LETTING OFF STEAM

NESTLED IN THE FOOTHILLS OF YANGMINGSHAN, the northernmost of Taiwan’s nine national parks, Beitou offers a languid antidote to downtown Taipei, a 20-minute metro ride away. The heart of the district is the hot spring resort area around Beitou Park, a narrow belt of greenery that stretches uphill on either side of a bubbling creek. On weekends, tourists flock here to soak away their troubles and take in the sites, which range from Japanese colonial relics to the timber-clad Beitou Public Library, one of the country’s most eco-friendly buildings. Or you could, as I regularly do, eschew the crowds and delve into the delightful web of pathways farther up the valley. I’ve lived in Beitou for 13 years and still unearth surprises when familiar lanes, staircases, and trails diverge from and reconnect with one another in perplexing ways.

Here, amid tranquil subtropical greenery filled with the electric buzz of cicadas and the chirps of bamboo partridges as they skim through the undergrowth, the sulfurous steam from geothermal craters fills the air. Imputing the mists to an infernal sorceress, the indigenous Ketagalan tribe that once roamed the region called it Kipatauw, meaning “witch.” Over time, the name morphed via Taiwanese (a variant of Hokkien Chinese) into its.