The scale of untouched nature in Taiwan was the very opposite of what they expected.
Before their arrival in Taiwan, they had thought people would be "all over the place," Emil said.
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What made their journey far more rewarding was the willingness of Taiwanese to communicate with them in English.
"We were in Japan in 1999, but Japanese people had the disadvantage of not wanting to speak English. If you talk to Japanese or ask a question, they will act like an oyster. The conversation is finished before it's even started. So you don't get anything out of them," Emil said.
The response they received in Taiwan was much more positive, he said.
"All over the nation, from Kaohsiung to Kenting to Taipei, Taiwanese were willing to communicate in English," he said, using the 30 e-mails from Taiwanese he had received over the past month as an example.
"Those 30 e-mails mean a lot, because the e-mail address was never mentioned in the TV or newspaper interviews we gave during our stay in Taiwan. This means that to get in touch with us, Taiwanese had to visit our Web site and look up our e-mail address. That's another step. It means a lot," Emil said.
"Never before had we received so many e-mails," in any of the countries we visited, he said. "We have done 57 TV interviews in 35 countries so far, as well as hundreds of interviews with newspapers, but we had never had such a response as the one we've had here in Taiwan. That is amazing."
"Taiwanese wanted to tell us about the beauty of the nation. You can see that people are proud of their homeland," Liliana said.
The couple still has about three weeks to continue their exploration of Taiwan before they leave for Hong Kong on Nov. 28.
But already, their experience in Taiwan has been an overwhelming one.
"Your first impression [of a country] is not always your last impression," Liliana said.
"We found much more than we expected about everything. It's the friendliness, it's the landscape and it's the culture," Emil said.
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