(Danshui, Sun Moon Lake, Taitung, Alishan, Tainan, Hualien, Taipei)
Good evening from Hualien, north eastern Taiwan:
If you are “fortunate” enough to get this, then it means your addresses survived my computer changeover in the week before Christmas, AND they are accessible from Taiwan.
Lucky you!
So far I have travelled down the west coast of Taiwan island and I’m half way back up the more rugged and less settled east coast. The odd postcard will give detailed bits and pieces, but it’s not hard travel, provided that you can cope with the following:
1. Severe air pollution is called “light haze” (light enough for the eyes to sting constantly in west coast cities).
2. At the airport, on arrival, and on entering every public facility, you will be temperature tested for SARS. Each time you will receive a little round merit sticker to wear in a growing neat row along your collar. My daily record so far has been 6.
3. This new year is “93”, because the Taiwanese calendar starts with the fall of the Manchu Dynasty. If you do not think that this is important, they’ll never book you a train or bus seat for 2004… well, not for another 1911 years(!).
4. If you cannot succeed in the nightly trawl of the streets for something that’s recognisably “dinner”, which you can comfortably point to, and quite possibly swallow, there’s a 7Eleven on every corner which does acceptable hot steamed buns/dumplings and coffee.
5. If you thought this was a Third World country: think again. It’s kind of like an affordable Japan, but much more outward looking. (It’s also affordable the Aussie $ has appreciated 30% against the local dollar in the last 12 months). Like Japan (of which it was a colony for half a century) , Taiwan borrows the best innovations from the rest (including a French rubber-tyred mini metro and Japanese bullet trains) while improving on the ideas of others (like forcing McDonalds to recycle).
6. There’s not much evident public visual or spoken public English. The “English” street and station signs are in one (or more) of three phonetic translations of Mandarin. Apparently the English place name spellings depend on which political party is in power so, in Taipei for example, the suburbs are spelt one way on the map, and differently again in the Metro. Your lips do have to move as you read so you can sound out where you may want to be. (The Lonely Planet Guide sometimes spells the same places differently again!!!!). If you studied Modern History and could cope with Peking/Peiping/Beijing being the same place, you’ll get the idea.
7. Last night’s dinner choices at a down-trodden hot springs resort in Chihpen were: “pig” or “dog” or “chicken”. The “Chicken” was an acceptable cold Bento meal, but I looked at this morning’s breakfast sausages with new suspicion.
8. Even in the streets of Taipei, when searching for the Chinese History Museum, you can be hassled by fundamentalist Christians trying to coerce you to attend a “God meeting”.
9. The late President Chiang Kai-Shek is gradually disappearing from the currency and the history books. The government “took back” his official residence when Madame Chiang died at the ripe old age of 102, because the land and house were “stolen from the people of Taiwan”. It’s now a great public park.
10. Taiwan is a real revisiting of my undergraduate history subjects as I am wallowing in colonial Portuguese, Dutch, British, American and various brands of Japanese and Chinese histories: New Year’s Day in Tainan was spent at series of 16th and 17th Century sites. Day 1 of this journey was spent in Portuguese and British colonial sites in Danshui, north of Taipei.
11. Lone foreign travellers are a bit of a novelty here, particularly “red-haired foreign devils”, as they say, so there’s always someone who wants to speak with you – usually blokes as women don’t seem to be so forthcoming. I met James Joyce on Taitung station – while local conscripts practised marching/weapons drill formations in buffed stainless steel helmets along the station platforms. James is an English Literature lecturer who changed his name to that of his favourite author. “Joyce” translated into Mandarin doesn’t really bear thinking about!! This afternoon, while contemplating water buffalo on the river bank, as one does, even the local park-bench-drunk wanted to practise his English geography.
12. Sydney New Year’s Eve was 9pm, local time (why wait to celebrate?) in a Japanese café where one of the Japanese customers and the Chinese chef got involved in a detailed conversation comparing Vancouver with Sydney (as places to escape when the mainland Chinese arrive: they have already purchased their apartments in those cities). The Taiwanese don’t see themselves as “Chinese”, in the same way that they didn’t see themselves as “Japanese” for the first half of the 20th Century. But I don’t suppose the Tibetans do either…
13. The mainland Chinese government is deeply annoyed with the current Taiwanese government for allowing referendums to be held. It’s viewed as de-facto independence by a “rogue state”. The Taiwanese Prime Minister seems to think it will assist him in winning the next election. Every time the mainland Chinese try to interfere in Taiwan, the Taiwanese vote the way China did not want them to. Chinese officialdom doesn’t seem to have quite worked that one out yet…
14. There is (of course) an underlying militarist streak to Taiwan. The changing of the guard ceremonies at national monuments are just plain bizarre. Imagine skinny, silver-helmeted Daleks, twirling rifles in white-gloved hands, while dancing in formation to “YMCA” and you’ve kind of “got it”. To witness 200 human automatons performing with the National Military Orchestra in the plaza of Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall was kind of worrying, because I’m not sure it will save them from China…
15. One “does” the national parks and the monuments: Sun Moon Lake (an area where 300 people lost their lives in an earthquake two days after 9/11, so the rest of the world didn’t notice…); Alishan (a three and a half hour ”toy train” ride through spirals and zig-zags. At 5am EVERYONE is summoned from hotel beds to hike to the mountain top to observe a stunning sunrise (while being simultaneously ranted at through loud-hailers by half a dozen tour leaders in three different languages before straggling back to a pork floss hotel buffet breakfast)… The limestone Taroko Gorge trip is tomorrow. Then it’s back on this anti-clockwise train circuit to Taipei then on to Hong Kong.
16. One did not expect “Betel Nut Beauties”: scantily-clad young women perched in luridly lit glass boxes along the highways, selling the local addiction. Don’t worry about the apparent bloodstains on the pavement: it’s just betel nut spit. Nice.
It’s time to go out trawling for dinner. The local market looks promising, after to a visit to the local beach this afternoon (protected by anti-aircraft batteries as the Taiwanese air force strafed the coastline). I’m also looking for my nightly hot can of “Mr Brown Latte: A Kiss To The Spirit Of The Future”… advertising slogans are somewhat different here too.
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A Postscript: 10 days later:
I’m now back in my new mountain house, having subsequently travelled to Taipei (and the amazing National Museum: the collection secreted from Beijing when the Japanese invaded and eventually smuggled to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-Shek and his cronies – in effect they stole and saved the greatest collection of ancient Chinese art from the destruction of the Cultural Revolution).
The LOW POINT of this trip was being caught in a torrential downpour in Hualien markets and catching the usual travellers’ cold. This led to a febrile and snotty “night in” with only Taiwanese TV for company. You will not be spared. The local version of “Millionaire” includes communal hand clapping to introductory as well as “shame-the-losers-as=you-send-them-off” music. The local Dating Game has 8 (count them: EIGHT) contestants who all have to sing, dance, tell jokes and so on, to the potential date… with a mixed-age male panel to encourage them and to massage them… AND with a kind of Asian Phyllis Diller wisecracking to her straight -man and feral audience. It was all in LOUD Mandarin and I was engrossed. The local version of “This is Your Life” lasted TWO hours: largely unscripted the hosts mention a name; the nominated victim talks (or sings) in glowingly emotional terms about this person who may or may not be standing behind them at the time. Gifts are given. Tears are shed. A birthday cake is presented.
Channel-surfing through all of this (with every studio show leery with BRIGHT sets of clashing colours and relentlessly flashing lights with no account for contrast or mood…) was utterly mesmerising. Or maybe it was just the local Panadol cold/flu tablets which are laced with huge amounts of caffeine.
It’s a drug trip I choose not to repeat.
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