“Follow me!” As Taiwan’s Covid-19 outbreak eases, foreign visitors to Taiwan are choosing to take free guided walking tours from the Presidential Office Building down Ketagalan Boulevard to the tree-filled 228 Peace Memorial Park.

To help visitors understand the political upheavals that took place here more than seven decades ago, the tour guide asks them to reenact the events that set off the February 28 Incident of 1947, with one visitor playing the role of a woman selling contraband cigarettes and another that of the official who confronted her, while the guide acts as narrator. This theatrical prologue helps the participants learn about what Taiwan experienced during the White Terror and the painful process that led toward the demo­cracy and transitional justice efforts of today.

Like It Formosa founder Sarah Chung (left) and COO Jeff Huang give foreign tourists a quick yet in-depth insight into Taiwan from different perspectives. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Walking through history

This is the Historical Route, the first tour put together by Like It Formosa and the most popular among foreign visitors. It leads all the way from Longshan Temple in Taipei’s Wanhua District to the Chiang Kai-shek Memor­ial Hall, and along the way the tour guide takes us back in time, talking about Taiwan under the Qing Dynasty, Japan­ese colonial rule, and then the Nationalist govern­ment. The idea for this route came from the real-life experience of Sarah Chung, Like It Formosa’s founder, when she took a free walking tour in Sarajevo.

As a fifth-year student of agricultural economics at National Taiwan University, Chung went on a one-year exchange program at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. At the end of her studies there, she took advantage of the opportunity to travel around Eur­ope for four months, visiting 33 countries.

When she visited Slovenia, she noticed a flyer on the counter of her hostel promoting a free walking tour. Taking the tour made her realize that “you don’t have to do a lot of homework to travel—local people who know the city well can give you authentic in­forma­tion, and you don’t even have to make a ­reservation.”

In Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chung says, “the guide first gave a light-hearted, jocular intro­duction and then, in a serious tone and with sadness in his eyes, described the ethnic conflicts that had ­occurred in the city and their re­percus­sions. This gave me a much deeper under­standing of how being located in the powder keg of Europe had impacted this country.”

Motivated by her discovery of how fabu­lous free walking tours could be and her wish that Taiwan had some, in 2015 Chung set about recruiting guides during her off-hours, with the aim of launching such tours here.

Tour guides for Like It Formosa are not only fluent in English, but also good at using vibrant explanations to help tourists better understand Taiwan. (photo below by Jimmy Lin)

Making guiding a career

After her experience in Sarajevo, Chung put in a lot of work to figure out the routes foreign visitors need to know, want to know, and can only find in Taiwan. The first she came up with was the Historical Route.

Going by the looks on the faces of her foreign guests, Chung knew she was on to something. In 2017, she quit her job in a bank to focus on planning tours and recruiting staff, and in 2018 she started the company Like It Formosa.

Like It Formosa then went on to launch eight tour routes across Northern, Central, and Southern Taiwan, as well as taking bookings for paid private itineraries such as LGBT tours.

The second most popular route for tourists leads through the old quarter of Tainan, which is rich in history. From Fort Provintia and the Hayashi Department Store to the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, the route is packed with temples large and small, and along the way the guides take tourists to drink winter melon tea, worship, and cast moon blocks to ask for guidance about marriage or health, activities which have a particu­lar draw for foreign visitors.

Like It Formosa’s second most popular itinerary leads visitors through the old part of historic Tainan. This photo shows the Chuan Mei Theater.

I am a Taiwan tour guide

Thanks to the tourism boom of 2018, the number of visitors served by Like It Formosa tripled. Over the last five years, it has welcomed more than 36,000 visitors from 67 countries.

Most of the guides are between 25 and 30 years of age, and around 70% have studied abroad for some amount of time, with many having taken free guided walking tours themselves while overseas. They chose to join Like It Formosa out of a desire to promote Taiwan, discover­ing only later that it could also be a way to make money—although the walking tours are generally free of charge, most tourists appreciate their guides’ wit and knowledge and will give tips, often amounting to €10 in Europe, and NT$200‡500 in Taiwan. Some also give their guides presents or foreign cash.

Popular tour guides should not only be fluent enough in English to tell the stories of the sights along the way, but also need to have eloquence and specialist tour guide skills. For example, Chung says, when visiting the Xia­hai City God Temple in Dadaocheng, the tour guide vividly introduces Yue Lao, who binds couples with a red silken cord in his role as an Eastern Cupid, and tells the participants that only single people come to the temple to worship him. The guide then jokes that if you find yourself at home swiping through Tinder, you may as well come here and give it a shot since it’s much easier, a comment that usually gets a big laugh from those on the tour.

The most popular of Like It Formosa’s tours is the Historical Route, which helps tourists learn about Taipei’s local culture and stories. Shown here is Dihua Street.

Teaching tour guides

The sudden arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic caused the number of foreign visitors to Taiwan to plummet, leaving Chung to face the most severe test since the company’s estab­lish­ment. From the start of 2020, the number of people taking part in the walking tours ­began to dwindle to nothing, and on March 19 they had no choice but to stop the tours completely.

Fortunately, Like It Formosa had been been develop­ing another business model since 2018: training English-­language tour guides. After she started her business, Chung received many invitations to speak at schools, so in 2019 she set up a sub-brand, Meet Up Formosa, to formalize her training of English-speaking guides.

To strengthen their English education work, Chung invited Jeff Huang, who had been part of the first orienta­tion training in the company’s early days, to be chief operating officer.

In response to the pandemic, Meet Up Formosa strengthened its online services and began planning English-­language tour guide courses for the tourism and foreign language departments of educational institu­tions like National Nantou Commercial High School and National Pingtung University of Science and Tech­nology, as well as for English gifted classes in ­senior high schools. In light of the government’s Bilingual Nation 2030 policy and the needs of the new curriculum, says Huang, many teachers hope to give students the chance to get out of the classroom and put their English to real-world use by introducing ­Taiwan to visitors.

Chung believes the convenience and safety of Taiwan will only attract increasing numbers of independ­ent tourists in the future, and these free walking tours will be invaluable in helping them to understand Taiwan better and to enjoy their time here more.              

Free walking tours can help visitors learn about the culture and history of the places they visit. Picture here is Taipei’s Longshan Temple.

Free walking tours can help visitors learn about the culture and history of the places they visit. Picture here is the Presidential Office Building.

Foreign tourists getting to know Taipei on foot. (photo by Jimmy Lin)