Speaking Part 2 Band 6 / 7 / 8 同題三版（最近的旅行）

Describe a recent trip that you enjoyed.

You should say:

• where you went
• who you went with
• what you did there

and explain why you enjoyed it.

"OK, I want to talk about a trip I went to Hualien last year. I went there with my two friends from university. We went for three days in October.

Hualien is on the east coast of Taiwan. It is famous for the mountains and the sea. The most famous place is Taroko Gorge, which has big marble mountains and a river.

On the first day, we took the train from Taipei to Hualien. It took about two and a half hours. We arrived in the afternoon and we went to our hotel. The hotel was near the night market so we went to eat many things.

On the second day, we rented a scooter and we went to Taroko Gorge. It was really beautiful. We saw the river and we walked on a trail. The water was very blue and the mountains were very high. We took many photos.

On the third day, we went to Qixingtan Beach. The stones there are black and smooth. Then we took the train back to Taipei.

I enjoyed this trip because the place is very beautiful and also I had fun with my friends. We laughed a lot. I want to go again next year."

"I'd like to talk about a trip to Hualien, on the east coast of Taiwan, which I took last October with two close friends from university. We'd been planning it for months, and it genuinely lived up to every expectation.

We caught the early train from Taipei and arrived in Hualien just before noon. After dropping our bags at a small family-run guesthouse near the night market, we spent the afternoon wandering around the town, trying as many of the local snacks as our stomachs could handle — mochi, glutinous rice dumplings, and this extraordinary scallion pancake that I still think about.

The real highlight, though, was the second day, when we rented scooters and rode up to Taroko Gorge. I'd seen photos before, but nothing prepares you for the scale of it — sheer marble cliffs rising on either side, and this turquoise river cutting through the bottom. We hiked one of the shorter trails and stopped for lunch at a little indigenous-run restaurant that served wild boar — something I'd never tried before.

On the last day we went to Qixingtan Beach, which is famous for its smooth black pebbles, and then caught the train home.

What made the trip special wasn't just the scenery, as stunning as it was, but the fact that all three of us genuinely unplugged for three days — no work emails, no social media, just long conversations and bad karaoke in the guesthouse. I came back feeling properly rested for the first time in months."

"The trip I want to talk about was a three-day break in Hualien last October, on Taiwan's east coast — a part of the island I'd somehow never visited despite having grown up only a couple of hours away. I went with two university friends who, like me, had been drowning in work for the better part of the year.

We took the first express train out of Taipei, and within two hours the scenery had shifted completely — concrete gave way to rice paddies, then to the Pacific, appearing suddenly out of a tunnel. I remember thinking how strange it was that something this spectacular was this close to home.

The centrepiece of the trip was Taroko Gorge on day two. We rented scooters and rode up into the mountains, and no amount of photography, honestly, does that place justice. You're weaving along narrow roads carved directly into marble cliffs, with a turquoise river roaring below, and every few kilometres the landscape reorganises itself entirely. We did one of the more modest hikes — not out of laziness, but because we kept stopping to take it in — and finished the day at a family-run indigenous restaurant where the owner insisted we try his wild boar sausages, which were probably the best thing I ate all year.

The final day was a quieter one — Qixingtan Beach, famous for its smooth black pebbles and the sound they make as the waves pull back — and then the train home.

What I think I enjoyed most, looking back, wasn't any single moment but the texture of the whole thing: the fact that for seventy-two hours none of us checked a single work email, and we remembered how to talk to each other properly. Trips like that, I've come to realise, matter less for where you go than for what they let you step away from."