Return to Taiwan, Part 2

The next morning, we woke up to realize that we were surrounded my humongous mountains. It was breathtaking. We were about halfway down the mountainside, with a view of the river below. We packed up, and of course they had a breakfast buffet ready for us. We paid his uncle, but the 3 marine guys were nowhere to be seen. We had made plans to hike with them in the morning but I reckon they were pretty hungover. So we headed out, but by this point my bike was spewing black smoke something fierce and we needed to get to a mechanic. We found a gas station and they rang up a mechanic for us, who showed up with tools not 10 minutes later. He changed my oil for like 10 bucks and we took off into the mountains again.

We got a wee bit lost and ended up loosing an hour or two, but we would have never spotted this giant suspension bridge had we not. So high up there. Safety isn’t a huge concern for the Taiwanese. This was clear while walking on this narrow suspension bridge a few hundred feet up and families of 3 whipped by us on their scooter (that’s 1 scooter for all 3) and expected us to jump up out of the way against the ropes. Anyway, we had a good long day of riding.

We stopped in a small place for lunch...decided to try the ‘stinky tofu’ I’d been hearing about. Apparently this particular place sucked at it because it was so gross I almost vomed. For months I had been occasionally smelling this horrible odor that is a mix of vinegar and rotting animals, as I’d walk through town. That’s stinky tofu. Some places make it taste good though, so I’m told.

Just before sunset, we cleared this really long tunnel. There was ice in the tunnel, if your wondering how cold it was up there. Upon coming out the other side, we found tons of bikes and cars pulled over, and immediately knew why. The sun was just setting over a ‘sea of clouds’, as they call it. We were above the clouds, where you could see the mountain peaks poking out. It looked just like a field of snow. Totally worth the trip up there.

The ride was spectacular for a bit longer, then the sun set. I have been cold in my day, but never this cold. We had to stop regularly to jog and thaw out the extremities, and we were already wearing all of the clothes we had. I even had a pillow case over my face. It was getting tough to drive with numb hands, and it was dark, foggy, and rainy/snowy. Jeff had the good idea to let a car pass up and follow it so it would light up the way, and eventually we saw the lights of a small town and headed down to it. Turned out to be a small aboriginal village called Lidao. The very first place we went into happened to contain a Chinese speaking Canadian English teacher who was keen to help us find a homestay. We downed a big meal and hit the hay.

Back on the road the next day, we were again dumbfounded by the amazing views everywhere around us. That tunnel the night before had been the highest point of the highway, and we were now descending and exiting the mountains. Everything was green and the road was very curvy. This equals a very fun ride. It took forever because we kept stopping for pictures. So, we finally came out of the mountains, and decided to speed it up a little. Kyle and Jeff zoomed by, and I kept up for a bit, but all along my bike had been coughing smoke. The oil light wasn’t on this time, so we thought maybe it was still burning excess oil, but low and behold, my bike started doing the sound Jeff said it would do if the engine seized, then it stopped. Mike’s scooter, RIP. Couldn’t even kick start it. The tricky thing with this was that your not supposed to leave Tainan with these bikes, or at least the foreigners aren’t because they can’t be trusted, and now we were on the other side of the country and the bike was dead. We went to a place that looked like a mechanic shop, mimed it out, and she lead us to a bike mechanic. This family was so nice. The old mechanic drove his truck out to our bike, loaded it up, and brought it back for us. He took one look at it and made a face that said “this is gonna cost you”. He said it needed a new engine lol. The cheapest way would be to bring it back to the rental company, and he wanted to call them himself, but we couldn’t do that because we weren’t supposed to have it way out there. His daughter then came out, who spoke English fluently, and brought us and the bike to a shipping company that could bring it back to Tainan for us for $40 USD.

After this was sorted out and we loaded everything from my bike onto Jeff's and Kyle’s, she took us to a Taiwanese bento-box type place, and then invited us back for coffee and snacks with her family. Such nice people. When we left, they bagged up all the oranges and bananas that were on the table and gave them to us as a goodbye gift! We got the girl’s number and she would later help us even more with the bike situation.

We drove down the coast, and I was now on camera duty on the back of Jeff’s bike. Not the most comfy way to ride, but better than the bus. This was the sunniest day of the trip so far. Jeff had never seen the ocean before, so when we saw it approaching in the distance, it was a big moment him. We rolled up the pants and walked out on the beach to challenge the massive waves coming in.

The rest of that day we went in and out of some smaller mountains, and ended up back in Kenting, where I had been on my first trip around Taiwan. That first night we got sloshed and played drinking games with some other Canadians we’d met. Kyle told this Taiwanese guy in a band that he and I were famous Canadian musicians, and halfway through their set they called us up on stage to do Hotel California. Neither of us knew that song, so we played another one, but Kyle forgot the words and I was drunk on the drums. Pretty funny when the guys in the band kicked us off the stage. We finished that night with a fire on the beach, and did the same thing the following night, with beer and few other people we had met. It was raining most of the daytime while we were there, but we got to do some good hiking in the lush green hills and through some gorges, and cruised around town a bit.

We made it back to Tainan in record time so that I could pick up the bike we shipped and get it back to the rental company before they charged us for an extra day. I made it to the address they gave, but no bike! The next few days were spent getting Chinese speaking people to call that address, other people to call the shipping company, even called the truck drive. The shipper said the receiver had the bike, the receiver said the company was still shipping it, and the truck drive said he never heard of this bike. So for a while we thought the bike had disappeared and I'd owe them a scooter. Eventually, the girl that had helped us before called me up to say that it had been brought to a different address! I drove there, surely enough found the bike, and walked it back to the rental company. It was 3 or 4 days late by this point, but given that I missed out on 2 days that I had already paid for, at especially expensive ‘holiday rates’, I wasn’t keen on paying for these extra days. When I explained that it broke down on me ‘across town’ and I hadn’t had a chance to walk it over until now, they just grumpily took it back. Because of the amount they had overcharged us throughout all the scooter rentals we'd made there up to this point, purely because we are foreign and don't know any better (so I was told by my Taiwanese friends who pay 1/4 the price for the same bike), and the fact that the bike was faulty to begin with, I didn't feel very bad for them. The girl who works at this place is also maybe the devil herself. The things she would grunt out in our faces every time we were there seemed even meaner because we couldn’t understand them. She would say these things as she closely examined our passports, which we had to provide as collateral when we took the bikes. We headed home and that was it.

Another highlight is when Kyle and I played at The Armory, the best bar in Tainan. They asked us to play on Chinese New Year, which was awesome because its a pretty big party night. That went really well, so they had us play again on my last night in town. We were called The Mockumentary, and we rotated on vocals, guitar and shaker. It was the first time I'd ever done lead vocals for most of a night. They were super good to us....payed us well, free beer, and provided the whole sound system. And the owner come up to do some traditional Taiwanese songs as well. Lots of fun.

And one more fun thing...I had had an urge to play drums for while, so I rented a jam space for a session and wailed on the kit for a while. The owner of the place was there and we got to talking over a saki bottle that never seemed to end. Really cool taiwanese punk guy, who had a band called Mr. Dirty. He invited me to go back that night to jam with them on bass, and I did. It was quite awesome, considering I had never played with such a dirty grungy punk band before, let alone a taiwanese one (mind you, the 3rd guy was canadian also). If I had been sticking around longer, I could have played at Spring Scream with them, which is a huge music festival in Kenting, but I was long gone by then. I'll always have the jam though.

That's Taiwan pretty condensed. There's lots more to say, but I had stopped keeping a journal by this point and am having trouble remembering everything. It'll come back to me though, and I might do an update if its anything important. Otherwise, the next posting should bring you up to speed to where I am in Australia.

Cheers, Mike

Return to Taiwan, Part 1

Back in Taiwan! So, I seem to have accrued quite the backlog on my blog…a backblog if you will, since I’m at about mid-december in my stories, and as I write this it’s just before April Fools (do they have April Fools here….guess I should check that out before I do anything). Gotta catch up. So, rather than typing up about 30 pages of Taiwan stories, I’ll sum up my 2 months there in one post. So I met back up with Kyle and a good solid drunkening ensued. As I was leaving Taiwan the first time, Kyle had just joined with the soccer team. While I was gone, they had won a big tournament and had a week of partying. So the team was pretty tight by this point and Kyle knew half the foreign population of Tainan. Didn’t take long to meet tons of people. While I was there, Kyle and I did some English teaching. I started as a substitute teacher for a guy taking leave over Christmas, and occasionally taught at an alternative English school about a 30 minute scooter right away. Pretty great school….the kids were learning English through music, movies and games. The pay was also amazing, since it was a bit of a commute for me, so I didn’t have to work many hours to get by. Also got to spend 4 or 5 days with my couchsurfing friends in Taipei again and was taken on a long bike ride along the river, and did a bit of hiking and hot springing as well. I also satisfied my appetite for towers by going up the Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world. Around this time, the wheels started turning, so to speak, on a plan to bike across Taiwan, from the north to the south. Sam and David were gonna hook we up with EVERYTHING I needed for this trip during Chinese new year break while they were on vacation in NYC but the weather never panned out :(. Would have frozen my taiwans off. Anyway, ended up going on a scooter trip with Kyle and Jeff. I’ll go into more detail on this later cause it was radical.

Tainan, the city kyle and I lived in, is the cultural center of Taiwan (it was an older capital) and the 4th biggest city in the country. EVERYBODY rides a scooter there. People are quite generous as well. I was loaned a scooter for most of the time I was there, and kyle was GIVEN a motorcycle. Also, just as I arrived, I met a girl who was leaving the country, and she hooked me up with her cell phone and blankets and lamps and whatever she couldn’t take with her. Great people.

I did the walking tour of Tainan that the Lonely Planet suggested, and it was awesome. I had already seen a few temples, including a temple complex that is the biggest is East Asia supposedly, but the map in the book brought me to heaps of temples hidden within city blocks that I would never have found. I’m sure there are signs for these, but they all looked Chinese to me. Some of these temples and ancient walls were hundreds of years old. I also got to see the “Tree House”, which essentially was the remnants of a house overgrown by massive trees. There were a lot of vines in this house. So off course we got Tarzan and ninja photos.

There was a couchsurfing meeting in Tainan while I was there, with people from all over Taiwan. One of them was the first host I stayed with, back in Taipei. I joined them for coffee and that eventually turned into a night out. Going out in Taiwan with a bunch of Taiwanese people is the bomb. They took me to all of the best restaurants, some of them very small places, and we tried a few things at each place. Since this is in Tainan, its the best of the best of Taiwan really. Then we checked out a temple at night where everything was lit up and there was a festival going on on the grounds as well. Really cool authentic Taiwanese experience.

I had heard about this “monkey mountain”, a hill in Gaohsiung, the 2nd biggest city in Taiwan just an hour or two south of Tainan. I rode a scooter down there and hiked up. No monkeys, because apparently they’re only out until 4pm-ish, but a sweet hike nonetheless.

Tainan is near the ocean, so a scooter ride can take you to the beach where there's surfing, kite surfing (sometimes free), good reading spots, and all sorts of beach stuff.

The scooter trip was a little iffy at first. None of us knew what we were getting ourselves into, other than everybody telling us it would be freakin cold, and to bring full-on winter gear. Hard to believe this whilst sweating buckets in town, but we did bring everything just in case. I turned out to be a long weekend, and all the scooters were booked, so we had to wait until the evening to pick them up. They only had 2 available, so kyle decided to take his old beast of a motorcycle and see how she fared. Our friend Ian speaks some Chinese and was kind enough to help us sort of the bike situation. So, this trip would take us from the west coast of Taiwan where we lived, across the mountains on the Southern Crossing HWY to the east coast, then along that coast to the most southern point of the country, then back up the west coast to home. Taiwan is over 70% mountains, with all the major cities along the flatter coast lines, so there were LOTS of mountains to cross, and we got pretty high up there. Once we got the scooters (important side note: jeff’s was very new, mine was very old) it was already 8pm and we weren’t sure if we should hold off our departure. Jeff eventually persuaded us to hit the road that night because he was short on time before he had to head home, so we did, and even before the mountains bundling up was very necessary. Also, scooters can cruise! My bike stalled on one of the longer straightaways…..foreshadowing? We made it to Maolin where we had reservations at a lodge, but the English speaking person who we spoke with from the lodge decided to leave, and we couldn’t communicate with them on the phone to obtain directions anymore. None of the locals seemed to be able to help us either. We found a hotel lobby type place with a party going on, and started talking to these guys who spoke a tiny bit of English thanks to their Marine training. They were wasted and friendly and one of them invited us to stay at his place. His wife didn’t like that very much, so he invited us to stay at his uncle’s lodge instead. At this point it was midnight or something. He woke up his Uncle, who got up all smiles and prepared us a feast. They even busted out a brand new bottle of Johnny Walker. We sat there and chatted, and there were a lot of high fives and handshakes and shots every time we understood each other. They showed us our room, which was big enough for 6 but it was only the 3 of us, and we crashed hard.

To be continued...