Taiwan

I really want to write it all down. But it’s daunting. There’s a lot, and I forget more and more as I settle back into Japanese drudgery. So I’m going to list it here, and flesh it out over the next few weeks. But I want to get the list down now, before I forget.

– Landing in Taipei and meeting Alex’s friends. Allen, Stone, Mina, and ________.
– Forgetting to change money, heading back to the airport to do so. Racism.
– Are we hungry? Famous restaurant in Taipei. First restaurant to sell soy milk. Maybe.
– An hour’s drive there. Realizing the profundity of the language barrier. Lots of laughing.
– Restaurant. Realization that Taiwan is a developing country. Food, fucking delicious.
– Drive to “the hotel”
– Meeting Angelica
– Next day, breakfast, bread, train station.
– Train to Hualien. Eat bread. Rent bikes. Gather maps at visitor’s center. Check out 7-11. Find groceries.
– Cycling! Stopping to take pictures along the way. Highway 9, tons of trucks and buses.
– Escape the highway, head for the coast, find beach, set up tent.
– Enjoying beachy evening. Stack rocks on top of each other. Man in orange keeps looking at us from high up in a tower. As we’re walking back to the tent, a SPOTLIGHT bursts forth from the tower and starts scanning the sand. We run for tent. Scary!
– Decide if they wanted us/wanted to hurt us, they could have easily found us by now and done so. Alex falls asleep at 630.
– Wake up next morning. Canned tuna, terrible dates, fruit, and coconut milk for breakfast.
– Bike! 7-eleven. Poopstop. Also food and coffee.
– Up Taroko Gorge! Bike. Hike. Bike. Rain, mist, fog all day. Beautiful rock walls towering above and below, green, green, grey river rushing. Temples everywhere.
– Find campsite! Set up tent! Now it’s pouring. Bike up the gorge a few kms to find dinner.
– Most expensive meal of the trip. Gorge ourselves on $30 worth of mediocre Chinese food.
– Back to tent, lots of rain, sleep.
– Next day. Try to find hot springs up the gorge but fail. Ride down. Take pictures. Stop in Hualien, buy groceries. Eat oreos and nut milk in park. Fighter jets. Graveyards by the sea. And then headed south.
– Biking into the darkness. End up pitching tent on the beach near a little fishing village. Have a campfire, which makes me happy. Drink wine, eat chocolate, sleep.
– Next day! Biking up a huge hill! Alex is getting grumpy. People on very fancy bikes, wearing very fancy bike clothes, keep passing us. We get to the top and it’s beautiful, mountains into sea, first true blue-sky day we’ve had. We carry on, stopping at a view point. Fancy cyclists everywhere. They want to take our picture. They want to talk to us. They’re very friendly.
– Man comes up, introduces himself as Sarge. Says his boss wants us to join them for lunch. just 20 kilometers south. We acquiesce. Start biking with them. They are much faster than us. Their photographers are taking pictures of us. Their cars are offering us water and bananas and encouragement. We are bewildered and jolly.
– Lunch! Delicious, fresh, amazing seafood of all kinds. Learning the story of who all these cyclists are and what they’re doing. Get invited to join them for the rest of their tour. Decide to follow them that evening over the coastal mountains to a hot spring village. 47 more kilometers.
– It’s hard. We’re tired but exhilarated. We arrive. Take stock of sunburns. I’m a lobster-monster. Hot spring feels marginally tortuous. First night in an actual hotel, and it’s a lovely one. Wooden tub in our room that we can fill with water piped directly from the hot spring.
– Dinner with the cycling group, kindness. They ask us to stay with them for the rest of our journey. We politely decline. They are fast and we are not. They are biking 117 kms the next day. We would like to bike 60.
– The next morning, we say good bye to our entourage and they set out at eight. We eat breakfast. Look at maps. Try to find sunscreen. Drink sulfuric hot spring coffee. End up leaving at eleven. We head for the route back to the coast that the boss suggested to us. Highway 23.
– It’s windy. We’re grumpy and tired. We each eat two soft-serves. Blueberry, Swiss Chocolate Chip for me, Mango, Strawberry for him.
– We stop in Fuli and buy 18 bananas, sunscreen, and aloe drinks because we can’t find aloe vera.
– Highway 23 is beautiful! Agrarian. Gentle hills bring us up and down to a twisting gorge and we suspect then the “over the mountains” part must begin but the angle of the hills remain benign. Seventeen kilometers in, we start climbing. And climbing. Lots of false summits. It starts to get dark just as we start going down. We go down forever. It’s dark when we get to the coast. We start to camp near the beach, under coconut trees (hoping to hide from the authorities as “NO CAMPING” was clearly posted). Decide it’s too dangerous and decide to look for another place. To the town. 7-11. Food, regroup. Alex asks the police, they direct us 8 kms north to the other police station.
– Completely dark, we ride 8 kms. We find the police station. They let us in, we camp in their backyard. They have hot showers!
– Next morning, we get up early. I’m grumpy and tired. The wind is blowing straight at our faces, it makes me more grumpy. Alex kindly bikes ahead of me to reduce the gusts. We finally get to Taitung. The hostel that our 8 year old lonely planet recommends is, surprisingly, no longer in existence. We drink fruit smoothies and sort out where to look for affordable accommodation.
– Get hotel, shower, then to wandering Taitung. Loveliness.
– Sleep. Wake. Bike to train station, give back rental bikes. Put all of our gear in pink, flimsy garbage bags, two each. Four hour train back to Alex’s friends.
– Arrive. Dinner. Delicious. Duck’s blood. Stinky tofu. Other things that sound bad but taste good. We’re very full.
– Walk around night market. They keep buying us food. Full.
– Hour long foot and leg massage. Painful, orgasmic. I feel like a princess.
– Next day, our last day. Pick mulberries from their farm and eat them. Out for breakfast, huge amounts of food, those sesame noodles. Full. Then ice creams as big as my head. Uncomfortably full. Then, bubble tea. Museum. Playing with Oen, the five year old Taiwanese boy whose English far surpasses that of my elementary Japanese students’, all day long. After museum, snack! Still full, but it’s delicious, so we eat it. Then we go to buy fruit. Starfruit, pineapple, wax apple, papaya, custard apples. Then to dinner. Peking duck. I could eat it every day and still revel in the complexity of the flavors. So full. Finally learn the word for full. “Japaa.” It’s the only word I learn in mandarin, aside from thank you and hello.
– Back to “the hotel” which is a gigantic and gorgeous house owned by Angelica’s husband. More eating. The fruit!
– Try to poop as much as I can before bed to make way for all the food that is about to pass through my bowels. Have never been so lavishly feasted before.
– Wake at five in the morning, drive two hours to the airport, and we’re back in Tokyo after 3 hours.
– Tokyo feels sterile.
– I am still, three days later, convinced that I am shitting out Taiwanese food. Japaa!!!

Here’s a picture. It’s from Taroko Gorge. More to come, perhaps.

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