A couple of days ago, Facebook reminded me that it’s been a year since I visited the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum, which is about an hour by car from where I live. That was one of the first trips I made to update Taiwan: The Bradt Travel Guide for UK-based Bradt Travel Guides. The first edition of the guidebook came out in 2010, the second in 2014, and the third edition appeared in mid-2019 — so freshening up the contents has been more than due. 

I’ve been asked more than once how much travelling I did to write the guidebook in the first place and how much has been needed to revise it since then. The answer is: I don’t know. Early on, I tried to keep track — but I quickly gave up, because many if not most of the excursions I’ve made have had more than one purpose. Sometimes I’ve gone to a place simply because I need to include it in the guidebook; very often, however, I’m going because at the same time I can research a newspaper or magazine article. For instance, the two-day rail trip from Tainan to Taipei via the east of the island I completed this spring generated not just useful material for the guidebook, but also photos and information that resulted in this article and also a good chunk of this article.

This morning I felt a notable sense of relief when I sent off the final map for the fourth edition, having uploaded the last piece of text yesterday. These final few weeks haven’t been unusually stressful, however, because I made sure to get stuck into the task of revising the book as soon as I’d signed the contract. Well before that I’d begun compiling a list of things I should add or delete, as I came across them during other projects (or while travelling for fun). Some of it’s been dreary. Most of it’s been interesting. Hopefully the book’s readers will find it both useful and engrossing.