Taiwanese, who are used to having their own room or sharing one with family members, may find it hard to adjust to youth hostels or backpacker inns, where you rent a bed in a communal room. And in truth there are few places in Taipei that offer lodging of this kind, which provides easy opportunities to make friends with people of various nationalities.

Near the Taipei Train Station, hidden in the alleys off of Taiyuan Road, is the Taipei Backpacker Hostel, which hopes soon to obtain a hotel license after being open for five years. It’s a highly distinctive backpackers’ hostel.

You enter by ascending a narrow old staircase. The four-story building has rooms for one to three people and others for four to eight people. The average price per person in the communal rooms is around NT$500. Each floor has bathrooms, a laundry room, and a small lounge with free Wi-Fi. Although the rooms are small, they have all the essentials. Warm and unpretentious, the hostel has earned glowing reviews from foreign backpackers. Its occupancy rate has consistently been reaching 80% every month.

“Backpack travelers definitely need lounges and kitchens where they can socialize,” says Mike Weng, the hostel’s proprietor, who was originally a software designer. Weng used to frequently go to Singapore on business, and he sometimes stayed at local hostels there. Those experiences sparked his interest in backpack hostels.

“A wonderful experience I had at a hostel was waking up one morning to find a beautiful blonde sleeping in the next bed.”

He decided that he wanted to provide foreigners with a similarly economical way to visit Taiwan and experience its culture. He searched for a long time before he was able to rent this old building, which he has renovated and decorated himself.

Learning on the job, he has gradually made renovations, looking for materials anywhere he can, buying second-hand furniture and even learning how to install electronic door keys, so as to ensure safety. In consideration of his guests’ needs, he has specially designated an expansive room for storage, allowing international visitors to temporarily store their luggage there. He also set up a self-service shop, which allows hungry guests to purchase snacks and instant noodles from coin-operated machines.

“When backpackers are coming in late at night, I can give them the main door and room door codes via email during the week before they arrive. And guests who leave early in the morning can leave their room charges in an envelope in a box at the front desk.” Weng has eliminated 24-hour desk service, opting not to take deposits but instead to operate on an honor system. That has put his backpacker guests at ease, and consequently he has loyal customers who give the hostel good word-of-mouth.

One day a guest from Malaysia brought a group of good friends, and got them to secretly decorate the hostel with freshly cut flowers, candles and balloons. When the guest and his girlfriend entered the front door, all they could see were flowers and balloons from the first floor on up. At that moment, he pulled out the engagement ring he had been carrying and proposed to his girlfriend. The hostel guests served as witnesses of the romantic moment.

These interesting stories have made Weng want to open more hostels so as to allow even more international friends to enjoy the warmth of friendship in Taiwan.

With its soft lighting and modern decor, the Taipei Backpacker Hostel, though small, has everything its guests need. It has earned the praise of international travelers.

Many solo foreign travelers to Taiwan, with an eye toward making their dollars go farther, choose to stay in a two- or three-star hotel and use the money they save to spend on souvenirs and at good restaurants.

With a succession of major international exhibitions—including the Tai­pei flower and design expos—giving a boost to the tourism industry, Formosa International Hotels, a listed company, opened Just Sleep hotels in the Xi­men­ding district of Tai­pei and on Lin­sen North Road. These offer rooms for sleeping and breakfast at a good value of NT$3,000 per night.

The first Just Sleep was in an old building in Xi­men­ding. It offers basic facilities, with only a lobby, restaurant and rooms. The interior design is lively, colorful and fresh. It suits the taste of young backpack travelers. Each room offers a new and original look: For instance, there are cleverly designed wall recesses for mini fridges, tissue boxes, clothes racks and so forth. Guests are inevitably pleasantly surprised when opening the door to see their room for the first time.

“We definitely maintain our service at five-star levels,” says Just Sleep’s general manager Cindy Chen. They use the same brand of mattresses as the Regent. Each floor has serve-yourself laundry facilities, and the entire hotel has Wi-Fi. Moreover, the Xi­men­ding branch offers tour guide services. With its 150 rooms, the Xi­men­ding Just Sleep has been open for two years, and has reached 90% occupancy levels every month.

Just Sleep has also cooperated with local shops to provide guests with free coupon passbooks. There are plans for interactive multimedia equipment in the lobby that will allow guests to check flights and train schedules and peruse general tourist information.

Hotels in Tai­pei have adopted all manner of themes: island nation, exotic land, cartoon fantasy—you name it, the city has it. But there is only one that has a military theme: the National Soldiers’ Hotel.

Located in the Xi­men­ding neighborhood, the National Soldiers’ Hotel offers views of the Presidential Palace. It’s very centrally located, with the highest-priced rooms going for only NT$2000. It’s a top choice for independent travelers on a budget.

The hotel has never advertised. Instead it created a name for itself with a deal of NT$100 for an all-you-can-eat breakfast on New Year’s morning of the ROC centennial. As the crowds left the ceremonies on the plaza in front of the Presidential Palace, over 2000 people lined up to eat the breakfast. Others came to see what the hubbub was all about, and they discovered that the hotel, with 200 rooms, was clean and comfortable.

The hotel is decorated simply and unostentatiously, with oil paintings and relief sculptures of battle scenes, a 753-mm cannon in the middle of the lobby, and a long hall with scenes of fighting on the outer islands. All of these provide guests with a sense of the anxious atmosphere of war.

As far as the rooms are concerned, one floor is known as “the base,” with company commander rooms, NCO rooms, and platoon rooms, which hold up to nine people. Guests can come with a couple of friends to reflect upon their days of military service together. In the company commander rooms, there are illustrations of battlefields and military equipment, even battalion flags. Military surplus equipment adorns the platoon rooms. Every­ morning, contests are held in which guests attempt to fold their blankets into perfect squares. The floor consistently has the highest occupancy rates in the hotel.

The top floor features the com­man­der-in-chief suite, which is usually not open, but rather reserved for the ROC president, should he need a place to rest. The suite includes spacious living and dining rooms, and separate sleeping quarters for the president and first lady. The study has a precious desk that was custom made for Chiang Ching-kuo.

With its large beds made from woven bamboo, The “Ant Hill,” one of the houses that comprise the Treasure Hill Youth Hostel, offers its guest a mix of the old and the new.

Do you want to stay in a hostel surrounded by art, tree-covered hillsides and old buildings?

Located in Tai­pei, on Ding­zhou Road Section 3, the Treasure Hill settlement has an area of some four hectares. With its old Guan­yin Temple built by Taiwan’s early Han Chinese settlers from Zhang­zhou and Quan­zhou, the military dependents’ village that was built after the ROC forces decamped from the mainland in 1949, views of nature and proximity to the ­Fuhe Bridge, overpasses and highways, it presents a classic juxtaposition of old and new.

After renovations at Treasure Hill and growing media attention, in 2006 The New York Times listed it as one of the places with the most special flavor in all of Tai­pei. The settlement has been declared an historic site by the Tai­pei City Government­, and two of its old buildings are now being turned into a youth hostel, to allow art travelers from around the world to experience the culture of those settlements of mainlanders in the years after the fall of mainland China to the Communists.

Randomly built on the hillside, these buildings still look much like they did when they were built over half a century ago. One of them has a carving of an ant hill hanging out front. The first building adopted for use by the hostel, it is known as the “Ant Hill.”

When you enter the building, you first see a small lounge with some simple kitchen equipment, where hostel guests can socialize. The room has maintained its authentic look, with the original windows, floor tiles, bamboo weavings and so forth. The décor in the rooms is modern and streamlined, with the quilt for each bed in the six-bed rooms stored in a bag and hung from the wall. It offers a simple kind of elegance. Family rooms, on the other hand, have large beds cradled in elaborate nest-like bamboo weavings. The mix of old and new is hip and fresh.

Designed by artists, the Ant Hill uses the winding and undulating alleys of Treasure Hill as its inspiration, and the design team called upon a group of volunteers to bring about a makeover for the old house. They painstakingly carved the walls and made picture frames from shards of broken glass. They also created a window between two neighboring buildings, which draws attention to the buildings’ different elevations. The window is decorated with orchids, adding color to the architectural landscape.

The hostel has employed extremely simple design in the hope that artists who visit in the future will leave their own artistic imprint, so as to echo the history of Treasure Hill, which was built organically and accumulatively.

The other hostel building, known as the “Light Beam House,” likewise has three kinds of rooms that offer a mix of the original architecture with modern design elements. For instance, some use large sheets of gauzy fabric as translucent room dividers, allowing guests who don’t know each other to more easily pull open the dividers and socialize. Both of the hostel buildings lack air conditioning. The idea is that guests, by forgoing air conditioning, will get a feel for the natural temperatures of the forested hillsides. Yet to bring down summer temperatures, there are plans for living roofs with 300 plants of various species. Visitors strolling the alleys above these buildings will be able to enjoy their beautiful expanses of green.

“I hope that our future guests, rather than merely being consumers, will carry on the communal spirit of the settlement and become part of the community.”

Isis Lee, a commissioner of the Treasure Hill Artist Village, notes that back when the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs first decided to preserve the Treasure Hill settlement, the plan was to create a symbiosis among the homes of the original settlement, the artists’ colony and the youth hostel. Consequently, artists are given priority as guests. Furthermore, before they come, they are asked to prepare to settle their thoughts and slowly experience the site, in the hope that the vitality of Treasure Hill will be replenished by the diverse cultural input of the visiting artists.

The military-themed National Soldiers Hotel in Ximending holds blanket-folding contests every morning. The hotel prompts many of its male guests to reminisce about their days of military service.

With its soft lighting and modern decor, the Taipei Backpacker Hostel, though small, has everything its guests need. It has earned the praise of international travelers.

Located on the busy streets of Xi­men­ding, the Just Sleep hotel, with its modern interior design, has set its sights on economy-minded business travelers.

Located on the busy streets of Xi­men­ding, the Just Sleep hotel, with its modern interior design, has set its sights on economy-minded business travelers.

With its large beds made from woven bamboo, The “Ant Hill,” one of the houses that comprise the Treasure Hill Youth Hostel, offers its guest a mix of the old and the new.