Mountain Entry Permits Required
Before entering many trails and mountains in Taiwan, you are legally required to obtain a Mountain Entry Permit from the National Police Agency, i.e. the“Police Mountain Permit”. As a general rule of thumb, all Top 100 mountains will require this permit (except most of the（ Hehuanshan area peaks), none of the Small 100 mountains will require this permit, and a few other popular trails like the Walami and the Zhuilu will require it. Not having the permit can result in you being sent off the mountain, not being allowed on to begin with, or being fined. It’s not very difficult to arrange so there is no excuse for not having one when necessary.
It is always possible to obtain the permit in person at a designated police station near the trail on the day of hiking, but this requires finding the correct police station, more paperwork, and is usually just a waste of time compared with doing it online. The online application is much simpler, but the only catch is the online one needs to be done 5 days or more before your planned start date. It’s also written in Chinese.
IMPORTANT: For many trails that fall within national park boundaries, you are required to obtain a Park Entry Permit from the National Park Headquarters (applied for online, in English) as well as a Police Mountain Permit. Yes, that’s two permits for the same trip, so make sure you get them both.
Registration Process Online
Before you begin, make sure you have the addresses, phone numbers, ID numbers (passport or ARC) and birthdates of all group members. You will need these later in the application and they cannot be added later. Wait until you have the information then apply. The first step is to access the application page, either from the National Police Agency’s homepage or directly via this link: https://nv2.npa.gov.tw/NM103-604Client/ . Right away you may run into a problem, due to this website’s painfully old technology. Apparently the encryption technology is outdated, so you might see a serious-looking error page in Google Chrome or perhaps a similar one in another browser. If you don’t see this, just skip this step.
Click on Advanced, and you will see the following:
Click on Proceed to nv2.npa.gov.tw (unsafe). Don’t worry, it’s not a virus, just a little incompetence at the National Police Agency. Now you should be greeted with the following page:
Click on the second tab, 如山許可證申請作業, and you will see the following:
In this page you will check 3 boxes. Check the box *1 to accept their conditions. Check the “foreigner” 外國人 for option *2 and then enter your ARC or passport number in the box next to it*3 . (doesn’t matter which one) Then type the letter-number “captcha” combination*4 and finally click on the green button to enter the application page*5. Example:
Now you should see the application form. Fill it out:
*1 Select foreigner 外國人 and enter ARC or passport number, same as previous step.
*2 Surname Name.
*3 Birthdate in the format YYYYMMDD.
*4 Phone number.
*5 E-mail address, obviously. Required field.
*6 Address.
*7 Emergency contact person, should be someone in Taiwan.
*8 Emergency contact phone numbers x2, just enter one number twice if you don’t have 2..
*9 The default option means “hiking”. Do not touch this one.
*10 These two fields are for the dates you will start and end your hike. Here you get the fun of dealing with Chinese month names and Taiwanese years, all in one place! The little calendar should open up to the current month by default, so if your application date is within the same month you don’t really have to worry about this. But for your reference, here are the Chinese months:
一月 Jan.
二月 Feb.
三月 Mar.
四月 Apr.
五月 May
六月 Jun.
七月 Jul.
八月 Aug.
九月 Sep.
十月 Oct.
十一月 Nov.
十二月 Dec.
Here it shows the Taiwanese year 104年, which is 2015. Year 105年 will be 2016, Year 106年 will be 2017, etc. Again, this shouldn’t matter much as it automatically opens to the current year; just don’t be put off by the strange looking year format.
Once you’re finished entering the information, your screen should look roughly like this:
Now click on the little button beside the calendar dates to check and make sure these are valid dates for online application. If you see:
…where there is a long message, something is wrong. Most likely you are within 4 days or less of entering the trail so you can’t apply online. It must be 5 days before trail entry or earlier to be able to apply online. If you see the shorter message:
…then your dates are OK. Now click on this blue button:
You are not done yet…..click below for the next page to continue filling out the form.
