He showed up in a fishing group asking if anyone would lend him gear and take him out. An Israeli backpacker working his way through Asia, now alone in Taiwan, planning to drive the island loop with no fixed plan — a sleeping bag and a mat in the car, sleeping wherever the road ended.
I read that post at a strange moment. I was deep in research for a June trip to Hokkaido, trying to wedge my own fishing window into a family holiday. So I knew exactly what he was up against.
Because fishing abroad is never really about how you get a rod onto a plane, or whether the fish are there. It’s about whether you can put yourself in the right place at the right time, with the right tool, and present the lure the right way to the right water — then fight the fish the right way to bring it in. It’s an information war, start to finish. Just writing it out is exhausting.
But help where you can.
The meet-up
He was still near Taipei, and I happened to have time, so we set a day. We hit it off immediately. With my limited English and some AI translation filling the gaps, we talked about life, choices, work, travel. Somewhere in there he started to feel like a younger brother who happened to be Israeli.
Since his loop would bring him back to Taipei, I dug through old gear I rarely touch and put together two rod-and-reel combos plus a small box of tackle — enough to cover maybe 70–80% of the shore scenarios he’d run into out there. Whenever the urge hit on the road, he could just fish. I’d stay in Taipei and troubleshoot online.
He went and did the whole loop
We didn’t talk again for about two weeks.
In that time he worked his way south along the east coast — Hualien, Taitung, working the gravel shores and reef shelves, hitting river mouths and breakwaters. He also hit a few of Taiwan’s streams and caught 卷仔. He’d never fished freshwater before, so the day before he headed in I spent a while walking him through how to read a river — current speed, bottom changes, the slack water behind any obstruction. In Hualien he fell in with some local anglers who took him out to Wushi and Sanxiantai for mahi-mahi. He came back empty-handed, but said something about what it felt like to stand at a first-class spot with the whole Pacific in front of you. He also made it to Hengchun. The sand, the coral, the tropical species. For someone from the Mediterranean, the terrain had a familiar shape, just completely different.
He messaged me through all of it: knot questions, fish ID, “is there actually a road down to the water here?” I sat in Taipei pulling up satellite maps, texting people I know along the coast, digging through whatever I could find. In a way, I retraced the whole coastline with him — without leaving my chair.
Eventually he looped back north to Taipei. Said he wanted one more session before he left.
What we actually caught
We fished a groin jutting out from a long sandy beach, sky flat and gray, the kind of hazy overcast that makes it impossible to tell early morning from just a dull day. The fish that came up was a striking iridescent silver thing with long threadlike fins trailing off it — an Indian threadfish, called 馬面 in Taiwan. It went on the clip, and he puckered his lips at it like it owed him money.
Seeing Taiwan through someone else’s eyes
Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Taking him to fish, taking him to the quiet overnight spots we treat as nothing — all of it turned new again in the eyes of someone who’d crossed a third of the planet to get here.
We complain that domestic travel is boring, overpriced, a trap. But to a first-timer on a different price scale, our sea, our mountains, our beaches, our street food — even a thousand-NT plate of Donggang bluefin on a tight budget — add up to a complete experience.
Even a blank session at the shore becomes a moment he’ll keep. The way I still keep the morning I got skunked watching Mt. Fuji from the Numazu coast, or the whole day I stood in cold drizzle holding a rod, staring at the Statue of Liberty and getting nowhere.
Sometimes travel isn’t about going far. It’s about borrowing someone else’s eyes to see the world you already live in.