The Magong North Ring Line— Part 2 of a three-part series on Penghu's car-free sightseeing buses — covers the full sweep of the northern coastline in about four hours — the archipelago's most iconic sea crossing, a fishing harbour that draws comparisons to the Greek islands, prehistoric lava columns that photograph like a film set, a village of coral limestone lanes and local food, and a banyan tree that has been growing for three centuries.
First-time visitors to Penghu face a particular problem: the island group is small enough to suggest that a day is sufficient, but the roads are unfamiliar, the distances add up, and the most interesting places tend to sit apart from one another without obvious connection. The Magong North Ring Line is the answer to that problem. The cruise-style Taiwan Tourist Shuttle bus carries a professional guide for the entire four-hour loop, handles every transfer, and strings together the archipelago's best-known sites in a single morning — leaving no one to navigate by scooter through roads they do not know, or to miss the last stop because a connection was missed.
The Cross-Sea Bridge: Walking Into a Postcard
The first stop is the Penghu Cross-Sea Bridge, the structure that joins Baisha and Xiyu townships across open water and functions as the defining image of the archipelago. Standing at the bridge head and looking out, the deep blue water, white breaking waves and the long spine of the bridge all converge at once. The Taiwan Strait wind is direct and unobstructed. The feeling of Penghu's open expanse — the particular quality of being surrounded by sea on all sides — arrives in that moment as completely as it does anywhere in the islands.
The bridge is also simply the unavoidable photograph. Whether the composition is the arch of the entrance gate, the bridge itself stretching toward the horizon, or the shoreline view from beside it, the result tends to resemble a postcard of a place you would want to be. For a first visit, there is no better opening.
Waian: a Hillside Harbour Called "Little Greece"
Following the Xiyu coast further west, the route arrives at the Sanxian Pagoda viewpoint above Waian harbour. From the elevated platform, the scene below arranges itself into layers: dense white-and-ochre houses stepping down the hillside, the fishing harbour in the middle ground, and a deep blue bay opening behind it. The visual logic — white village, curved coastline, saturated sea — is the same logic that earns places in the Aegean their reputations. Waian has earned its own version of the comparison, known around Penghu as "Little Greece."
On clear days, fishing boats on the harbour water, the shimmer on the surface, and the silhouettes of offshore islands fill out the view to the horizon. At dusk, the sky above the strait turns orange and red, and the harbour lights come on below. Photographers who arrive in the afternoon find it difficult to leave before the colour is gone.
Daguoyeh: A Wall of Volcanic Columns
The geological centrepiece of the route is Daguoye Columnar Basalt, where a long face of near-vertical columns rises directly from the waterfront. The formation lay buried and unknown until the Japanese colonial period, when workers began excavating the shoreline to build a wharf connecting Magong and Xiyu. The columns they uncovered had been cooling and crystallising underground for millions of years, arranging themselves into the hexagonal and rectangular cross-sections now visible across their full height.
At Daguoye the scale is unusually large and unusually accessible — visitors stand close enough to read the individual fracture lines and layering in the rock. After rain, the basalt darkens to near-black, and a shallow pool in front of the wall mirrors the columns back at full height. The scene produces its own cinematic quality without any effort from the photographer.
Erkan: Reading a Village Through Its Walls and Its Food
Entering Erkan, the pace of the morning drops. The village preserves a dense cluster of traditional Minnan-style houses built from coral limestone and basalt — the same materials the island provides in abundance and that earlier generations quarried because there was nothing else. Winding lanes, mottled walls and the carved lattice of old house windows hold the accumulated memory of a community that has spent its history negotiating with the sea and the wind.
The stone walls around the vegetable plots are not decorative. They block the northeast monsoon and keep the salt damage off the crops — the same dual function that walls perform in Nanliao on the east coast, and the same adaptive intelligence that shows up across Penghu's older settlements. Every surface in Erkan was built by people solving specific problems.
The village also feeds its visitors. Three things are worth finding before the bus moves on: almond tea, thick and mildly sweet; cactus sorbet, made from the fruit of the spiny plants that grow wild across Penghu's drier hillsides; and pumpkin cake, a savoury pressed cake with deep roots in the local diet. Eating and walking through the lanes at the same time is the right pace for this stop.
Tongliang: Shade, Roots and Slow Time
The final stop is the Tongliang Great Banyan, and it earns its place as a closing stop. A single tree planted roughly 300 years ago beside Bao'an Temple has expanded outward through its aerial roots until the roots have thickened into secondary trunks and the canopy covers the footprint of a small grove. The visual result is somewhere between one tree and a forest — a structure that has grown beyond the category that originally contained it.
The bus stop sits underneath the canopy. Locals gather here in the thick shade to talk; the sea breeze reaches the interior through the root system. Watching the mix of residents resting and travellers arriving and departing under the same canopy is, as the original Chinese reporter describes it, the most characteristic scene of Penghu's slow travel — the moment when a route that has moved through basalt, bridge and village history finally asks nothing more of you than to sit and let the island come to you.
The North Ring Line connects ocean, geology, culture and history across four hours. For a first visit to Penghu, it remains the most efficient single route for collecting the islands' most representative moments — and the most difficult to improve upon.
Plan Your Trip:
Route: Magong North Ring Line | Taiwan Tourist Shuttle(台灣好行)
Departure: Magong City
Duration: approximately 4 hours
Operating days: Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday (closed Tuesday and Wednesday)
Tickets:
- One-day pass: NT$300 full / NT$150 half
- Two-day combo (North Ring + Huxi): NT$500 full / NT$250 half
- Two-day combo (North Ring + Pengnan): NT$450 full / NT$225 half
- Three-day pass (all three routes): NT$600 full / NT$300 half
- Half-price: seniors 65+, persons with disabilities plus one companion, Penghu residents, children
