Many of the easiest day trips from Taipei lie within the city's own metropolitan reach. Tamsui, at the end of the red MRT line, is the classic riverside outing — a former foreign trading port with a lively waterfront and a famous sunset over the Taiwan Strait. Yangmingshan National Park covers the volcanic mountains immediately to the north, with hiking trails, craters, and spring flower meadows, while Maokong in the south is a tea-growing hillside of charcoal-stove teahouses reached by gondola. Beitou, also to the north, adds hot-spring bathhouses to the list.
Further afield, the most popular outing runs east to Jiufen, the atmospheric old gold-mining town of stepped lanes and red lanterns, and its near-neighbour Shifen, with its old railway line and viaduct waterfall. North along the coast lies Keelung, a working seaport famous for its Miaokou Night Market and the rock formations of nearby Heping Island, and the green-and-yellow sandstone hoodoos of Yehliu Geopark.
