The Road to Yilan

I ventured outside of Kaohsiung for the first time this weekend, and Katie Beth and I took the high speed rail to Taipei (covering the span of the island in less than two hours) where we met up with two of her Canadian friends, Nathan and Andrew, who had arrived in Taipei from Kaohisung earlier that morning. From there we all took a smaller train more resembling a subway rail along the eastern coast to Jiaohsi where we rented a pair of scooters.

Saturday afternoon we trekked up to the Wufengchi waterfalls and actually swam around in the largest pool while Taiwanese tourists walked past and stared. That night we drove further south to Yilan where we found a cheap hotel and ate dinner at a night market. In many ways the night market resembles a bazaar or the prototypical marketplace you'll find in any number of movies, except the stalls boast everything from knock-off watches and Buddhist beads to t-shirts with ridiculous and non-sensical English phrases - "Other Girls Wish NEWYORKDIVA", "Here I Am and There You Are", bedazzled Jelly Belly logos, etc.

The best draw though is the food. At the Yilan market we found salty sesame buns stuffed with meat that are cooked in huge heated urns, with the buns pressed and stuck to the urn's inside wall; "onion oil cakes", batter and green onions fried in oil and folded in half with a fried egg; pureed mango and milk; rolls filled with fruit and shrimp; and mini waffles. This isn't really remarkable though. Just as at any given state fair you can find turkey legs, roasted corn and cotton candy, at just about any city's night market (Kaohsiung is actually the home to several) you can find all the foods mentioned, along with duck heads, grilled squid, donuts, fruit, tofu, and rice-stuffed sausage that's surprisingly similar to boudin. Nathan seemed quite flustered when I told him that Cajun culture had the same thing. I think he's stuck in a "which came first" sort of loop - Tainwanese rice-sausage or Cajun boudin?

Ultimately Yilan didn't have much else for us to see, so the next morning we headed further south to track down a botanical garden mentioned in one of our guidebooks. Outside of Yilan mountains reared up on all sides, and though the roads kept climbing higher up the steep slopes, around every turn we saw higher and higher peaks, all covered in ferns and palms and dark, thick forest. We found out that visitors to the gardens have to register a day in advance to control human traffic, so we snuck down a forest past a few kilometers further down the mountain, and saw an older Taiwanese couple sitting in lawn chairs in a shallow stream. They flagged us down on our way out and offered us tea in Chinese.

With Katie Beth translating we learned that the couple picnics in the stream every Sunday. They passed around small cups of steaming oolong and they insisted that we try their roasted chicken and then the mangos they had cooling in the water. None of us could finish a cup without the husband quickly refilling it, and after fifteen minutes would not let us leave unless we accepted the whole chicken we'd been eating (we found it later it was indeed an entire chicken - a foot and half a head were nestled in the bottom of the plate). We tried to get them to take a picture with us, but they simply repeated "Bu yong, bu yong, bu yong," meaning "no need."

From there it was further south to Suao to check out the cold springs (chilly waters that are pumped into public bathing areas) before we finally drove back north to Jiaohsi. By the time our train arrived in Taipei it was past 10 pm, and we wound up riding back on an overnight bus, arriving in Kaohsiung at 3 am. Imagine a Greyhound bus with recliners and you've got the picture. The rest of the group was unimpressed with my Harry Potter similes.

Taiwan is the steepest island in the world, and I'm glad that I finally got to get a sense of its mountain ranges. The sense of height stacked on top of height, being able to see entire ledges off to the horizon and above those even higher peaks faintly outlined through clouds is staggering. With luck I'll get to do much more exploring. For now though I've got to adjust to living in a real city.

Ni hao, y'all

After five days in Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second biggest city, I'm finally making good on my promise to start a travel blog. While I already have in mind topics on which I'd like to focus more later on - food, religion, and scooters, off the top of my head - for now I'll just throw out noteworthy points from the past few days:

1. The city is huge and the most metropolitan place I've ever lived (albeit compared to Lafayette and Jackson).
2. "Kaohsiung" (高雄) literally translates to "tall hero."
3. This county was the hardest hit by Typhoon Morakot about two weeks ago, but the city itself is largely unscathed. Other areas of the island are still in pretty bad need of relief, and apparently many in Taiwan are calling for the president's resignation due to the dismal response.
4. I'm studying Mandarin 12 hours a week at the Taipei Language Institute under four different teachers, and all I've done so far is repeat syllables and occasionally whole words after them while trying to speak something that sounds vaguely similar to Mandarin. One of the teachers, Shi Laoshi, told me that I'll "struggle with pronunciation for three months." So I at least have a timeframe.
5. In Chinese and Taiwanese culture, when addressing a person you know as a professional, you refer to them by their surname followed by their title. For example, the above mentioned teacher is surnamed "Shi" and "laoshi" means teacher. Default titles are "xiansheng" (Mr., husband, gentlemen), "xiaojie" (Miss, young lady) and "taitai" (Mrs.). Of course, these words are meaningless if you don't pronounce the tones right.
6. Tones are hard.
7. I can recognize maybe thirty or forty written characters so far, but often two separate characters go together to make a different word (the characters for "small" and "heart" together translate to "caution") so I don't really have any idea what I'm reading.
8. Thankfully "tea" (cha, 茶) just means "tea," and there are signs for tea stands on nearly every street! Taiwan's climate is tropical, so every place mainly serves very sweet chilled tea, but there's green tea galore and Taiwan is famous for mountain teas and oolong (a tea that's between green and black in flavor and oxidation). I'm still keeping an eye out for any place that serves more traditional teas, but for now the fruit infused chilled greens on every corner will have to do.
9. I am in fact writing to you from the future. If anything cataclysmic happens, I'll contact those of you who I believe will be capable of altering history and saving our timeline in 12-13 hours. In spite of this, I don't believe we'll be able to prevent either the rise of Terminator-like robots or the assassination of Jon Stewart; both are inevitable.

I promise I'll try to keep things entertaining as I write about any adventures or interesting cultural points I come across. Feel free to let me know if you want to know more about something, or if you've got any questions or comments.