Cycling, Tea, and a Few Too Many Hills
Over the last few months, I’ve been traveling deep into Taiwan’s mountain ranges, visiting tea farmers and roasters who are doing things differently: no pesticides, no fertilizers, not even organic ones. They let nature lead. Their teas feel alive, and so do their philosophies.
I’ve decided to start documenting these encounters, partly so I don’t forget them and partly because they deserve to be shared. (Also, I’m low-key annoyed I didn’t start this earlier. But better late than never!)
Last Friday, I brought Lea with me to Yuchi. The plan: cycle around Sun Moon Lake, then visit a tea farmer I’d met at a fair in Nantou the week before. We drove nearly four hours with our bikes strapped to the back - Taiwan really is cycling paradise - only for me to realize the “lake loop” wasn’t flat. There’s about 1,300 ft of climbing.
For Lea, this was her second ever ride. At one point, halfway up a hill, she got off her bike, glared at me, and declared she hated me. Fair. I offered to swap bikes (mine had lighter gears), but her rental frame was so tall I could barely reach the pedals. Eventually, after a few laughs, a lot of sweat, and minor suffering, we made it around the lake. It was 4 p.m., an hour later than planned, but we decided to keep going to the tea farm anyway as the sun began to dip.
Mr. Hong’s farm
The farm was a short drive away, tucked in a valley facing Yushan, one of Taiwan’s tallest peaks. After turning onto a steep, muddy road, we saw a hand-painted sign and a man waving. Mr. Hong. He’s in his forties, one of the younger farmers I’ve met, and clearly noticed I’d shown up in shorts. (A rookie mistake. The mosquitoes in Taiwan’s mountains are not to be trifled with.)
Mr. Hong’s land feels like a dream: rows of tea bushes surrounded by palms and forest. Through the palms, you can glimpse the mountains fading into mist. It’s half jungle, half alpine. He grows Camellia formosensis, an indigenous Taiwanese tea variety, and makes both black and white teas from it. The Sun Moon Lake region is famous for black teas, but usually from Ruby 18 or Assam hybrids, so I was curious to taste his.
Before we began tasting, Mr. Hong plucked two fresh tea leaves and handed one to each of us. “Try it,” he said. We obediently chewed. The leaf was intensely bitter and astringent, basically nature’s mouthwash. He looked at us expectantly, so we smiled and nodded as if it were delightful. He chuckled, clearly amused by our effort to be polite.
We then went and sat in his small tea room, all windows, surrounded by pine trees, like a cabin in upstate New York. He said we’d arrived at a good time: he’d just received a batch of black tea back from the roaster and wanted to test it.
The tasting
He asked me to set up three cups: one open, one covered, and one for his white tea. I wondered why the lid mattered.
He explained that if a tea isn’t roasted enough, brewing it with a lid traps the unfinished notes. It tastes muted. Brewed without a lid, air interacts with the leaves and pulls out the missing flavors that should have developed in roasting. When a tea is roasted perfectly, both methods taste almost identical.
These are the kinds of details you’d never learn from a book.
Just as he said, the open-cup black tea bloomed with flavor, while the covered one tasted muffled. He nodded, slightly disappointed, and said he’d send it back for another round of roasting.
We then tried his Camellia formosensis white tea - light, wild, a little foresty. Finally, he brewed a yellow tea he’d been experimenting with, gongfu-style. After a few sips, Lea and I were sweating. He laughed and said, “That’s the cha qi.”
At first he was quiet, but once we started tasting, something opened up. He talked about everything he’s learned from tea, his experiments, his philosophy. I listened, fascinated. Lea, meanwhile, was fighting sleep, her eyelids bobbing like little gates. Fair again. It had been a long day.
As dusk settled, we thanked Mr. Hong, promised to come earlier next time, and drove off. The road back to Taipei was four hours of car-karaoke and half-delirious laughter. We got home past midnight and fell straight into bed.
It’s days like this that remind me why I started this journey: to meet people like Mr. Hong, to see where tea really comes from, and to feel the energy that never makes it onto a label.