(Anti-clockwise around Taiwan)
Go to a convenience store in Taiwan and, no matter the time of day or night, foreigners are greeted with an enthusiastic: "GOOD MORNING!!"
So, 'Good Morning' to you too.
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Flying north along the slate-grey and brown Taiwanese west coast, reclaimed seaside lands harbour massive industrial complexes, behind of which is a sprawl of cities and irrigated fields, backed by huge emerald green mountains lost in whisps of cloud. Thousands of stainless steel hot water tanks atop hundreds of apartment roofs glint eerily across the landscape as you fly into Taipei's international airport.
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Taiwanese fellow passengers like to talk: Jacki, from a Hakka family in Miaou-Li was returning to Taiwan after a couple of years of establishing shopping centres in mainland China and Mongolia. He'd grown up in Taiwan with a grandmother from the south of the island who spoke who spoke "Taiwanese" in an otherwise Mandarin speaking family: "Mandarin is spoken in Taipei and was imposed by Chaing Kai-Shek. Before that, our families had to speak Japanese". After university in Taipei and a business degree in Melbourne, he had worked in India and China. China was too restrictive: none of his phones or Facebook would work there. His last work had been in a new city in Mongolia. The shopping centre was open, but the apartments were empty, so in two months, the shops had not seen one customer. The Chinese government didn't like the new Taiwanese President, describing her in language worthy of Donald Trump. Before working overseas he had done compulsory military service in an airforce medical corps. "It was hard but it was not dirty like the army..."
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On the Tarmac was something unthinkable on my first visit to Taiwan more than 10 years ago: Mainland Chinese aircraft from Xiamen Airlines and China Eastern Airlines. The long trudge through lino halls to Immigration and the long bus ride into Taipei were much the same, as was the still-soon-to-be-opened-new-subway into town.
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"Good Morning!" (Family Mart: Zhongshan):
A humid evening stroll through Zhongshan shopping streets and a passable ramen encouraged sleep...
Today's news: Recently elected Taiwanese President Tsai has successfully departed on an overseas visit (because mainland China has not "interfered too widely" in her plans) to travel to raise Taiwan's international profile. To Panama.
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"Good Morning!" (7Eleven Taipei Main Station):
I lined up with the morning commuters for an Americano caffeine hit. The store was run by a very friendly and efficient Down's syndrome guy with big boofy twins (somewhere on the Aspergers spectrum: aren't we all...) on the registers providing thorough, if not overly friendly, service. I'll be going back.
Young women in Taipei are pointedly and regularly offering me seats on the metro. Do I look so old and frail (apparently)? Toddlers eagerly clamber on to the empty plastic benches when I refuse.
The prebooked "Three hour cultural walking tour of night market foods" was a novel idea to the Mandarin Institute receptionist. She phoned. She conversed. She looked towards me and said: "Sir, it has been changed to a fun trampoline night in another part of Taipei. Is Sir wanting to join in?" Sir was moderately unimpressed.
Today's news: after prolonged industrial action about overly long shifts and low pay, China Airlines staff secured a pay RISE to USD5 per hour in overseas locations (compare that to your hourly local rate...) and recognition of the need to improve rostering, for passenger safety at least... The other more benign union for the airline, linked to the Kuomintang political party, then put in a catch-up claim after being bypassed. The Head of China Airlines, after refusing to communicate with any of his workers, was sacked, and then attended his own lavish birthday party.
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You can take the (Japanese) bullet train and be zipped down the west coast to the southern city of Kaohsiung in under 3 hours, or you can take the conventional Tse Zhang express and take over 5 hours at a quarter of the fare, but you do actually get to appreciate the scenery of industrial and coastal Taiwan as it becomes increasingly tropical: rice and vegetable farming plots and cow sheds make way for sugar cane, pineapples, pig sheds and extensive concrete-tank fish farms with their floating water paddles, splashing away to create something like a current for the developing fingerlings.
Some time after passing a glimpse of the concrete Statue of Liberty in a roundabout near Chayi, I noticed someone standing behind my seat. Ami was standing in the express carriage for the one-stop commute into Tainan (because she hadn't paid for an express seat). I moved my "Taiwan: A Political History" book so she then took the available seat. And talked. All the way to Tainan. She is studying Tourism at Tainan University, planning to be a flight attendant or a tour guide. She has a cousin who is picking strawberries on a working visa in Australia and would like to join him. I must eat the specialty food of Tainan: milk fish (showing many photos of fishies on plates on her phone) "And here are photos of my university and now I must get off the train". And she did.
The trolley service on the train dispensed $8 warm boxed lunches (you have to like luke warm pork and cabbage) from an unkempt gap-toothed bloke who occasionally cracked a reluctant smile. Wrangling a large cooked pork chop, bone in, with small disposable chopsticks is something of a messy, acquired skill. The locals tend to do it like consenting adults under cover of the box lid, so no clues there...
Lines of palm trees signal your arrival into the massive building works for the undergrounding of Kaohsiung Main Station.
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"Good Morning" (as my 8pm bento is provided from the sushi stall in Kaohsiung Main Station):
Kaohsiung was a major Japanese port exporting food and armaments into China before 1945. After Allied bombings, it became a rebuilt but gritty industrial town and port. In the last 10 years it has gradually transformed into a green city with rail yards reclaimed as parks, and a major waterfront clean up. Free rides are offered on the trial line of their fancy new grassed and wire-free light rail line: all very hesitant as drivers learn the new trams, and how to power them up from an overhead bar at stops. There were 20+ locals on the stop-start trial runs, proud of their innovative city. I'm not sure that the antiseptic interiors with flat white plastic seats would appeal to commuters in some other countries...
The "oldest remaining European building" is at Harbourside Takao: the former British Consulate. I was there on the day that the Brexit vote was announced. In front of a small arched white masonry building were models of a Victorian era official and overdressed wife with coolies and a rickshaw. They were swamped by a large tour group of mainland Chinese pointing, laughing, taking selfies and chain smoking. Some symbol of a future, perhaps?
Across from the hotel (on the wrong side of the tracks, meaning a bizarre negotiation for a free transit ticket every time you need to access the bus or subway), clogged road traffic is warned of road works by a human-masked-and-helmeted wig-wag dummy in fluoro-safety vest, perpetually waving an orange flag and safety baton from side to side; floodlit at night. Nice.
Today's news: China has suspended all formal communications with Taiwan. The background: Taiwanese fraudsters in Cambodia were deported to China rather than to Taiwan, because Taiwan is considered to be "China", and so, according to the Cambodians, Chinese Taiwanese criminals can go back to where they have never lived. Taiwan protested. China suspended communication. And so it goes...
China offloaded Formosa (now Taiwan) in the Treaty of Shimonoseki after losing a war (gather first of many) with Japan in the 1890's. Many Taiwanese have little empathy that they are really part of a greater Chinese nation that gave them away so easily more than a century ago. Much of the Chinese population moving to Taiwan in the previous 300 years had been escaping China, and the Qing government was glad to see them go.
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Taiwan seems more Japanese than Chinese at times. (Chiang Kai-Shek certainly thought so in 1945 when he Nationalist Chinese government took over the island after 50 years of "Japanisation"). After being beaten by Japanese school masters until 1945 if they did NOT speak Japanese, Taiwanese students began to annoy their new Chinese masters by speaking it....).
Japanese colonial architecture seems well preserved and valued. The trains have kept their Japanese culture of signage, meal boxes, ticketing, punctuality and even Shinkansen. "Curry" tends to be the sweet Japanese version, with kimchi on the side; some cafes do the unison-staff-shouting-a-welcome-and-farewell thing. Travellers I met from China confirmed that Taiwan "feels" more like Japan to them
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A sign at the Takao Museum: " NO MORE FUKUSHIMAS! NO MORE NUKES!"
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A Sugar Refinery Museum suggests a bit of a lack of tourist attractions in Kaohsiung, yes? Not really: it was one of the first Japanese-built industrial enterprises. Signs point out the Dutch architectural heritage of the original office building, noting that the square decorations on the rooftop frieze were actually provided for army snipers, should the Taiwanese see fit to challenge Japanese hegemony. As well as restored industrial items, Japanese residences and office buildings and a sugar train to a carpark, and a fun fair, and an "entertainment" on traditional stringed instruments being ignored in the food court, were cicadas, butterflies, locals on a Sunday stroll or cycle, and pineapple plantations edged with painted, concrete graves. There was also the gentle scene of 20 silent artists with easels and watercolours, contemplatively painting the live-model surly adolescent boy.
The sugar train was not so sweet. A large woman (part of a lively tour group) accosted me: "Where You From? I From Taichung!!" Grabbed by the elbow, I was dragged into a cane carriage to be forcibly introduced to the Extended Family: "HEY! Aust-Ray-ya-ya!!". It was a mercifully short train ride before they surged off in pursuit of a passing horse and cart. I set off into the tacky fun fair, seeking the fairy floss counter to see if they also manufactured the mysterious "pork floss" that appears on Taiwan's breakfast menus...
Booking the next leg of my counter-clockwise travel around the island was deeply fascinating. I had the TRA's printout of the train and time and destination I wanted. The booking clerk on the "wrong" (that is: quiet) side of Kaohsiung station stared at it, scratched a few anatomical bits, reached for his phone, typed it all in, translated it into Chinese, read the screen, translated some of it back to English to confirm with me, retranslated it, tapped it into the ticket keyboard, printed a draft, checked it with me, printed the ticket and swiped the Visa for immediate payment. Only in the 21st century... And it took half an hour to achieve.
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"Good Morning": (fruit and rice cookie carpark vendor in humid, mid-afternoon Eluanabi):
The southern most point of Taiwan is in Kenting, where a line of tawdry coastal resorts (each one with three or more Go Kart tracks: like Surfers' Paradise of the 1960's) surround a few enticing yellow-sand beaches with serried umbrellas and lines of tractors loaded with stuff for hire. Roadside stalls sell inflatable beach toys and are surrounded by narrow, basic hotels and more Thai restaurants than you'll find in Newtown. The Kenting National Park is edged by wind turbines and a large, coastal nuclear power plant, before the bus eventually deposits you in a small dusty Main Street of dark shop houses with a large car park. This is a relief for many reasons. The "express" bus wasn't an express for most of the way, and every approaching stop (of which there were 100+) was announced in detail in 4 ponderous languages: Mandarin, English, Hakka and ???. The recorded announcements (with exciting holiday titles such as as "Electrical Sub Station") were so long that the announcements more than "overshot" the stops. The result was interminable wittering of a synthesised female voice for all but the (brief) freeway sections.
So what is at the southernmost point of Taiwan? An ice cream shop. It is accompanied by a British white painted lighthouse, a bit of geographical signage, and a large notice: "Closed During Typhoons".
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Helpful advice on Koahsiung Main Station:
"THE DISABLED, ELDERLY, BABY-CARRYING PASSENGERS SHOULD TAKE ELEVATOR".
I took the stairs.
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Taitung: east coast trains from Taipei are now electric. The crowds have arrived and the semi-open-air station barely copes. Roadworks outside make the "how to get to your accommodation" wall map a bit of a joke. The 'Tourist Information' is a large faded local area wall diagram and some of what might be bus times, but no clue about where to find a bus, let alone how it might get you down town. Maps have some English. Bus drivers don't.
A block from the station (which is a very long way from the city) is a cluster of home stays and B&Bs lining 2 blocks that would do an English seaside town proud, all clearly signposted in fluent Chinese. Two girls on a passing "Moto" stopped to assist/me. They took an extended look around and realised I was already standing at the correct gate. Good. Big welcome from the owner, meet the family, a quick drop off of luggage, and I'm on my way to the scenery of Luye.
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Some lovely decorator ideas from Taiwan:
At most gentlemen's urinals on this island there are pleasant visual distractions at standing-eye-height, such as lengths of plastic sunflowers (Taipei City Hall), potted plants, lovely painted landscapes, inspirational messages, or least postcards of the place where you (gentlemen) are leaving your particular mark. This seems to be in order to delight and distract the northern half of one's person, while the southern regions do what they need to do. In Luye station, this was taken to extremes with urinals situated outside in a kind of tropical paradise walled garden.
The next half hour waiting for a stray bus (with an English timetable!) to Luye Gotai mountain top was less visually delightful, in the blazing high-noon sun in a dusty truck-polluted Main Street of scrappy and largely shut shop-houses, opposite the worryingly graphic "Earthquake Escaping Bulletin Board".
This tea-growing area along the eastern ridges of the central mountains, was considered by the Japanese to be the most healthful area of Taiwan. Apart from plantations and some neat Aboriginal villages, the mountain top updrafts are brilliant for hot air ballooning and parachuting. The views from Luye Gotai are down broad valleys with wide, flat, rocky river beds crossed by long spindly bridges and surrounded by small villages and plantations. There was a cool breeze on the balcony of the dark and forbidding souvenir shop...
It was when I got back onto the local bus that I realised that my map and phrase book were back my bag at the B&B. I tried, with additional help from three passengers, to convince the driver to take me back to Taitung. He was happy to have me on the bus, but only when he worked out how much to charge the vague and dozy foreigner on his ticket machine.
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Late afternoon Taitung: a "5km" trudge through down town with some crumbling colonial era buildings such as a concrete Japan era art-deco picture house, historical meeting houses of independence protesters (dozing supervisor happyish to be in a photo rather than to actually move in the heat), graphic posters for eye-lifts to make Asian faces pseudo-European amongst the usual identikit Taiwanese sprawl of low-rise apartments with glistening rooftop hot water tanks, boundless building front-and-rooftop advertising and a few slow-trafficked tree-lined streets baking in intense humidity. Stopping several times at convenience stores for cold drinks ("Good morning!"), I also had time to contemplate the heroic sculpted memorials to KMT soldiers (escaped to Taiwan from China in 1949: surely "heroic" is "ironic" in the circumstance...). The walk to the sea front was closer to 8km, leading to a windswept grey seafront, cluttered with vast concrete-blocked typhoon defences (scattered by the recent storms), and the Taiwanese Air Force low-flying jets: screaming several times in single-file along the beach. I shared the north-south, rough-surf-on-gritty-rubbled view with on old man and his sleeping dog, and a suit-and-tie worker on his "Moto", enjoying the gentle breeze before riding off home.
So, while walking, one contemplates passing Taiwanese on scooters (whose conversations are overheard as they ride and smoke along) and those also wandering in the shady sides of the street. What is it with bizarre English-worded T shirts in this place?
Some examples:
"Tuscan Straw Thoughful About"
"Blossom Welfare"
"Hiding I won't be caught be acting"
"Roman Holiday 1960's Squad 80"
"More Finger Croxx More For Benny Miles Croxx Croxx"
And my particular favourite: "Now That Will Climb Mind" ... which almost works in a strangely left-field kind of way.
Dinner at the "Italy Restaurant" was a challenging combination of garlic and small seafood chunks on pasta, flavoured (?) with fresh mint.
The B&B breakfast, after a night sweltering in a concrete room with the air con turned to alleged 16 degrees, was a not bad spread of local goodies. The efforts to ensure hygiene were evident from the large mountain of dead flies, decorating one of the plastic table mats.
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"DO NOT LINGER IN THIS AREA": Taitung station sign.
It was a choice of leaving at once on a very cheap, 4 hour, all-stops local train journey (air conditioned) to Hualien or wait 90 minutes in the stifling, foetid station for an express which would get me to Hualien an hour earlier. I took the local train and stretched along the roughly padded plastic bench, coolly reading my Taiwanese political history book, and sharing the intent reading time with several students going to university in Hualien in a kind of quiet study group, occasionally interrupted by the few other passengers, with many pauses in wayside village stations to be passed or overtaken by self-important express trains.
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"Good Morning": (Hualien hamburger diner):
And the "meal" was greasy cabbage, "Iceland Cod" and a side of Ostrich Meat: possibly an acquired taste. Certainly the students from the Business High School across the road seemed to be enjoying it.
Hualien's heavyweight brown-parchment historical city map doesn't show the "Martyrs' memorial" to Kuomintang soldiers who escaped (or not) the mainland with Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949. It's a vast and largely unvisited red and yellow roofed temple-style memorial to the period when the Republic of China on Taiwan seriously believed it was going to retake mainland China with Allied support. When Chiang Kai-Shek took over the island in 1945, his forces immediately plundered everything they could to support their civil war effort in China. By 1949, they were plundering much of it back, including the centuries of fine arts which is now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei (and therefore, effectively protected from the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s). It seems the island of Taiwan (not a country, not a nation, not even an independent state) has moved on From martyrs' memorials... As much as the ageing Mainlander Old Guard of the Kuomintang may resent it.
Across the river, a large sign: "MOTOR CYCLE RESCUE STATION SPEAKS ENGLISH"
The down town "Victory Square" is two walls of the Japanese era prison with corner sentry house, edging a broad square of abstracted sculptures/kiddies' play area (hard to tell which). At the swimming beach, north of the typhoon-shelter concrete harbour, beach goers are protected by anti aircraft guns at the southern end. Given the day's news that Taiwanese forces had mistakenly shot a missile towards China (fortunately falling short of the mainland), I wasn't sure how reassured I should be feeling.
Near the beachfront (nice breeze, again shared with a contemplative old man and dog as the Taiwan Airforce practiced their strafing runs from north to south along the concrete typhoon barriers and grey gravel sand) are the old railway goods yards (the kind of thing that is bulldozed in Australia for Darling Harbour or Docklands...) which are part a tacky-train-theme-funfair (yuck) and part carefully-restored Japanese single-storeyed wooden and tiled administration buildings completed to form a quiet area of green surrounded by verandas of stained wood. This is a bit of "the Culturally Rich Eastern Railway" tourist spot as TRA "promote Railway Tourism". Wherever you go by train on the island, you can use local stamps at every station and big museum to record your own touring passport. Adults are more eager than kids.
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Dawn in Hualen: woken by the Taiwanese Airforce practising their strafing runs over the city (I guess their air space is fairly limited...). The stylish B&B breakfast of Taiwanese delicacies served on an elegant Japanese style hot plate tray (again maintaining the best aspects of colonial culture) with an entree of steamed sweet potato leaves. The dining room is in tastefully minimalist Scandinavian style relieved only by a gaggle of stuffed teddies sitting at one table, small red Christmas decorations around the walls, a small Christmas tree decorated with red and gold bows and dangling gold teddy bears, a sole white ceramic reindeer peering through the water plants, and a sound track of Disney songs playing in the background. The family of Chinese adults next to me were singing along.
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Waiting for the "Payuma" limited express for Taichung: the large digital clock is mounted above a painted English sign: "MAY YOU HAVE A GOOD TIME". I did: my company for 4 hours was an American architect travelling with his phone-obsessed Chinese wife to Sun Moon Lake, who was happy to converse most of the way about leaving California in the financial crisis and riding the boom in China which was now slowing. His eagerness to return to California or the Midwest was moderated by "Trump" and "Guns". As the Taiwanese on trains tend to pull the curtains shut and feign sleep until "it's over", conversation in the aisle seats more than made up for the blocked scenery...
It was an organised elderly Japanese tour group in the carriage with us. They all took it in turns to photograph the arriving train in Hualien, brought their own bento lunches, left curtains open to the scenery, and clambered to get a group photo in front of the train in Taichung before it roared out to Changsha.
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"Good Morning!": (Chicken Leg Rice shop in Taichung):
Many kilometres of down town Taichung are dug up for massive transit projects. What was an imposing Japanese colonial station building is being dwarfed by a monstrous curvilinear elevated structure in bland Asian-Monumental-Grey-and-Glass. The pedestrian subway between platforms is decorated with quaint framed pictures of 1930's Taichung which really does look like a Japanese city, so you may appreciate what has been lost. (You might also appreciate a culture where framed photographs in railway subways are respected, and graffiti is never seen...). The ornate colonial era streetlights have been mimicked with new heritage(ish) street furniture, largely lost in the cyclical building and rebuilding. Once away from the building site, the city has its charms, like the 5 storeyed, ornately decorated Nantian Gong Temple where, plonked above the riot of ceramic dragons and mythological roof decorations, is a generously built and painted 5 storeyed bearded deity. The interior is rich red and gold at its most incense-enriched intensity. The rear view of the religious personage figure is reminiscent of a more tasteful rear-end of the Big Ram in Goulburn, NSW.
Walking (more like shuffling) back through the market streets was an exercise in moto-window shopping. The fruit, vegetable and some wet market stalls lined the laneways and locals cruised along... Pausing, but staying astride their motor scooters, they would check out the counters, ambling along at less than a walking pace to find, haggle and buy. Balanced on their "motos" were plastic bags of previous purchases, children on parents' laps, and in one case, a lugubrious brown and white mongrel spaniel, draped like a fur stole around his owner's butt, perfectly and happily balanced and drooling on the rear of the moto seat as they wended through the slow, confused traffic.
My pub (wrong side of the dug-up tracks again) was a very Nipponese experience, from the brown-trimmed, simple rooms to the bowing and chirruping pink-clad girlies who pressed the elevator buttons for you, and directed you to the open lifts, and were beyond relentlessly cheerful... Breakfast was also very Japanese: more seaweed than Weeties.
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A break to the hot and dusty urban madness that is Taichung seemed a good idea, like a day ticket on the Jiji mountain railway. This is another effort at TRA Railway Tourism. What might be a closed industrial branch line in most countries, has become a hop-on-hop-off "experience". The massed tour groups were out in force to see gaudily "wrapped" tourist rail cars, restored colonial era stations, a repurposed sugar refinery, a railway museum (stop me if you've heard all this before...) but with some mountain temples and occasional monkeys thrown in. Tea tasting tourism is a big deal as well, with extended tastings followed by the purchase of your preferred local blend.
After a walk around "small town Taiwan" at the small junction station of Ershui, with its smaller but ornate temples, neat town square, and local specialty street stalls of surgical appliances, a northbound train appeared, but not for us. This was the special train of retired passenger carriages used for bicycles and motos, wrapped in box cardboard and transported to where their owners had travelled, or were about to travel, by train. There were three carriages of travellers' motos circling around the island: apparently another big part of Railway Tourism, Taiwan-style.
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"Good Morning!": (the ramen bar in "Breeze", Taipei):
Tonight's news: I hear there was an election in Australia. While BBC were announcing the non-result, Russian TV was still showing Diplomatic Malcolm being calm about Islamic extremism in other places. On the following day three different people (South African, Canadian, American) asked how or why Australians could vote a "dead heat" parliament. Even compared to the convoluted tangle that is Taiwanese politics, a short answer to such a simple and direct question is a bit of a challenge.
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While the Japanese Imperial occupation of Formosa was hardly a gentle experience, particularly for Taiwanese Nationalists and those who did not wish to be "Japanified", the arrival of the Nationalist Chinese was something much harsher for Taiwanese people. In 1947, the police pistol-whipping of a widow selling tobacco in defiance of the Kuomintang government monopoly became a huge protest against the newish Nationalist Chinese government's controls and corruption. Over the following 2 years of "white terror" thousands were arrested, tortured and killed. In the mid 1990's, following years of gradual and reluctant (because of strong Mainlander-resident resistance to giving up autocratic power, especially to Taiwan-born residents) democratisation had reached a point where the first public park in Taiwan was made a peace park, with a grim 2-28 Monument to commemorate the events. The park has a small museum, and a memorial to key protesters who were killed in the initial uprising. It is one reason why many Taiwanese look back favourably to the Japanese years, compared to the rapacious greed, cruelty and corruption that accompanied the arrival of Chiang Kai-Shek and his forces. The number of arriving soldiers in 1949 was such that every Taiwanese working-age resident was said to be financially supporting two escaped Nationalist soldiers.
The next brief wander was to the monumental Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall where the changing of the Honour Guard happens every hour in front of the giant, seated, paternalistic, copper sculpted image of the old man himself. The pointy, stamping, gun-twirling, bowing moves (predicated by a bit of straightening of clothes and guns by the director/dresser) was 15 minutes of machismo in humid, sweaty full dress uniforms in front of a sog of overheated tourists. Only the mirrored-stainless-steel-helmeted armed services showed any real regard for the dead Republic of China Generalissimo/President/Prime Minister... Even the international airport is no longer named after him, as Taiwan politics move on as a robust (sometimes physically so) democracy.
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An expressionless, but correct, "Good morning" greeting was from one of the sincerely boofy twins in my favourite Taipei Main Station 7Eleven as I took a caffeine hit, searching for the elusive Metro Store for lovely gifts: a not entirely wasted trip, although not entirely "lovely"... A Sunday in the Spanish, Dutch, British colonial history enclave of Tamshui with hundreds of locals strolling the boardwalk caused me to stumble over a lone Australian flag at the former British consulate. Apparently Australia was put in charge e building for some years until Gough did the honourable thing and recognised the Peoples' Republic f China in the early 70's... And the consulate and Dutch fort eventually reverted to Taiwan, as they lost more "friendly countries" to their Communist enemies... The old foreigners' area has well preserved cemeteries, houses, and the first girls' school in Taiwan, established by the enterprising English.
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Last day in Taipei: on an easy organised trip - after a languid swim in the cushy apartment's rooftop pool - to the spectacularly located tourist village at Chuifen. On the twisting drive from the northern tip of Taiwan into the deep-green mountains, we passed polluted, discoloured sea water and rocks, and the extensive abandoned cliffside buildings of a Japanese wartime copper mine.
Our local guide: "The Japanese took so much, but they left us as one of the most developed countries in Asia"...
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I'm finishing this as we fly out of Taipei, with the thousands of glittering stainless steel hot water tanks on hundreds of drab apartment roofs, disappearing below in the shimmering noon heat.
Whatever time of day you are reading this: "Good Morning!"
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My reading for this trip was: Taiwan: A Political History by Denny Roy, who “aims for a balanced assessment”. A great read while travelling the island.
And:
Some Taiwanese T shirt wisdom:
“ More people have seen this T shirt than will ever read your blog”.
