Twelve days in Taipei and Okinawa: from the best night markets in Asia to the clearest water in Japan

A stepped path straight up from Xiangshan station at the end of the red line, twenty steep minutes to a set of boulders that everybody photographs the tower from. Go an hour before sunset, take water, and keep climbing past the first viewpoint where the crowd stops.

Six hundred metres of covered lane running from a temple gate, and the most orderly of the big night markets: one line of stalls, one way through, no side alleys to lose people in. Start with a black pepper bun baked on the wall of a clay oven at the temple end, and work along. Opens around five.

Pepper buns, oyster omelette, stinky tofu if you are brave and beef noodle soup if you are not. Nothing costs more than a couple of pounds. Cash, small notes, and one dish per stall so you can keep going.

Founded in 1738 by settlers from Fujian and rebuilt repeatedly after fires, earthquakes and an American bomb in 1945. It is a working temple, not a monument: people come at all hours to throw divination blocks and burn incense, and there is a chanting session most afternoons. Buddhist at the front, Taoist and folk deities at the back, including the matchmaking god who gets the most visitors.

A block of Qing dynasty shophouses behind the temple, arcaded in brick, restored and given over to exhibitions about the neighbourhood. It is one of the few places left in Taipei that shows what the city looked like before the Japanese rebuilt it in the 1900s. Free and quiet.

This is the home of Taiwanese street food that predates the night markets: braised pork rice, meatball soup, and thick squid soup. There are shops around the temple that have been doing one dish since the 1950s.

A white hall with an octagonal blue roof at the top of eighty nine steps, one for each year of Chiang Kai-shek's life, finished in 1980. There is an honour guard changed on the hour, a museum of his cars and desks below, and a great deal of unresolved argument about whether it should stand at all. The square around it is where Taiwan's democracy protests happened in 1990.

Nearly seven hundred thousand objects from the Chinese imperial collection, packed up in 1933 as the Japanese advanced, moved across the country through the war and shipped to Taiwan in 1948. Only a small fraction is out at a time and it rotates, so the jade cabbage and the stone carved to look like braised pork may or may not be there. The bronzes and the Song ceramics always are, and they are the better half.

The museum's own restaurant does a decent set lunch. Otherwise ride two stops back to Shilin for the standard neighbourhood options, which are cheaper and quicker.

A 1913 Japanese public bathhouse in a half Tudor, half Japanese building, restored as a free museum about the town's spa era. The bath hall downstairs is empty now but intact, with Roman style arched windows, and it explains why an entire Japanese resort culture grew up on a hillside outside Taipei.

A pool of pale green sulphurous water at the head of the valley, steaming continuously at somewhere between eighty and a hundred degrees, which is why it is fenced. The stream running down through the town from it is what feeds the bathhouses. Fifteen minutes on foot uphill from the museum and free.

A covered lane running along the contour with steps dropping away from it, lined with tea houses, taro ball shops and stalls selling things nobody needs. The two streets cross at the old theatre and the view down the steps to the sea is the one everybody comes for. It is often said to have inspired the bathhouse in Spirited Away, which Miyazaki has denied.

Built as a theatre in 1916 when the mines were at their height, rebuilt in the 1930s and restored recently, with the original ticket window and a hand painted screen inside. It marks the junction of the two old streets and it is the one building here with a real claim on the town's history.

The tea houses stacked above the steps are the point of coming: you order a pot of high mountain oolong, they brew the first cup for you and leave you the kettle, and you sit over the sea until the light goes. It costs more than you expect and it is worth it.

Five hundred and eight metres, the tallest building in the world from 2004 until 2010, and shaped as eight stacked sections like a bamboo stem. The reason to go up is the tuned mass damper: a six hundred and sixty tonne steel sphere hung between the eighty seventh and ninety second floors that swings to cancel out typhoons, and it is on public view.

About an hour from Taoyuan. Confirm the route is operating when you book: it has come and gone with the airlines more than once. Every car hire desk is in the arrivals hall, and the drive into town takes a quarter of an hour.

A bay of green water and small forested islets on the north west coast, shallow enough that the colour changes every few metres with the sand and coral under it. Glass bottomed boats run constantly from the beach and cost very little. Swimming is not allowed because of the currents, and the bay has been farmed for black pearls since the 1970s.

Ishigaki beef is the local boast and it is genuinely good, sold in izakaya around the covered arcade in the middle of town. Otherwise Yaeyama soba, a flat noodle in clear pork broth, and awamori, the Okinawan rice spirit, mixed with water and ice.

A concrete lookout tower in the middle of the village, four metres up a ladder, and the only place you can see the whole island from: red roofs, white sand lanes, the reef beyond and the other Yaeyama islands on the horizon. Climb it first and the geography of the day makes sense.

A wide arc of white sand and shallow turquoise water on the west coast, and the only beach on Taketomi where swimming is straightforward. The water stays waist deep a long way out, which makes it useless for snorkelling and perfect for an hour of doing nothing. Very little shade; bring some.

Three or four small places do Yaeyama soba and rice sets, all of them shut by mid afternoon and none of them fast. That is the pace here and there is no arguing with it.

The star sand beach, on the south west corner. The grains are the shells of single celled organisms that live on the reef and they really are star shaped, though after decades of visitors filling their pockets you now have to sift a handful patiently to find one. Take a pinch, not a bottle.

A north coast beach with living coral and reef fish inside thirty metres of shallow water, which makes it the best snorkelling on the island that does not need a boat. Bring your own mask; hire is limited. Stay inside the reef line, where the water is chest deep, and out of the channel where the current runs out to sea.

Cafes along the coast road do rice bowls, taco rice and shave ice, and several have a deck over the water. Taco rice is an Okinawan invention from the American bases and it is much better than it sounds.

A limestone cave formed out of coral reef over two hundred thousand years, with about six hundred metres lit and boarded for visitors. Stalactites, a colony of bats and a good deal of coloured lighting that the cave does not need. It is cool inside, which by mid afternoon is the point.

A forested hill park in the middle of the island with an observation deck on top, reached by a short road and a set of steps. From it you get the whole island at once, the reef line all the way round it, and on a clear evening the outlines of Taketomi and Iriomote. Almost nobody comes up here.

Fifty five minutes, several a day on the domestic carriers. Naha airport is the southern terminus of the monorail, so skip the taxi and ride in.

The kitchen of Okinawa, and the successor to the black market that fed the city after the war. It moved into a new building in 2023 and kept the arrangement that makes it worth going: buy a fish downstairs from whoever caught it and take it up to a restaurant on the first floor, which cooks it for a small fee. Parrotfish and irabucha in blues and greens that look implausible on a slab.

A mile and a half of shops running north east from the middle of town, called the Miracle Mile because it came back first after the war. Much of it sells souvenirs, but the covered arcades running off it southwards are the real thing, and they lead to the pottery quarter.

Goya champuru, bitter gourd stir fried with tofu, egg and pork, is the dish. Then rafute, pork belly slow cooked in awamori and brown sugar. Awamori itself is distilled from long grain Thai rice and aged in clay, and the aged kind is called kusu.

Ryukyu architecture is neither Chinese nor Japanese and the castle is the clearest statement of it: curved limestone walls following the ridge, a red lacquered hall facing west rather than south, and a courtyard laid with tiled stripes for lining up the court. The main hall burned in October 2019 and is due back in 2026. Go for the walls, the gates and the carpentry yard.

The royal mausoleum, cut into rock below the castle in 1501 for the second Sho dynasty and used for four hundred years. Three stone chambers behind a walled courtyard of coral gravel, badly damaged in 1945 and rebuilt over two decades. It takes twenty minutes, almost nobody goes in, and it is the oldest thing on the ridge.

Okinawa soba is made of wheat, not buckwheat, and comes in a pork and bonito broth with stewed rib or braised belly on top. The shops around the castle approach do it properly and close when the day's stock runs out.

The royal family's country villa, laid out in 1799 with a pond, a Chinese style arched bridge and hexagonal pavilions, built to entertain envoys from the Qing court. Levelled in 1945 and restored over twenty years from photographs. It is small, green and empty, and after the castle it is the right place to sit down.

The prefectural museum, on the cliffs at the southern tip. It is told from the civilian side rather than the military one, largely through recorded testimony, and it does not spare the Japanese army, which took food and shelters from the population and ordered mass suicides. Outside is the Cornerstone of Peace: black granite walls carrying the name of every person killed, Okinawan, Japanese, American, British, Korean and Taiwanese, in one list.

Two girls' schools were mobilised as nurses in the last months and most of them died, many in the caves along this coast after the unit was ordered to disband with the Americans a few hundred metres away. The museum is a single low building around a cave mouth, the accounts are by the survivors, and it is very quiet.

There are cafes along the coast road above the cliffs with decks over the sea, doing rice bowls and coffee. It is an odd contrast and a necessary one.

The holiest site of the Ryukyuan religion, on the east coast: a natural triangular corridor between two leaning rocks, opening onto a platform that looks across to Kudaka island, where the gods were said to have come ashore. Only the high priestess and the king could enter, and the priestesses of the kingdom were women. Approach quietly; it is still in use.

A small museum at the top of the potters' lane, with a Ryukyuan kiln excavated in situ under the building and a clear account of how the local style developed out of Korean, Chinese and Southeast Asian influences. Twenty minutes here makes the workshops down the lane worth an hour.

On the fourth floor of a department store, which is an odd home for it, and holding the treasures of the Sho royal family: crowns, robes, lacquer and the kingdom's own records. Small, well labelled in English, and the best half hour on the Ryukyu Kingdom you will get outside the castle.

Get off the main street and into the covered arcades behind it, where the lunch sets are half the price. Taco rice, champuru, or a bowl of soki soba with a spare rib on top.

The senior shrine of the old kingdom, on a limestone bluff over the only beach in Naha, with an expressway now running underneath the cliff. The present building is a post war rebuild. Go late in the day, when the sun goes down over the sea straight in front of it.

Naha's only beach, a curve of imported sand under the shrine bluff with the port on one side and the expressway behind it. Nobody would call it the best beach in Okinawa and it is the only one you can walk to from a city hotel, netted against jellyfish and staffed in season.

Pork and egg with rice is the standard Okinawan breakfast, sold in the diners around the arcades from early. Blue seal ice cream if it is already hot, which it usually is.