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...