Smelly eggs and ‘stinky tofu’ apart, Taiwanese food is delicious, and one of the island’s major draws It was sunrise. Shrouded in mist and dabbed with 2,000-year-old cypress trees, the vast craggy range of Taiwan’s Jade (Yushan) mountain – at 3,952m the highest peak in north-east Asia – lay before me like breakers in a stormy ocean. Much of the appeal of Alishan, the country’s dramatic mountain region, lies in getting there – on a small steep-grade train that winds round the peak, passing banana trees, bamboo plantations and dense walls of firs. After dawn, I found myself drawn to a nearby cluster of food vendors. A woman with a rose-pink hat sat in front of a vat of “thousand-year eggs” a prized local delicacy – although “hundred-day eggs” would be a more accurate description of their preservation period. She opened one up and showed me how her lime-and-clay marinade turns the whites into brownish jelly and the yolks to radioactive green. “Try one?” she gestured with a wide grin. I’m with Dr Seuss on green eggs: “I do not like them here or there, I would not eat them anywhere.” Least of all when they smell strongly of sulphur and some people say they’re soaked in horse urine (untrue, but believable if you’ve ever smelled one). Even so, these less-than-sweet-smelling eggs are nothing compared with the island’s most infamous dish: stinky tofu. It’s said that westerners turn their noses up to it in the way people from the east react to blue cheese. But has anyone ever crossed the road to avoid a slab of Roquefort as I was forced to do at a Taipei night market a few days before?

Original Source Alishan wonderland: Taiwan’s mountain delicacies