03 Jun 2013. Taiwan

03 Jun 2013.  Taiwan

Kenting National Park

 So today I find myself in Taipei, Taiwan, home of the 2nd tallest building in the world, strange but delectable foods, and beautiful scenery.  The Dutch actually named this island Formosa meaning "beautiful island" and the name has since stuck.  Taiwan is located just east of China and just west of Ishigaki island which is just west of Okinawa Japan.  It used to be part of China until Chang Kai Shek helped to win independence way back in the day as I've recently learned through several memorial visits in Taipei.  Thus they speak a Taiwanese dialect of Mandarin and everything is written in Chinese characters or Hansu(I think that's right?).  Fortunately many people speak English so this makes for a slightly easier experience than one might find in mainland China as it is called here.

The past week and a half I spent in Okinawa again hanging with my brothers Zach and David and spending more time with Fe. Missing that gal.  It was great to be around people that know me so well and I had a blast hanging with them all.  I think I have resolved to attend language school in mainland Japan in July and thus I am partially here to get out of Japan so I can renew my tourist visa in a month or so. I barely made all my flights to get here due to late check in both in Okinawa and Osaka. Fortunately, the airline attendants bent the rules a bit to accommodate me.  This is likely because I had no carry-on baggage.  In Osaka the attendant even told me she could not check me in because I had not showed up an hour early and that I must now buy another ticket.  This changed when her manager came to the counter.  And just as usual I rushed rushed rushed to get through the airport only to find once again that I had plenty of time to board the flight as people were still lining up.  And inevitably, the flight left late.  Seems like the budget airlines always do but I'll bite my tongue for the price.

My skateboard- travel style

So anyway, I'm here in Taipei as I said.  I slept in the Osaka airport last night since I had a very early morning flight and I didn't feel like getting on a bus for a hostel an hour away and paying all the money just to have a bed.  So I crashed on the seats in the arrivals terminal.  Every 10 seconds there was a loud ding dong over the intercom for some reason all night so I had to sleep with headphones and music playing.  As you can imagine, it wasn't the most fulfilling sleep one can experience.  

I arrived at 9:30 and I was quite worried that I wouldn't be allowed to enter because the airline made me sign a waiver to waive their responsibility for me not having an onward ticket yet.  But when I passed through immigration, the official didn't say a word.  So my passport gained another stamp and I rolled on through, into another great unknown.  Booked a hostel near the tower, checked in and took off on my skateboard for the rest of the day.  You can certainly bet I had quite a few wipe outs and at one point my board even flew out from under me into 4 lanes of oncoming traffic.  No bueno.  Cars were honking and I had to sprint out after it into the middle of the street.  This was almost as bad as when it flew out from under me and crashed into a scooter as I threw my groceries in the air and landed full contact on my hip and shoulder.  

Taipei 101

After checking the box on seeing the tower, I decided the $20 just to take an elevator to the top (standard pretty much for any tall building in the world) wasn't worth it and bypassed in favor of hiking a mountain for a similar view instead.  So I grabbed my map and board and headed a couple of kilometers south for Elephant Mountain- one of at least 4 peaks surrounding Taipei, each named after a different animal.

When I finally arrived where the map designated the trail, I was still in the middle of Urbania with no sign for the mountain in sight.  However, there was another sign in this area pointing to a different famous trail another 1 1/2 kilos away from my position.  Since I was losing daylight very quickly, I decided to head off for this other trail.  And man was that a great decision.

En route to my trail, I picked up some of the largest, sweetest cherries I've ever had.  They were like instantaneous energy.  I pushed on faster as the sun began to drop lower.  I finally located the entrance after dodging every damn dog in the neighborhood (it was in a quiet place a bit away from the city, more suburubian) and started chugging up the stairs without a rest.  A quarter of the way up the mountain, an elder Taiwanese woman began speaking to me in Mandarin.  I smiled at her and kept walking.  Then she yelled again and I told her I didn't understand.  Without hesitation, she reverted to near perfect English.  A bit strange really.  She asked me if I spoke Chinese to which of course I responded with a no, not at all.  See my vocabulary at this point doesn't extend much further than Ni-Hao (Hello).  So she began asking me what I was doing with a skateboard in my hands when I was climbing a mountain. Quite comical actually.  I told her I had a special skateboard that could skate up stairs.  She laughed and I admitted I had just used it to get to the mountain and she was a bit surprised when she learned how far away my hostel actually was.  (Maybe 4 1/2 kilometers or so.)

Taroko Gorge

I explained to her that it was my first day in Taiwan and we chatted for a while about different things including how we both came to run into each other on this day.  She was originally from an island a bit south of Taiwan and asked me if I was familiar with it. Of course, being as new as I am to this place I'd never heard of it.  She told me about how her father had been in the Taiwanese Air Force and was now paralyzed from the waist-down because of it.  One day he was flying a bomber in mainland China I believe it was when one of the propellers went out on his plane, causing them to crash the plane into a frozen lake.  His co-pilot froze and drowned but somehow he managed to crawl out of the ice and back to the base nearby.  She said he doesn't remember the incident but his b
ack was injured because the ice had been so thick, thus causing his paralysis.  It was pretty sad to hear but was quite a story indeed.

We continued to hike for a bit more before she decided to turn back about half way up the mountain.  She did very well for herself.  The mosquitos were becoming wretched, swarming around those blood thirsty beasts they were.  So with a goodbye and nice to meet you we parted ways as I chugged on further up the mountain.

Taroko Gorge

When I reached the top I was astonished.  I was at the top of a very large graveyard leading down to a paved, windy mountain road.  I was elated.  I walked down the steps to discover the most perfect road for longboard skateboarding I've ever seen.  It doesn't get better than this I thought.  As I began to roll, the beautiful cityscape of Taipei came into view on my left and I noticed the grave I had been next to was part of an enormous graveyard covering the entire side of the mountain for at least a kilometer.  There were symbols on the various graves of Christianity, Islam, Shinto, to Buddhism.  It was really quite incredible.  So I kept rolling and rolling waiting for this road to either end or drop very steeply but it never did.  Always slightly downward, hugging the mountainside, weaving through the countryside.  It was as if the road was built for longboarding.  With a proper longboard (I'm riding a penny skateboard) I may have never needed to jump off.  Could have ridden for kilo after kilo.  It was getting darker but  I didn't care.  The only traffic was the occasional scooter and perhaps a couple of cars the whole time.  I just kept weaving and diving, dragging and kicking, scraping and cruising.  It was the most enjoyable longboard ride of my life.  I was literally surfing down the side of the mountain cruising by religious shrines and monuments all the way.  Pure, unchallenged, unlimited awesomeness.

View from the graveyard atop the skate road

  

The rest of the day was pale in comparison.  I finally found my way back to my hostel an hour or so later.  I dropped my board off and attempted to round up some people at the hostel to go to dinner but no one seemed to take very much interest in being social. thus I ventured into the night market by myself.  I walked around for 45 minutes gathering the courage to attempt to stomach all of these bizarre foods.  Duck heads, chicken feets, breaded crabs, whole fish, fish balls, pork balls, green onion pancakes, overly boiled eggs, mystery meat galore(some of it raw), entire squids, oyster noodles and omelets... It was really too much to handle.  In the end I picked and chose various street food.  I settled on some kind of spicy black mochi(rice ball) thing covered in leafy greens and some kind of sauce.  (UPDATE DEC 2013: I later came to find out this was actually coagulated pig's blood.  lol The first thing I had in Taiwan was VERY exotic.) I also had fried corn on the cob, deep fried pork balls (with bones), fresh bananas and cantaloupe (sweetest I've ever tasted), and a sausage grilled with honey in the middle and dipped in lemon juice.  Top all this off with a Tapioca Pearl Black Milk Tea that Taiwan is so notorious for and you've got a recipe for an uncontained pleasurable Taiwanese eating experience.  Perhaps next time if I have someone with me, I'll be a bit more adventurous.

Me at Taroko Gorge in Hualien

Well that's it for now.  I'm going to tour Makong in the morning then meeting up with one of my old couchsurfer friends from New Zealand.  We are going to go to a big IT e
xpo (the biggest in Asia) called Computex.  Then we'll head down to the mountains in Hualien for some sight seeing.  After that I'll be rock climbing in Long Dong, surfing on the East Coast, perhaps hiking Kenting Nat Park in the South, then I'll end the trip with Hot Springs and a crazy Rave in Taichung sometime around the 15th.  Hopefully this all goes according to plan.   Until next time- 再見

Armin Van Buren in Taipei

Taroko Gorge