Honeymoon crashing at Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan
The most romantic hotel I’ve ever visited is The Lalu on Sun Moon Lake, in Taiwan. Even the name is a heart melter. In 2003, I was touring the East Asian island for the London Evening Standard newspaper, and had driven for four hours out of the roaring capital Taipei through vast industrial zones churning out Nikes and rice cookers. The Lalu, by contrast, was a haven of five-star tranquillity set in the Central Mountain Range where bamboo swarmed across jade-green peaks. It had opened the previous year, its Zen interiors designed by Kerry Hill of Aman Resorts fame and inspired by Chinese poetry. The exterior was strikingly modernist, but not newly built since The Lalu had a previous incarnation as the favourite holiday home of Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan’s first president, the man who had led his supporters out of newly communist China in 1949.
The president’s wife, Soong May-ling aka Madame Chiang Kai-shek, was a fearsome woman known as The Dragon Lady. She was still alive, aged 105, when I visited, though she had long left Taiwan to live in New York. She had once transfixed American president Franklin Roosevelt by making a throat-slitting gesture with a long, lacquered fingernail to illustrate how she would deal with his striking miners.
But, as I quickly discovered, The Lalu was now occupied by the very gentlest of people: Taiwanese honeymooners. Half a dozen young couples were bobbing in an infinity pool above the lakeland panorama, which was blurred by mist and humidity, allowing only the fuzziest view of a sacred emerald island and scarlet-roofed pagoda.
In another culture, an afternoon in this company would have been excruciating. Not here. The couples didn’t touch, and they most definitely didn’t kiss.
Honeymooners’ whispers mingled with birdsong
They simply stood close together in the water, speaking in intimate whispers that mingled with birdsong from Formosan yuhina in lakeside trees. Occasionally the women would move to the pool’s edge so their husbands could take a photograph of them. At one point, a smiling young man leaned forward and gently tucked a lock of his wife’s hair into her bathing cap. It was a gesture with enough romantic charge to set the ice cubes rattling in poolside glasses of chilled lychee juice.
A good place for a lone traveller was the airy spa. I had a wonderful massage that concentrated on various pressure points and was designed to counteract jet lag. Every so often a Chinese opera ringtone on my masseur’s mobile would go off and a bird sitting outside the open window would answer.
Evening dinner was surprisingly high-spirited. It turned out to be the tradition for honeymooners’ families to stay in nearby guesthouses and join them for meals. (I’m guessing it was only The Lalu’s exclusive prices that prevented them from checking in, too.) So I exchanged smiles with proud parents and younger siblings who were tucking into waterlily soup and crispy emperor fish alongside the happy couples in a very enjoyable atmosphere. I thought about something a city guide had confided the previous day, which was that her father used to tell her that the Taiwanese were ‘the lucky Chinese’ because they were living their lives in a culturally enriched and comparatively free atmosphere - this despite the country’s turbulent politics and precarious international situation.
My bedroom was all dark, moody sophistication and deep comfort. I woke up zinging at 5am and took a walk by the lake to Shuise Pier, where orange lanterns were strung above the wooden planks. Even at dawn, there was company. A group of four Buddhists were praying silently. Further along the waterfront, a woman was practising tai chi. And approaching fast from all directions were men bearing high-tech cameras keen to capture the sunrise.
In recent years, other luxury hotels have arrived on the shores of Sun Moon Lake, so the area perhaps won’t be as tranquil now - not necessarily a problem since Taiwanese people contributed such a large part of the charm to my visit. The biggest change, if I returned, would be that some of the young couples I saw would now most likely be proud parents crashing their own children’s honeymoons.
