Sarah Clewlow

When you work full-time, your life is carved into neat, predictable segments. Meetings, commutes, deadlines, weekends that disappear far too quickly. Big, sweeping adventures rarely arrive as month-long epics. They come as fragments: stolen weeks, long weekends, single days where you decide to choose the world over the washing pile.

For many of us, this is the only way to travel. In pieces. In glimpses. In moments squeezed between responsibilities.

And yet—those fragments can be enough.

Enough to remind you that you’re more than your job title.
Enough to feel your pulse in a new landscape.
Enough to stitch yourself back together with curiosity and courage.

This trip to Taiwan wasn’t a grand escape—it was one fragment of a life I’m trying to live fully. A fragment wedged between work emails and annual leave policies. A fragment that challenged me, moved me, exhausted me, and expanded me. With the additional challenge my first ever solo, self-supported expedition on the bike.

Taiwan introduced itself to me in fragments.

A burst of bubble-tea sweetness.
A blur of scooters slicing through junctions.
A whiff of incense clinging to my clothes long after leaving a temple.
A perfectly hot sweet potato from a 7-Eleven that feels—honestly—like salvation, after long hours in the saddle.

It’s not a country that arrives in one clean impression. It reveals itself in pieces, in small moments stitched together by exhaustion, curiosity, and the stubborn thrill of choosing to travel alone.

This is how my fragments began.

Fragment One: Leaving

Sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow watching wet snow fall across the runway, I felt the familiar swell of doubt. Fourteen hours to Taipei. A long way to travel alone with an overstuffed duffel bag and a head full of half-formed plans. As the plane lurched upward, heavy and uncertain, I smiled—because it felt exactly like hauling myself up a hill on a bike tour: ungainly, determined, borderline ridiculous.

But the sunsets over Kuwait out the window provided fire-red promises. The view flying the length of Taiwan’s east coast was a stern reminder: shit, this is far. Am I was really doing this, cycling all this way.

Fragment Two: Arrival

Taipei arrived with fluorescent lights, queues, and the kind of functional efficiency that makes you immediately aware you’re not in the West anymore. Jet-lagged, dehydrated, and incoherently trying to buy a train ticket with no cash, I ping-ponged between ATMs, ticket machines, metro cards, and eventually, defeated, the old-school ticket booth.

My hotel wouldn’t check me in for three hours, so—naturally—I decided to climb a mountain.

I lumbered up Elephant Mountain with my laptop in my backpack like a prize idiot. A Taiwanese pensioner in proper hiking gear bounded past as if gravity favoured him. A young couple laughed kindly at my sweaty, red-faced arrival at the viewpoint. I could hardly blame them—I looked like I’d just climbed a Tour de France col, not a city trail.

But there was Taipei, stretching out under a hazy sky, the iconic 101 building glowing faintly. I’m here, I thought. I did it. This adventure is no real

Fragment Three: Lost, Found, Lost Again

Solo travel means solving a thousand tiny problems every day. A metro that doesn’t take cards. A Garmin missing a rubber bit vital to actually staying on the handlebars. A city where scooters are a lifestyle, not a convenience. An elevator too small for a bike. A temple charm ritual you try to copy by miming at strangers.

It also means strangers rescuing you with a scrap of rubber from a back-street Giant store.
And a woman explaining—using colours and hand gestures—which prayer charm is for luck.
And a friend of a friend, Jessica, explaining life in Taiwan over coffee, from geopolitics to public toilets (7-Eleven: always yes).

The fragments start to become a picture.

Fragment Four: The Road

When you set out to cycle Route 1 around Taiwan, you imagine wide coastal roads and sweeping mountain views. You don’t imagine:

• A crank making a noise that could drive you to madness. (Thankfully I had the bike swapped out)
• A hotel that smells like a bin. (aptly named Bin City)
• Mosquitoes treating your eyelid like a tapas bar.
• Traffic lights so frequent you wonder if the entire nation runs on red-light discipline.
• A steak costing more than the hotel room it’s served next to.

But you also don’t imagine being chased by parrots in a city park.
Or being fed mysterious vegetables by roadside farmers.
Or a woman opening a hotpot restaurant 45 minutes early because she saw you silently losing hope outside, and slowly becoming hangry.
Or a landlord driving you through a typhoon to the next viable train station while his wife casually walks around in her underwear because—well, that’s just home.

This is what solo travel gives you: discomfort surrounded by astonishing kindness.

Fragment Five: Weathering It

The “Windy Peninsula” is not a poetic name. It’s a warning. The gusts shoved me sideways off the bike; traffic lights became hazards; cycling became a gamble.

I tried not to cry. Then I tried not to laugh. Then I gave in and asked my hosts through google translate about taxis. They stared at me like I’d asked if penguins could carry bikes. Eventually, the man simply said, “Does your bike fold?” and offered his car.

Bless this country.

Train hopping became part of the journey—navigating elevators, bike ramps that nearly sent me tumbling, and guards who wordlessly stepped in to help. The coastline from the train window was moody, wild, heartbreakingly beautiful.

I realised something important: freedom doesn’t have to mean doing everything the hard way. Sometimes it means choosing the train, and personal safety.

Fragment Six: The East Coast Magic

This was the Taiwan I’d dreamed of.

Dark clouds curling around mountains.
Endless green rice paddies.
The Tropic of Cancer monument appearing after a long climb, tugging memories of crossing the Tropic of Capricorn months earlier in Africa.
Silence so profound it felt holy.
Sweet potatoes that tasted like life-saving fuel.

On the days my legs felt dead or the headwinds relentless, I questioned why I was here alone. When I passed another bikepacker, I longed for conversation, connection. When I watched groups on supported tours, I felt a flicker of envy.

But the truth is: being alone sharpens everything.
The doubt.
The triumph.
The tiny wins you’d never notice otherwise.
The quiet mornings where the world feels like it belongs to you alone.

Those are the fragments that stay.

Fragment Seven: Returning

The final train back into Taipei followed parts of the route I’d cycled, a stitched-together replay of my journey. My sit bone was destroyed, my clothes permanently scented with incense, and my Garmin held together by a strip of Taiwanese rubber.

And yet—I felt invincible.

Back in the city, I wandered through night markets and temples, ate a questionable number of chips for breakfast, discovered an unexpectedly transcendent peanut butter burger, and finally—finally—collapsed onto a fresh hotel bed ready to go home.

My last taxi ride to the airport smelled so strongly of eucalyptus I felt like a delirious koala, but by then, nothing could touch me.

What Taiwan Taught Me (in Fragments)

• Freedom often looks like a mess up close.
• You can survive for days on sweet potatoes and stubbornness.
• Convenience stores are an ecosystem, a culture, a lifeline.
• Kindness is a universal language—even when no other words work.
• You can trust yourself more than you think.
• The hardest days make the best stories.
• Solo travel isn’t about being fearless—it’s about moving anyway.

Taiwan didn’t give me one clean narrative. It gave me fragments—sweaty, chaotic, hilarious, surprising, humbling fragments.

And somehow, they added up to freedom.