We Screwed Up With Our Latest Digital Nomad Destination

Coming to Taipei, Taiwan, in summer was a mistake. Here's how it happened — and how we handled it.

I recently mentioned to a friend that Brent and I were spending July and August in Taipei, Taiwan, and he said, “Taiwan? Don’t you know how hot and humid the summers are there?”

“Of course, we know,” I said indignantly.

But the truth is, we didn’t know — at least that it would be quite as hot as it is. It’s been 28°C to 35°C (or 82–95°F), with humidity exceeding 80%.

Taiwan has traditionally experienced very hot and humid summers, but climate change seems to be making it worse.

We also now know that summer is both Taiwan’s monsoon and typhoon season, and that they average three to five typhoons a year — and climate change is also probably making the typhoons stronger and more frequent.

Yes, we do a lot of research for this newsletter. No, we don’t always do as much as we should before we visit the places we go.

Unfortunately, Taipei’s weather was the least of our problems.

We had booked a studio apartment on Airbnb, and we knew it would be small. Hey, it’s Asia! In a metropolitan area of almost ten million!

The Airbnb photo.

But we were not prepared for just how small it turned out to be.

The ceilings are of perfectly fine height for an average Asian, but Brent and I both keep hitting our heads on the ceiling when going upstairs to the bed.

There’s a weirdly positioned ledge above that bed, and we both keep hitting our heads there too, every time one of us bends over to turn off a light.

And a dining room table would be nice, but hey, you can’t have everything.

We joke that we’re living in a sailboat. A very small sailboat.

Still, rather than a TV, there’s a device that projects onto the wall, and it works surprisingly well. So at least it’s a very small sailboat with what’s essentially a movie theater.

See that ledge above the bed? Brent and I both have bloody skulls because of it.

How did we end up in this situation? After all, we’ve been nomading for eight years.

And, uh, we literally write about travel for a living!

Here’s how it all went down.

We spent the first half of 2025 going between Mexico and Seattle, our former home. But we decided to spend the rest of this year — and part of 2026 — in Asia.

Our previous flights to this part of the world have been brutal, with multiple connections. On one trip to a Thai island, we had a total travel time — with layovers — of 42 hours.

We were very eager not to repeat this.

We’ve always wanted to visit Korea, and we spotted a non-stop, ten-hour flight from Seattle to Seoul, and that was that.

On our way to Seoul!

From Korea, we could then move on to Hong Kong, China, and Japan — the other places we intended to visit over the next nine months.

The original plan was to spend a week in the megacity of Seoul before heading to the Korean coastal city of Busan, which we’d heard great things about.

And here is where things started going off the rails.