If you had asked me a year ago what kind of country Taiwan is I would have cleared my throat, scratched my head and said ” … ummm” before coming up with the entirely unoriginal notion that they seem to manufacture a lot of cheap products. The only reason that my impression changed is that a woman I had met traveling around the US, Ya, drew me to the tropical island. Before you get your hopes up that this will be a steamy confessional I’ll shatter them now by pointing out that this is a serious account of an interesting country, not some smutty, cheap romance.
My travels started with a farewell to my parents on a below freezing pre-dawn morning in Canberra. I was flying from Canberra to Sydney and then on to Taipei and London a week or so later. It was a beautifully clear morning in Canberra with the dark sky peppered with stars and just beginning to turn blue as the sun started it’s day. It was a cold walk across the tarmac to the plane and I discovered that one of the drawbacks with taking the first flight of the day is that the plane hasn’t had a chance to heat up yet. It was only a small jet but had the nice feature of sheepskin lined seats. I thought it was a pity that the stewardess wasn’t wearing ugg boots as a finishing touch. Once we had taken off the scenery began to be illuminated, revealing lakes of clouds nestled in the valleys, like little blankets covering the land as it slept.
My Sydney to Taipei leg of the journey was with Eva Airlines, the national carrier for Taiwan. When I mentioned Eva to anyone they generally said “Who?”, but I tend to think that anonymity in an airline is not a bad thing when you consider that crashing is a big cause of notoriety. The flight passed without incident, which gives me an opportunity to roughly describe the features of Taiwan. It’s not a big place. You can go from one end to the other in about five hours. It is an oval shape with the longer part running north to south. It has a coastal plain along the west coast and a huge mountain range along the east coast. This gives it the appearance from the air of a whale that has just broken the surface and is diving back down again. Taiwan is located just off the south coast of China. They don’t see themselves as part of China politically but are very much Chinese culturally. I don’t want to delve into the whole history of the country here, but to sum it up very simply, when the communists came to power the losers went to Taiwan to start their own country. Taiwan is 22 million strong and an economic powerhouse.
Flying into Taipei, which is on the northern tip of the island, you can see mountains poking through a fine mist of pollution. It’s a scenic setting that has been marred by over-development. It’s an example of the practical being valued more than the beautiful, a common practice from what I saw of some of the countryside. My first encounter with the deadly acronym took place just before customs. Everyone passing by had to have their temperature measured. Luckily, they’ve advanced beyond rectal thermometers and now simply point a device at your forehead. This was a common feature at restaurants and department stores but was the only sign of the SARS epidemic which had caused so many deaths there recently. I was disappointed in a way because I had already come up with a good title for my email and now I had nothing to battle. The rudest shock was nothing to do with SARS but was simply the heat of the place. I went from below freezing to a night-time temperature of 28 degrees, so the walk from the bus stop to the hotel had me sweating as much as if I had just completed a marathon and stepped out of the post-race shower. Sweat wasn’t rolling down; it was violently spurting out in an effort to find somewhere to cool down.
It makes a big difference when traveling to a strange country if you know someone that lives there. It is even more helpful if that person actually knows how to organise things, so in contrast to my usual style of turning up and figuring stuff out from there, I could just relax and enjoy the ride. The recent travel warning about Taiwan unsurprisingly had a bad effect on the number of people traveling there but it couldn’t have been better timing for me because suddenly hotels were offering incredible deals. The hotel room was in a slightly Japanese style with matching low ceilings in the bathroom. I was occasionally reminded of this when I straightened up in the shower but I forgave all as it had air conditioning. During my period in Taipei it was my homebase, the place I retreated to when I ran out of sweat.
On my second night there, Ya and I went to a night market, which in temperature terms is the closest I have been to hell. I had the utmost sympathy for the people cooking over woks in their little stalls, but Ya pointed out that I shouldn’t feel sorry for them as they make a lot of money. I don’t think she has ever spent an evening cooking over a hot plate, which is bad enough in a reasonably cool kitchen, but to do it in temperatures pushing 50 degrees is a hell of a way to spend your life. I was suffering just walking around the place. If you can imagine the outside temperature being the hottest you’ve ever felt in your life, and this is at night, and then taking a walk through somewhere even hotter, you will have an idea of the experience.
Without a doubt the best feature of Taipei was the food. In city terms it isn’t anything special, with lots of ugly buildings and barren parks, but once you head inside some restaurants the true magic of the place is revealed. At the National Palace Museum they have a piece carved in brown jade representing a slab of Dung Po Pork, which says a lot about how much respect the Chinese give their food. In my time there I was almost permanently stuffed full of food, including Dung Po Pork, which does something magical to a piece of pork thereby rendering the fat on top as tasty as the gelatinous filling of a pork pie. Even the food on the trains was tasty. On trains in the US you get microwaved hotdogs and pizzas, in the UK you get crisps and sandwiches, but in Taiwan they sell lunchboxes with a bit of rice, assorted vegetables and some meat. It makes all the difference to a journey.
The only trip we took around Taiwan itself was to travel to Mt. Alishan, which is located precisely in the centre of the island. You get there by traveling halfway down the coast and then switching to an alpine train which heads up into the mountains in a manner that reminded me of Switzerland. The scenery at the start was of houses and farms on the plains, but the hills soon appeared in the distance, and before long we were climbing up into a jungle similar to how I imagine Thailand and Burma. The track wound around small settlements going constantly higher. Soon the jungle started to change to forests of bamboo scattered with trees. The hills had turned into mountains by this stage that stretched away in all directions. The ground fell away sharply by the side of the tracks giving glimpses of the valley below. By halfway it felt incredibly high but we had as much to climb again. The air took on a welcome cool note and the scenery changed once again to the sort of forest you might find in Europe. It was such a stark difference to what we had so recently left that it felt like another world.
One of the specialties of Alishan is the sunrise. I have a very low opinion of sunrises, but in spite of this Ya convinced me to get up at 4:30am to make the journey by train to the top of the mountain. In most western countries in the world you might get a few old people getting up for a sunrise but here the station was packed with people of all ages. We couldn’t even get a seat on the way up. I’m not at my best in the mornings but it was a fine day and refreshingly cool, so wandering up to the viewing point wasn’t too taxing. You could still see the lights of a town twinkling in the valley far below as the sky lightened overhead. It was a spectacular looking place, with very steep mountains covered in trees. The sun rises over Mt. Jade which, at about 2500m, is the highest mountain in northeast Asia. We were told that we were lucky to be seeing a sunrise at all as the area is notoriously cloudy and a sunrise hadn’t been seen in the last 11 days. To be honest, I saw better sunrises in Sydney, but it was nice to see the spectacular scenery slowly uncovered. The other specialty of Alishan are the giant trees. Although not as big as Californian redwoods they are incredibly old. On one walk through a section of forest next to the hotel there is one tree 2000 years old and about 32 of them in a range from 700 to 1600 years old. Most of them didn’t just sprout straight up but split apart so that four trees were growing on the one trunk.
My time in Taipei was generally spent eating, sleeping and trying to cool down after venturing outside. The streets of Taipei are fairly wide but it still felt closed in and oppressive. There wasn’t ever a clear sky in the city with the pollution haze detracting from the friendly atmosphere and making the place feel dirtier than it was. It might have also been that there was nowhere to get away from it all. On one of the days Ya and I went to Yangmingshan, which is a mountain just outside the city. It is a nice place with grassy fields much like a park but in a totally natural setting. I assume there are good views as well but when we where up there it was as misty as a sauna. Even on this mountain outside the city there were people everywhere. Taipei just feels like another overcrowded city, the kind of place that you can’t escape from. Only the food elevates it out of the ordinary. The best parts of Taiwan are away from the crowded city and plains, up in the cooler mountains. Apparently there is some lovely country along the west coast but that will have to wait for another time.
Dave out.
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