Image taken from Pixabay

Taipei, March 13 (CNA) Noble Caledonia, a United Kingdom-based luxury cruise liner, will offer an island-hopping itinerary around Taiwan and its outlying islands of Kinmen and Penghu, the first travel model of its kind ever seen in Taiwan, the Maritime and Port Bureau said Tuesday.

About 100 British passengers will arrive in Taiwan March 15 via air and will then board the 4,200-ton ship at Keelung Port in northern Taiwan for a nine-day cruise before leaving for Japan March 23, the bureau said.

The tour, which costs US$9,432 per passenger, will continue for another six days in Japan, with passengers returning to the U.K. from Osaka in western Japan.

During Noble Caledonia's Taiwan visit, it will also island-hop to Kinmen and Penghu, a new form of international cruise tourism in Taiwan that shows increasingly diverse travel styles, said Chen Pin-chuan (陳賓權), the bureau's deputy director-general.

"There is an emerging trend for cruise line tourists to travel in relatively small, luxury groups, with customized itineraries," Chen said.

In Kinmen, for instance, the tourists will go to the Guningtou Battlefield History Museum, the scene of the most significant victory in 1949 for the Kuomintang forces in the civil war against the Communists.

The ship will also dock in Tainan, southern Taiwan, allowing passengers to visit the Chikan Tower, built by the Dutch in 1653 as an administrative center, as well as the Foguangshan Monastery, which is one of the centers of Buddhism in Taiwan.

Chen said there are more international cruise liners expressing similar interest in visiting Taiwan.

"We will capitalize on that momentum to design more in-depth and quality tours," he said.

(By Lee Hsin-Yin)
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