Within five minutes of leaving the station, smoothly reaching 280kmh, the scenery has already gone from glossy urban, small children watching the trains from the footbridge between department store blocks, through industrial factories, acres of intricate steelwork and plumes of steam, to the greenery of Taiwan between its cities.
In the middle distance are the ubiquitous mountains, wearing clouds gathered close. The ground nearer is very flat, squares of rice growing, trees, blocky buildings.
Wires, of course, everywhere wires.
In the rainy season the sky is a dark grey. But it’s not actually raining and the sun is bright on white walls and shiny metal, almost every building with its chromed cylinders on the roof and an increasing number with solar panels too.
Sometimes the fields give way to fruit trees, or grids of palms. Sometimes the concrete and wall-tile buildings give way to timber and corrugated iron, agricultural buildings thrown up in years past to keep off the worst of the weather in the tropical way.
Here and there a shrine like a tiny temple, as shiny and ornate as the farm buildings are tired.
At speed, the train moves into rain from sun, the country roads alongside flowing with water, droplets sliding horizontally across the porthole windows as the train banks. Curtains, layers of them, rainy season rain in its warm enthusiasm, blur the distance.
A motorway, on legs as they all are, approaches and swoops away again, and the sun returns, shining on the white cables of a bridge, the river it crosses, and glinting from a vast golden Buddha beyond.
These Buddhas, often on mountains or temple tops, or both, sometimes several stories high, preside over the landscape between them, serenely.
The line runs up the populated plain, spinal mountains on the right heading north, but the foothills encroach, tunnels gulp the train and let go again, and walls of vegetation appear outside the windows. Trees jostle and fight in profusion even on steep slopes, only odd sculpted rock formations standing bare here and there.
Bamboo sprouts among it all, exploding from the ground like the green eruption of a biological missile strike. On a slower timescale maybe that’s exactly what we’d see. But this is high speed rail, and we sweep past, buffeted briefly by another train in the opposite direction, twelve carriages passing us in a second.
The temples are more frequent in the mountains. Ornate, red and gold, dragons and figures entwining, perched on ledges and peaks.
Then suburbs again, houses mixed with trees and small squares of glistening rice, roads quickly narrowing and roofs rising as it turns to city, new towers swathed with scaffolding. Out of the city into more foothills. More rain. Then fog mixed with it as we pass the home of the sea goddess.
Overall, an hour and a half from one end of the island to the other.