I'm going to post what happened in case it helps anyone else, although not sure how useful a post on an English forum will be, as I had to speak Mandarin to everyone and if I couldn't read Chinese it would have been a lot more difficult.

I bought the 3-day pass from hopetrip.com.hk (Chinese only) for HK$587 which was NT$2200 at the time of purchase. This avoided foreign exchange fees on my HK card (and the poor GBP to TWD exchange rate from my UK cards). The trips I ended up taking would have cost NT$2740 so it was a reasonable saving.

On arrival at TPE, I went to the bus stop for Ubus 705 to the HSR station. Despite what websites say, tickets are purchased on the bus and not at the service counter, and the bus runs every 30 minutes. A bus was about to depart just as I arrived, but there is no standing and the person before me was given the last seat, so I was told to take the metro. The fare would have been NT$30 in exact coins only.

Metro is NT$35 cash or easycard (etc) and it took 40 mins.

At the Taoyuan HSR station, there was a very long queue at the manned counters, but there was a sign saying "passes and elderly priority" above a counter which had no queue, so I went there. 10 seconds later 2 old people came out of nowhere and tried to push me from the counter... but the staff member told them to go away. She took my passport and the code to the back office, 10 minutes later she came back with a booklet that served as the ticket. She then reserved me a seat for my first journey, but said if I wanted to reserve seats next time I would have to join the long queue. If not, I could sit or stand in the non-reserved carriages.

With a reserved seat my passport was not checked at the ticket barriers, but it was when I entered the station without a seat reservation. There were always plenty of seats available except for once between Taoyuan and Hsinchu.


Going from Taoyuan city to the HSR station was a bit of a hassle, the map provided by the bus company is awful. I started at the TRA station and not a single person knew where the bus to the HSR station was, from police to shopkeepers to staff at the Kuo-Kuang bus station which is near to the Mitsukoshi. Eventually I found someone who told me the Taoyuan bus company station was to the south of the TRA station, which is completely different from what the map says. The driver of this bus (206) didn't care about tickets or payment at all.

On the way back to TPE from Taoyuan HSR, I was lucky that a bus was just about to depart when I arrived at the stop, and I got the last seat!