Arriving in Taipei. Gallery
Loving it so far. I set off from Dubai to Taipei. Great flight with Emirates. I managed to get through three and a half films (Burnt, which was the best, Steve Jobs, The Walk and about half of Gravity). The airport at Taipei was a very manageable size and not overcrowded. I didn't need a visa with my British passport and my bags appeared very quickly. As this was a hastily arranged trip, I realised when we landed that I hadn't made any arrangements to get to my hotel. I headed to the info desk and soon found a bus that could get me into town (about an hour's drive from the airport) for roughly four quid. The bus had frilly curtains and a TV playing a Taiwanese talent show, so I felt as though I was being transported in someone's cosy living room. Due to miscommunication rather than malice, I was dropped off from the bus much further away from my hotel than I was expecting. A young man I asked for directions kindly Googled it for me on his phone and we decided I'd better take a cab. The cabbie I flagged down spoke no English, but called someone who spoke to me and then Googled the hotel and gave the driver directions. He drove me straight there and didn't try to rip me off as would have happened in many cities. The fare was only two pounds. I checked in, dumped my stuff and headed right out to check out the hood, as I'm only staying here for one night. What an interesting and eclectic neighbourhood. Gucci (genuine) and jade stores mixed in with massage parlours with really low prices for an hour's body massage or reflexology, a betting shop, tea shops with fine teas and unusual cakes including Queen's cake, iced green bean cake, presidential palace pudding, chestnut cake and crispy Tario cake, little local eateries and a beautifully carved temple where the locals were making their daily offerings and the air was wreathed with heady incense smoke. There were lots of darkly cluttered and enticing small side streets that I was dying to explore, but I thought I had best leave for those for the morning and stayed on the main drag. I had a pork dinner with rice and cabbage, pickles, salami, and tofu for a few quid in a cheap restaurant and ate about half of it. There was something which looked like a local favourite, a “hundred year old egg”, so I gave that a miss. Now I'm going to have an early night as my five day tour around the country starts tomorrow. My first impressions are favourable. It's cheap, interesting, very foreign and I can see that there are tons of things to be experienced for the first time here. I love it when things are so different. Most people I have spoken to so far have little or no English, but they have been very willing to help and it's lovely to watch their faces erupt into broad smiles and they nod enthusiastically as they begin to get an inkling of what you're trying to say and realise they can help. I think I'm going to enjoy myself this week, so roll on the morning.
Sun Moon Lake I was collected from the Imperial Hotel by a driver who took me to meet the rest of the group and our tour bus. It was a cold morning in Taipei, just like a clement English Spring day. But at least the sun was shining and no rain was forecast. I fell in love with our tour bus at first sight! Wild sunny colours, wait till I post a pic. It's impossible not to to be happy when you're touring around in a bright pink and yellow and green bus. I feel as though I should be popping acid or some other sort of hallucinogenic and listening to hippy music whilst draped in a kaftan and sporting a cowbell. Anyway, just the sight of it puts me in a good mood. We set off on the highway heading inland to Sun Moon Lake. Walter, our guide spoke good English and gave us the general blurb about Taiwan as we drove. Central Taiwan is mountainous and has wide fertile river valleys criss-crossed with rivers and the scenery was verdant and pleasant enough but not exceptionally dense or appealing. The buildings are mostly drab and uninteresting, except for the scattering of temples which are very intricately carved and painted in bright colours, bordering on the garish. Sun Moon Lake is the favourite honeymoon destination of the Taiwanese. Named for its shape (by someone with either a vivid imagination or an eye for a catchy tourist trap monicker), it is supposed to look like the sun with a crescent moon underneath. Perhaps it does from above, but certainly not from ground- level. We wondered through the village on the shores of the lake and ate some street food for lunch. I had a small box of fried pork with onions and bamboo shoots. Yum. I saw a group of locals sitting gazing at the lake, each with one hand raised in a mudra before their faces as if they were saluting the lake. I asked Walter if they were meditating and he explained that they were practising Falun Gong: a spiritual practice combining meditation and Qi Gong exercises. Apparently the practise was outlawed, and remains so, in China when the movement became too popular, but it is not prohibited in Taiwan. After wandering around the shops and food stalls for a while, we got on a boat and had a sail around the lake-from the sun to the moon and back again. Being on the water always puts me in good spirits and the bright sunshine made me wish I was wearing shorts instead of trousers. Back on the bus, we were waiting to pull out onto the main road when a distressing sight caught my eye. There was an exhausted mongrel bitch lying in the dirt in the last throes of what seemed to have been a difficult birth. A bright red blood-stained pup seemed to be wedged half in and half out of her and, littered around her in a semi-circle, lay a string of bright red corpses of her other stillborn pups. The local Taiwanese walked around her without pausing or giving her a second glance, let alone a helping hand. We followed the twisty turny road that skirts the perimeter of the lake, until we reached the Xuan Zang temple. A relatively new, and not particularly interesting, edifice built to honour the memory of the Venerable Bhuddist scholar who was responsible for translating many of the sutras and other sacred texts. We traipsed up to see his skull and relics but they were very well protected so there wasn't actually much to see. Then we set off for a one hour hike to reach a tall pagoda, from the top of which we were promised a memorable view of the lake and surrounding area. I began optimistically enough, but hadn't been walking for long when my knees started to complain and I realised that there would be very little chance of me completing the hike unless I wanted to spend the rest of the week in agony. Reluctantly I turned around and sauntered back to inspect the souvenir shops around the entrance to the temple. Then I climbed back up to the temple grounds to look for the coffee shop, but spotted the memorabilia building instead and went inside to learn about the life of the Venerable Zang. I found a pile of souvenir Heart Sutra Handwriting Booklets, together with a polite notice inviting me to take one, but not unless I had first written out the Heart Sutra in full. Having the best part of an hour to kill and little alternative means of entertainment to hand, I duly sat at the little desk provided and copied out the Heart Sutra in longhand. I didn't really understand much of it, but enough to make me want to find a better translation. Anyway I claimed my free notebook and went back to the bus in time to meet the others. A sullen American teenager of Taiwanese descent, whom I haven't once yet seen detached from his iPhone headphones, told me the view from the top of the pagoda had been ok but not really worth the effort of getting there. So I felt slightly less miserable that my knees had let me down. Next we went to to the rather splendid Wen Wu temple on the hillside overlooking the lake. A very impressive building ranging over numerous levels with many beautiful carvings and statues. Walter demonstrated how to ask for and receive answers from above to any questions we may have, using wooden bean-shaped blocks which you toss onto the floor three times and lucky numbers and scrolls. I have a few questions at the moment where I could have done with a little enlightenment, but it was not to be. My first three throws gave me three "no"s, decreeing that today I could not pick a lucky number or ask for guidance on my choices. Hrmp, so much for that then. Instead I lit some incense for the men in my life and asked for help for my good friend Fawzi who is gravely ill. Finally we drove to our hotel to get settled in for the night. Hotel Del Lago was perfectly situated and I had a nice room with a balcony right over the lake. Walter had offered to take a party of us to a local restaurant and order dinner for us if we didn't fancy fending for ourselves. I decided this was the easiest option. It was not necessarily the best choice though. Although six quid a head bought us seven main dishes plus soup, rice, fruit and tea, it was all pretty revolting. The braised pigs trotters were just bones with big lumps of fat attached. The small whole fried shrimp had a crunchy texture which made me think of biting into dried out locusts or cockroaches, and I didn't relish eating the whole heads, tiny though they were. The other meat and the whole fish on a platter were all full of bones, so really only the mushrooms, wild fern with garlic (which was delicious), rice and melon were edible. I think I'll take my chances with my own choices in future. There was just time to poke around the souvenir and tourist shops before I went and fell into bed and slept like a baby.
Meandering Around I had breakfast beside Sun Moon Lake on this glorious sunny morning. Very peaceful. We left Hotel del Lago and travelled southwards a little way inland from the coast. Our first stop was at Wu Chang temple which was destroyed by a 7.3 richter earthquake on 21 Sept 1999. The top of the temple collapsed down onto its base but has been left standing in a crazy topsy turvy drunken jumble of colour and carvings. A new one has now been built next to it. Our second stop was in Ji-Ji to see Taiwan's smallest railway station. Yawn. I didn't really want to get off the bus to look at it, but I did. That took about five seconds, and then I looked at the nearby shops and stalls, which were far more interesting. I bought a big bag of dried mango slices to chomp on the bus. I saw a tank amongst the foody snacky items which I swear looked liked it was full of frogspawn. Gross. There are also lots of big pans of hot water everywhere with horrible brown coloured hard boiled eggs bobbling in them which look positively evil. No thanks. We hopped back on the bus and set off for a long drive to Kaohsiung, via Tainan. For lunch we stopped at a motorway service station. It had about 40 fast food restaurants, a 7-11, an aquarium and a Starbucks. After Walter's horrible meal recommendation last night, I couldn't face the thought of a Taiwanese fast food combo, and there wasn't a Burger King or KFC, so I mooched about looking for things to nibble. I tried a strawberry Mochi. These things come in all different flavours: green tea, sesame, chocolate and every variety of fruit. They're just a little bigger than a chocolate marshmallow tea cake (or choco-cream pie 😀), but wobblier. Mine was made of strawberry jelly, dusted in icing sugar, and was filled with a deliciously creamy light strawberry mousse. Then I found a box of taro cakes and thought I'd better try them. Taro, it turns out is a sort of purple marrow or yam. I think it must be the vegetable they use in the Philippines to make purple ice cream for their Alo-aloes. The cake was round and purple with a light flaky texture and a stodgy sweet filling. Not bad. Definitely more appealing than the hundred year old eggs. I washed it down with freshly-made strawberry milk. The packets of snacks they sell, like our crisps and nuts, are fascinating: chilli hard-boiled quails eggs, dry roasted green peas ("full of beans!" according to the pack), crispy ginger plums and my favourite is "almonds and fish" which appears to be a mixture of slivered almonds with whole fried whitebait. Salty I guess. A long drive lay ahead of us before our next stop. The highway crossed fertile valleys laced with glittering rivers and streams and full of rice paddies and water bamboo plantations. Walter pointed out dragon fruit, pineapples, bananas, lychees, guava and custard apples. Also of some interest were the numerous cemeteries. About half of the population like to be buried with the other half opting for cremation. The government is trying to promote cremation to save the island's limited land resources. Each grave, or family plot, is partially surrounded by a curved low wall, about waist height which appears to cast a protective arm around the dead. It reminds me of the big curved seats on my favourite funfair ride-the one where the floor of the carousel undulates up and down as it spins and the individual cars swivel and spin faster as the ride progresses. We arrived at Fo Guang Shan Monastery, an enormous Buddhist complex, which appears to be part museum and part Buddhist learning centre. It is funded by private donations and is of truly impressive proportions. After passing through a main entrance building, you are confronted with a long wide open air set of stone steps which pave the way to a distant building of modern design, dominated by a huge Buddha head. Separate covered walkways run up either side of the complex, studded with a string of individual three or four storey pavilions of uniform design with gardens and colonnades of stone statues of the Buddha running between them. The scale is impressive and it reminded me of nothing so much as the great temple complex in the old movie of HG Wells' Time Machine. It housed texts, ancient artefacts and paintings, statues of Buddha and an illustrated biography, videos and interactive exhibits such as one I liked where you step inside, wait for a section of a sutra to light up in front of you, say it out loud and are then invited to consider how it makes you feel. Whilst I am sure that the contents of this memorial/museum/educational centre would be of immense interest and importance to anyone who is or wishes to become a Buddhist or is interested in studying the religion, for someone with little or no knowledge of Buddhism or its tenets or terminology, like me, I felt that I simply did not know enough about it to make the most of my visit. I could only wonder at the mystery and otherness of it all and imagine what life as a devout Buddhist might be like. I repaired to the shopping area where they had some interesting and expensive items. I spent a lot of money on some unnecessary but irresistible trinkets and almost nothing on several very cheap books I found on Buddhism in the Buddhist bookstore. It was well worth a visit anyway. Off we went and finally got to Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second city and largest harbour. It's main claim to fame of course (unless I'm mistaken) is that it is where Jonathan Greedy's beautiful Usha was built. As we were a little early for the night market, we went to see Love River, just to kill some time. This is where, in olden times, Taiwanese men would take their lady loves to woo them by rowing them up and down the river. These High Rise, I wonder 😀😀), which was indeed very grand with plush carpets, crystal chandeliers and huge floral decorations. A skyscraper towering over the skyline and overlooking the huge harbourm of Kaohsiung, part of the building was occupied by an expensive department store and I had to use lots of will power to resist going shopping there after I dumped my luggage. I must say that this tour is delivering on its promise of good hotels, contrary to my low expectations. So that was it, another interesting day in Taiwan under my belt. Enjoying my trip so far.
Taiwan Summary
Pingxi, Jiufen and the Lantern Experience. What a marvellous day I've had. Sooooo much fun. I've seen the Yin Yang Sea, mountain views and waterfalls, scoffed, chomped and slurped, haggled in shops, silently observed tea ceremonies, tried calligraphy, inhaled the aroma of dim sum, fried fish, stinky tofu, tea-boiled century eggs, dried seaweed, crispy pork, taro balls and seen hundreds more unknown foods, drinks and desserts, bought incense spirals, fresh prawn crackers, rose petal tea, ginger tea, Mochi, eaten custard apples, wax apples, pink guava and pineapple cake, chosen a dragon, smelled the sandalwood carvings, caressed the cool jade, picked some beads that match my eyes, been carried along by crowds, written wishes on four sides of my pink paper lantern and sent them up to the heavens, had my ticket punched on the train to Ting Jong, made a beggar smile and been massaged to within an inch of my life in a quiet back street near my hotel. Today was everything I hope for when I set off on my travels 😊
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