If you haven’t heard, capybaras are having a bit of a moment. The hashtag #capybara has over 10 billion views on TikTok and counting. Viral videos circulate of these big fluffy rodents engaging in sometimes ridiculous, sometimes hilarious behavior — surfing down the river on a crocodiles’ back or balancing tangerines on their head. They even have a catchy Russian-language theme song that goes something like, “Capybara capybara ca-py-ba-rahhhh!”
Taiwan was the genesis of the cat cafe phenomenon. It’s a place where meerkats and hogs can be considered household pets, so obviously any notions of animal ethics were not going to suppress a pervasive love of all things cute, especially in this image-driven age of social media.
Capybara Knight (水豚騎士) in New Taipei City’s Tucheng District (土城) offers visitors a chance to get up close and personal with these strangely adorable internet sensations.
Photo courtesy of Hollie Younger
‘LIVING CHAIRS’
Capybaras are the world’s largest rodents, weighing up to 79kg and are native to South America. Herbivores and highly social creatures, they live in wild marshes in groups of between 10 and 20 individuals. They have webbed feet and are adapt swimmers, although they tend to hop when on land. The “living chairs” and “nature’s ottoman” nicknames were earned as other animals, including birds and even monkeys, like to sit on them.
They might look a bit like oversized, semi-aquatic guinea pigs but their friendliness and all-round cuteness has made them international internet celebrities, for good or ill.
Photo courtesy of Hollie Younger
At Capybara Knight, you can experience capybaras firsthand as they lounge in the shade with their duck friends, welcoming you to give them belly rubs, head scratches and, of course, food.
The cafe offers 90-minute sittings during which there are capybara-themed drinks, snacks and desserts to help you hit the minimum spend of NT$100/person. An additional NT$150 (NT$200 on weekends and holidays) gets you a 20-minute slot in the capybara enclosure. The fee includes a capybara-shaped egg cake for you and a cup of hay for them. Groups are kept small, and a keeper is on hand to help answer any questions.
Capybara Knight is home to two capybaras, one female named Ba La (拔辣) and her male companion Ga Bi (嘎逼), each two years old and surprisingly friendly, apparently, unbothered by all the attention. The cafe also houses two ducks, two rabbits, a dog and a cat.
Photo courtesy of Hollie Younger
The capybaras are well taken care of by passionate keepers, we are told. Their outdoor enclosure is large with hay for them to lie down in, grass for them to eat and even a pool for them to swim in. There are also steam vents keeping their pen as humid as a South American swamp.
Online reservations are recommended well in advance, especially on weekends and holidays — the capybaras are pretty popular at the moment.
Photo courtesy of Hollie Younger
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
RSS