A Spontaneous Trip Around Taiwan

A Spontaneous Trip Around Taiwan

It seems I haven’t updated my blog in awhile, so I figured better now than never. As you might have guessed I returned to Taiwan. As you might not have guessed, I haven’t been sticking around with my head in a textbook.

Some friends of mine from Taipei (Adam and Anita) invited me on a spontaneous trip to Alishan mountain and Tainan. They only told me about it the night before we left, and so I had to leave very suddenly, which apparently sparked the latest diplomatic nightmare as it apparently "pissed off" a couple people, which was not my intention (and is never my intention), because I filled out their “going away form” rather hastily, and didn’t have time to meet with Cindy in person after being informed she wanted to meet with me 2 hours before my bus left (needless to say, I wasn’t going to give up on my trip over some bureaucratic red tape). Filling out a form to go out for the weekend seemed ridiculous enough for me, so I wasn’t going to do it except my Taiwanese roommate, who told me I was “his” responsibility, told me he’d be punished by management if I didn’t. When I wasn't able to show up for the meeting, Cindy sent me an email to complain, saying I had to report in every 2 days of where I was going, staying, etc, to which I responded with one email saying, in as polite of terms as I could manage, that there was no way that I was going to report to them my every movement and action. Diplomatically, things between me and Tamkang are as strained as always, but I don’t anticipate staying here much longer, so relevancy of poor diplomatic relations decreases daily. For what it’s worth, all my friends, my entire family, and even Dr. David McLeod, the BU equivalent to Lily has heard about my preference to gallivanting than to actually going to class, all approve of my decision to travel over studying, so even if Tamkang doesn’t like it, I’m still going to do it. I don’t mean to be harsh, but I’ve had enough. I know they only want to do what they think is best for me, but what they don't understand is that it might not be correct, and cultural misunderstandings are clearly at work here. Hopefully I have not acted wrongfully, what do you all think? Sorry, had to vent a little there.

So to make a long story short, I headed out with my Taiwanese friends to Chiayi, a small city just north of Tainan, where I stayed the night at Anita’s house. Chiayi, like most places in East Taiwan, is effectively a smaller version of Taipei, so there’s nightmarkets and KTV (Karaoke parlours) to amuse you. We saw a crazy trippy movie, perhaps a made for TV movie, about a bunch of strangers trapped in a Tesseract with amnesia and various lethal physical theorems, chilling alternate dimensions, and psychological conspiracies that all ends badly. Trippy film.

The next day we drove to Tainan, did some sightseeing there, mainly temples and whatnot in the old part of the city, though my Taiwanese friends from Taipei, used to their beloved MRT, got tired of walking pretty quickly. As is all too often the case in such circumstances, I got thrust into the leadership role, which meant we went to places I wanted to see, but I was never sure if they were places everyone else wanted to see, like the old shrines built by Koxinga, the guy who liberated Taiwan from the Dutch and effectively made it a Chinese entity for the first time in recorded history, leading to its eventual amalgamation into mainland China under the Qing Dynasty. The temples of course, looked more or less, like every other temple in Taiwan, but the history behind them made them interesting, including one set-up as a shrine to the concubines of the last Ming loyalist on the island who all killed themselves when the Qing came a-conquer’n. The Taiwanese maybe didn’t find it all that interesting, as it would be nothing exotic to them, and only one went there with me, perhaps because she wanted to make me happy more than out of her own interest but I couldn’t get her to tell me otherwise so away we went.

After Tainan, we went to an old farmhouse in the highlands around Alishan, the mountain famed for its sea of clouds sunrise. People travel here from all over Taiwan to wake up at dawn and see the sunrise, but only Anita and her friend who lived in the house where were staying, bothered getting up with me to see it, and we only looked out the window from their house, rather than making the journey over to the mountain. Granted though, it may have been one of those things that couldn’t possibly live up to hype and few things can at 6 am. But at least Anita and her friend and friends family, vibrant rural folk who clearly enjoy being separate from the hustle and bustle of Taipei, were nice. The farmhouse was on top of terraced tea plantations and exactly what you’d expect of rural Taiwanese life, and the family that lived there were very generous and friendly and had the rural mannerisms of farmers back home so it was all very welcoming and I’m definitely glad we went there. Staying with families was definitely a major highlight of my trip.

A little later on in the day, we went to Alishan (Mt. Ali) itself and hiked around for about a half hour. Alishan has more the feel of a urban botanical gardens than a nature reserve as even the main park itself is covered in roadways and elementary schools and dominated visually by cherry blossom trees which, while beautiful, were clearly planted there by the Japanese. Also I remembered why I like traveling alone so much, because my Taipei friends kept stopping to take photographs at every freaking tree, which while yes they are beautiful, constant stopping to take photographs does get a little aggravating when you want to at least get out of the parking lot. Nothing against my Taiwanese friends of course ;), just cultural difference. Of course in a place as popular as Alishan, the noise of the endless tour groups scare away any chance of seeing wildlife, but there was a nice little community atmosphere around the village and I even got to pose with one of those stereotypical Asian farmer hats. The 1900 year old tree was nice too, though my Taiwanese friends got mad at me because they wanted to see “The Old Tree” and so I lead them down the trail marked “Old Tree Trail” but it ended up being different old trees than they were thinking of (though if the tree is almost as old as Jesus, I say that’s a pretty old tree). The trail was measured in metres not kilometers, so I suggested, if they really wanted to see this other tree, that we could, but they were already too exhausted for hiking any further.

So instead we went to a picture-esque old railway logging town now filled with souvenir shops and trinkets galore. It was a nice little town, with great ice cream wrapped in pancakes like the original waffle cone Taiwanese style (Taiwanese generally don’t distinguish between pancakes and waffles, just like they don’t distinguish between scooters and motorcycles, but then we don’t really distinguish that much between older and younger siblings either). The town was filled with tourist shops and had a wide assortment of trinkets and do-hickeys for your souvenring pleasure ;).

To finish the day off we went to an Aboriginal village where the Aboriginals had taken over a river, 10 years polluted to the point of being something of a love canal, had worked it back, using traditional and ecologically friendly practices, to a thriving ecosystem filled with fish within a decade. A remarkable environmentalist feat to say the least, especially in a region where environmentalism as a movement is still in its infancy yet is desperately needed. Unfortunately though, it was closed by the time we got there, so we didn’t get to see much, but we could walk around a little bit and it was an overall pleasant place to walk around with lots of birds chirping and the jungle not too far off. I did not go fishing of course. The rural road getting there, however, was windy and narrow and collapsed in portions, but like a true Taiwanese, my Taipei friend drove like he was on Main street Taipei, causing one poor girl to have to get out of the car periodically green with motion sickness. Still though, I have to admire the guy for being willing to drive on such crazy mountain highways in the first place, as I wouldn't want to.

Anyway, after the weekend trip to Alishan, I decided I wanted to see the rest of Taiwan, so I did, going first to Tainan to see old the Dutch Fort at Anping, called Fort Zealandia, from where the Dutch once ruled the island. There isn’t much left from the original fort, save an old stone wall, and the recreation looks somewhat similar to Fort San Domingo in Danshui, but it was an okay place to chill.

Next, I went to Kaoshiung and Kending. Kaoshiung is just basically an industrial city so there’s not much to say about it, although it is the second biggest city in Taiwan and apparently a Japanese-style shinkansen (bullet train) is going to connect it to Taipei in the near future. Kending is Taiwan’s most famous tropical beach resort and is located at the southern most tip of Taiwan, so many Taiwanese, and some European friends said I had to go to it.

That said, Kending seemed a little disappointing for me, mainly because the main beach was completely closed to the public. The town planners, in their infinite wisdom, sold the entire beach to big hotel which proceeded to fence off the whole area leaving the main beach at Kending private property and completely devoid of swimmers (the hotel is still being built it seems). Instead of getting surf and sand, all I got was a pack of very angry guard dogs who barked and snarled at me until I got back to the street. I managed to rent a bike, and biked along the rocky shoreline near the Youth Activity center which was very volcanic in origin and very cool, perhaps the best thing I did in Kending. They have some more spots like this outside of the town proper, but they wouldn’t let me rent a scooter without a Taiwanese license and the bus service was not exactly noted for its reliability (I got stranded on more than one occasion by buses that just stopped coming in the middle of the afternoon and had to walk along the highway for a couple hours in the tropical humidity until I found a hotel which let me use their shuttle service and thankfully they also gave me a glass of much needed water)

The town itself had a plethora of tourist-geared restaurants with a tropical/Asian theme so you could find Thai food and even Mexican food pretty easily, which was nice though it seemed ironic that a town, now effectively with no beach open to the public, would have such a beach atmosphere.

There is an adjacent town, Nanwan, which actually has, and lets you use, a beach, so I went swimming there a little, then I tried to go for surfing lessons. Lonely Planet Taiwan recommended an outfit called Fu Dog, run by a Texan proprietor of the same name, I assume. The surf instructor assigned to me, however, was a Canadian claiming to have learned to surf in the frigid waters of Vancouver island (Vancouver Island, for all you non-Canadians out there, is about as non-frigid as Canada gets, but compared to Taiwan it would be colder than a witch’s tits to use the old adage). I never did meet the guy to ask him about it though because the next morning, when he was supposed to pick me up, he never showed, so I said nuts to him and left Kending.

After Kending, I meandered my way to Taidung where I stayed one uneventful night (I was tired from traveling) before catching a flight to Lanyu (aka Orchid) Island. According to reports, the ferry ride over to Lanyu island is rough enough to make even a seasoned mariner upchuck, thus I decided the only slightly more expensive and considerably faster airplane would be a better bet. Unfortunately, the plane ride couldn’t have been much rougher if it tried. Not only the tiny 19 seat propeller plane whip out of Taidung Airport on an S-shaped acceleration, but once in the air, it immediately engaged in a high angle turn while pointing skyward, causing my luggage to flop around like flying fish in a Lanyu canoe. Once it got level again, it was turbulence, turbulence, turbulence all the way to tiny Lanyu, which gave me feelings of jubilation at the sight of land. The nightmare (for someone with a fear of flying, though thrill-seekers would love this plane) was just beginning, however as they plane begin landing procedures. These procedures basically consisted of the plane effectively coming to a complete halt over some rocky peninsula (which at few 100 metres above the ground is not something you particularly want to be doing in a plane), before freefalling down and than up and down and than up and down and than up before finally coming to rest on a runway clinging desparately to the side of a mountain surrounded by sea (As it turns out, the runaway was also supposed to be a few feet longer but part of it was taken away in one of the nasty typhoons that rip through the area every year, and the authorities never bothered replacing it). This flight took place on a bright sunny day, a rare occasion in the area that receives the second most rainfall of anywhere in Taiwan. On the way back, the flight was a little smoother (though the plane still felt like it could fall a part at any moment), and I did get stranded on the island a day longer than expected due to bad weather. For me though, even the flight was only 30 minutes long, it was enough to crawl back into my seat for the return. When I finally did get back to Taidung, I looked back at my aircraft and could swear I saw smoke rising from the roof. Luckily I was safely back on Taiwan itself at this point, could now take the train back to Taipei.

While I would never fly in one of those devil planes again, I did absolutely love Lanyu Island, mainly because it had that quintessential Caribbean laid-back attitude that is so refreshing after leaving in Taipei’s go-go-go money-money-money business-business-business atmosphere. The people there are very friendly, one group of Aboriginal doctors and nurses I befriended let me stay in the nurse’s dorm for free when it became clear I was stranded and the island’s only ATM would not accept my international debit card. Still I was able to go snorkeling amidst tropical corals, scootering (they actually let me rent one here), karaoke, exploring along rural roads, dining with very friendly locals, seeing local art and even some Modern art in the house of one artist, and even got to take the Dawu (the island’s local aboriginal people) Flying Fish Festival. To give an idea of how remote and special this island’s culture and festivals are, the Discovery channel had been there the week before I was shooting an episode. While the fish festival involved a lot of men wearing loin-clothes and full-head cone-shaped metal hats, with small slits for eye holes, I was the one who seemed out of place. If I wasn’t the only person of European descent on the island, I was definitely close to it, as local village kids began poking and prodding at my mysterious, exotic, and yet terrifying arm hair. Just to give you a picture of the characters I met on the island, there was the Taroko Aboriginal Dentist whose loneliness on the small island met I quickly became one of his greatest friends or so he kept telling me, a Filipino cook insistent her kids need to go to a big school to be competitive, an attractive island girl with a flirtatious smile who worked in the general store and had me pronounce all the English written on products in the store much to her and her sister’s amusment, a nurse with spunk who spoke English well and gave me a bunch of free stuff but told me not to say too much as her husband might get jealous, and the flamboyantly transgendered police chief and “party ANIMAL ladies” who asked me out of the blue to explain to the group what was meant by the word “sissy” so he could boast that he was one and a woman (I had just said that “sissy” meant “wimp,” forgetting about the connotations involved with sexual orientation).

The island, while still steeped in its Aboriginal traditions (they still often fish out of traditional canoes which line the beach everywhere), is also a haven for Christian missionaries, and predominantly uber Protestant ones apparently as they’ve got many Taiwanese convinced, on the main island as well little Lanyu, that Christianity and Catholicism are two separate religions. While I’m a Protestant myself (Anglican to get specific), even I think it’s a tad Orange Order-ish to actually claim that Catholics aren’t Christian which makes me wonder about these missionary services in Taiwan. I have another suddenly uber “Christian” friend, who also was adamant that Catholics and Christians were completely different. She constantly brings up Jesus, so in that sense is definitely more Christian that I am or most people I know back home, though I guess most young Canadians feel about Christianity the same way that most young Taiwanese feel about Buddhism/Daoism (they never really separate the two) and Confucianism, which is to say they find them overly familiar religions (if they even call them religions) and don’t really see what’s special about them, but Christianity is exciting and new and growing leaps and bounds here. Besides it’s what they follow in economically successful America, so the business and America-loving Taiwanese thinks maybe they should look into it. Ironically, Buddhism for one, I believe, is growing faster in North America and maybe Europe faster than anywhere else in the world for the same reason. Even Daoism, through the increasing Western fascination with Feng Shui, is growing more rapidly in the West than in its Eastern homeland. Confucianism, with the possible exception of those questionable “Confucius say” books, still appears to be a hard-sell in the individualist west.

Speaking of religion, I miraculously returned to Taidung (miraculous on account I survived the plane a second time). Once back in Taidung, I found my way to the first hostel I stayed in in Taiwan, small place called the Gringo Hostel, recommended once again by Lonely Planet. Hard as hell to find, because it was on the second floor of an arcade, it was devoid of people save for one “clerk” I presume who seemed annoyed I had arrived and interrupted his online gaming. He phoned the proprietor and proceeded to continue to play his game while we waited. The proprietor, a 30 something aboriginal woman named Coco seemed nice enough, though a little unorganized as she asked if I could wait 10 minutes while she cleaned a room for me. I waited 10 minutes and then moved my luggage into the soaking wet room. Coco then offered to buy me supper if I agreed to help her teach a Cram School class on English. I pointed out that the class was in half and hour, so we bolted onto the scooter and hurried to McDonalds and then the classroom. After stomaching a Big Mac, I found myself in front of one of Asia’s infamous cram school classes, with Coco asking me if I was nervous. I told her “speaking English doesn’t make me nervouse. Speaking Chinese can though, usually I just assume I’m going to make an ass of myself and go for it ” (hehe, another old adage: When you “assume” you make an “ass” of “u” and “me” good old semi-irony). At any rate, Coco started the class spewing off in Mandarin about English and I’m not understanding a thing, but remembering how great it used to be back home when people could explain a new language in my native language. Of course though, it soon became clear why Taiwanese generally have so much difficulty with spoken English as no English was being spoken for the most part. Coco, who herself has only spent 10 days in an English speaking country, was still fairly skilled with English and a fairly hard core teacher, making people actually do their homework and ask me questions in English (they had the questions in front of them as it turned out, provided by Coco on a sheet). Some of the questions provided by the course-book (which of course the students just read aloud) were a little weird, like “What is your unforgettable things?” which of course grammatically is wrong (“is” with “thing,” “are” with “things”) but really is not a question any English-speaking person would ever ask you. We might say something like “What’s something that happened to you that you’d never forget?” but I don’t know too many people who carry around “unforgettable things.” That and in answer to this question, I was recalling my trip to Lanyu, saying “I met some friends there who were Aboriginal…” at which point Coco corrected me and said “you mean ARE Aboriginal” and I’m thinking “No, I mean WERE Aboriginal, because I’m telling a past-tense narrative and you aren’t supposed to keep switching from past to present tenses in narrative even though the characters mentioned are still alive and indeed still are Aboriginal,” but I decide that it would not be too constructive to bring this up, and besides after writing this blog with as little editing as possible who am I to be grammatically critical? At any rate, I can say now after experiencing a cram school firsthand, I am glad this phenomenon has not swept over to the other side of the Pacific, because the focus on quantity of class time over quality does not, in my opinion, prepare people for the real world. There’s only so much studying a person, particularly a teenager, can or should do and, in my opinion, your intelligence and maturity comes not only from academic tutelage but real-world experience, so kids get out there and experience it!

After the cram school, we passed a nightclub that Coco had given me a coupon for, so I figured I’d invite her out for a drink. We stopped went in, and it soon became clear that she was a regular here, and while it wasn’t busy by anyone’s standards she didn’t take much convincing to let it all loose. By 11 o’clock the cram school head-mistress had lost her academic demeaner and was dancing around a pole topless, much to my surprise though in actuality it was probably more to impress a certain American sitting by the bar who was not me. As the evening progressed and a few too many beverages had been had by all, I found myself considerably plastered and some strange lady who couldn’t speak English that well was coming on to me pretty strong. When she tried for a make-out session and than made threatening gestures to other women in the bar, I thought perhaps it was time for me to leave. What ensued was a drunken foreigner, namely me, trying to get directions out of perplexed 7-11 clerks (who constantly get confused even if you talk to them while sober) before the lady with the threatening gestures and sexual advances, who seemed just like every woman I’d been warned about running into in a bar in Asia, caught up with me.

The next day I went to Taidung’s famous National Museum of Pre-History, focusing on well Pre-Historical cultures and Taiwanese Aboriginal culture (it is reportedly the best showcase of Aboriginal culture on the East Coast). While it did have a good selection of Aboriginal culture, I had been hoping it was a tad more extensive, and the building had one very confusing layout where I ended up going back around and around in circles until a security guard escorted me out.

The day after I headed to Taiwan’s famous white-water rafting river, but as it was the off-season they didn’t have enough people to go rafting so I wasn’t able to do much here, so I just headed on to Hualien.

Hualien, the biggest city on the East Coast, other than Taipei’s port of Keelung I presume, is the popular place to stay for traveller’s seeking Taroko (pronounced Tai-Yu-Ge) Gorge, Taiwan’s most famous natural wonder. The marble-cliffed gorge is indeed one eye-opening place, and as wild and natural as Taiwan gets, though getting there via buses and taxis, and not part of a tour group, can be frustrating especially as once you reach a trail it might often be closed. It is doable however, and worth it as on one hike to a waterfall I ran into a wild Taiwanese macaque, the first wild monkey or even non-human wild primate I have ever encountered, but as soon I snapped a crappy photograph the macaque ran away, scared away by a tour group lumbering up the path who I’m pretty sure never even realized it had been there only moments before. When the tour group left, I hid in the shadows waiting for the monkey to reappear, but those primates are smart, as it only reappeared after I had already walked a fair distance away and then disappeared before I could return.

This all happened yesterday, and basically brings you up to today, where I sit here typing my blog and trying to plan my next move which could very well be me leaving Taiwan for good in the next couple of weeks. Will I just return to Canada, or will I make a stab at Singapore and Thailand? Tune in next month to find out (I’d like to update sooner, but knowing me it’ll probably be next month).