Sunday March 10, 2012
On my Chinese New Year scooter trip, I noticed that the waterproofing on my tent was coming apart. The tape over the seams had turned brown and was peeling off and disintegrating. Worse, the inside of the fly felt tacky. I did a bit of reading online and people said that this tackiness meant that the waterproofing was breaking down. This happens with age, but I guess I accelerated the process by leaving the tent tightly packed for extended periods inside my rooftop apartment here in Taipei, where it gets quite hot during the summer.

This discovery led to a long quest to find the materials and information I needed to reapply the waterproofing. During this quest, I was reminded forcibly once again what a strange place the Internet is. I found forums where people were discussing various ways of waterproofing tents, and, even discussing such a dry and technical subject, the back-and-forths soon turned nasty with people insulting each other and getting aggressive. Despite the hostility, I pulled together some information. I didn’t get nearly enough information, I should say. I haven’t had much luck lately when it comes to my Internet searches. I don’t seem to have any talent in the way of defining my search terms to return any results that help me.

In the end, I went to a local camping store and picked up a tube of what I thought was Seam Grip. I got it home and realized it was a new product called SilNet. Apparently, it was meant for products that used silicone in their waterproofing. That sent me off into another useless tailspin through the Internet trying to find out what this meant and if it was important. I had no idea if my tent had silicone waterproofing. I suspected not because this appeared to be a new thing and my tent is a solid ten or twelve years old. I wanted to return this silicone-based product and get the product I’m familiar with – Seam Grip – but that turned out to be impossible. None of the stores carried Seam Grip, only SilNet. It seems I had no choice.

Before I could apply the SilNet, I had to remove all of the old waterproofing tape. I spent one evening simply rubbing and peeling off the old tape. I tried various methods, but the best was simply rubbing it with my thumbs and fingers. Next, I used antiseptic pads containing isopropyl alcohol to try to remove the adhesive residue that was left behind. I spent a solid five days trying to find isopropyl alcohol in Taipei, but couldn’t find it anywhere. No one carried it or had even heard of it. Everyone carried ethyl alcohol (ethanol) or methyl alcohol. Perhaps one of those would do just as well, but my Internet searches indicated otherwise. Isopropyl alcohol was the preferred product since it had no additives at all and left behind no residue. In any case, the SilNet instructions said to clean the seams with isopropyl alcohol and that was what I wanted to do. I was about to give up on my search when I found a pharmacy with large boxes of antiseptic pads – the type that nurses use to disinfect your skin before they give you an injection. The pads contained only a 70% solution of isopropyl alcohol, but I thought I would give it a shot.

That night, I sat down with my tent fly draped over my knees once again and slowly went over all the seams with these alcohol swabs. They were quite thick and they were saturated with alcohol, so they worked quite well. I did about a foot of seam with each swab before tearing open a new one. I don’t know that they actually removed any of the adhesive residue. It’s not like the adhesive simply dissolved and turned into liquid. Or maybe it did. I’m not sure. In any event, the seams felt very clean and dry to me when I was done and I felt confident that I could apply the SilNet. First, being not entirely stupid, I did a small test patch. I applied the SilNet over a six-inch section of seam and left it to dry overnight. The next morning, I was pleased to see that it had hardened and dried, exactly like I am used to Seam Grip doing. In fact, it looked exactly like Seam Grip. I guess that chemically it had to be different, but it seemed to function just as well.

During my online research, I learned that the best way to apply seam sealer is to put the tent on the fly inside out. This leaves the seams exposed on the outside of the tent and it pulls the fly taut, making it easier to apply the seam sealer. Pulling the material taut also leads to a better application. If you put the seam sealer on when the material is loose, it might then be pulled free when you tighten the fly and stretch it over the tent later.

This was good advice, I thought, and I decided to do that. I was lucky in that the weather forecast called for a sunny weekend, and my landlady did not do any laundry on Friday morning. This meant I could put my tent up in the laundry area – the only area on my rooftop that is large enough for my tent. (Sometimes I do miss the large spaces, large rooms, basements, driveways, and back yards of Canada. In Taiwan, it’s very difficult to find convenient places to do anything that requires space.) I set up my tent and then I had a “Well, duh!” moment. The Internet had let me down again. Sure, it might be possible to put your fly on your tent upside down – if your tent was a pup tent from the 1960s. Most modern tents have irregular shapes and the tent fly is sewn together in panels in a very specific way to go on the tent in only one way. Sure, I could turn my fly over and lay it over the top of my tent, but it doesn’t fit anymore. It is very short on one side and extremely long and dragging on the ground on the other. I tried pulling the fly this way and that way in dozens of directions, but it was impossible. There was simply no way to put the fly on in reverse and pull it taut. The best I could do was just drape it across the tent and then do the seams one by one and constantly wait for each section to dry enough so that I could pull the fly across the tent and expose another section of seam. It wasn’t easy (to put it mildly) to do this on that crowded and cluttered rooftop, and I ended up with a pretty nasty job of seam sealing. To be honest, even if the fly was neat and taut, I’m not sure that I could have applied the seam sealer neatly. The seam sealer comes in a tube exactly like a tube of toothpaste. All you can do is squeeze it out and try to apply a consistent line of goo. That would be easy if you are talking about something like caulking. But it’s not so easy when the material is a transparent liquid and you use only a small amount of it. You can’t turn the mouth of the tube on edge and just squeeze it out like toothpaste. That would result in far too much coming out. You’d need about fifteen tubes to do a tent! The proper procedure is to put the mouth of the tube flat against the seam and apply even pressure and draw the tube along the seam while keeping it flat. This works, but it takes a very practiced hand and a keen eye to see that you are applying any seam sealer at all let alone the right amount. It would have been much easier to do this on a wide, flat clean surface, but I had no such surface available to me and I just had to do the best I could. The seam sealer came with a little brush, and after I applied the liquid, I spread it evenly with the brush. I occasionally missed spots and then I’d just apply a bit more seam sealer and spread it around. Seam by seam, I worked my way around and up and over the tent. The brush and the tube and my hands got stickier and stickier and the work got progressively more difficult as I lost patience and my back started to ache. I hung in there, though, and eventually the job was done, and I had used exactly the one tube to seal all the seams on the fly. To be honest, I think I’d applied too much. The seal could have been much thinner. But at least I hadn’t run out. That would have been worse.

I left the tent and fly out there for a couple of hours, but when the seam sealer had dried sufficiently, I decided to move the fly indoors. The sun was quite strong, and I didn’t think it was wise to have the hot sun beating down on the seam sealer and fly all day long. Instead, I draped the fly over my bedroom as best I could and left it to dry indoors. I’ve had the fly out ever since then and I’ve been moving it from my living room to my bedroom as I move from room to room. It’s not ideal, but the seam sealer dried nicely. It does not feel tacky at all and it appears to have a tight grip on the fabric despite the lack of silicone anywhere. The seam sealer is a bit sticky in that it is essentially a type of plastic or rubber. But that’s unavoidable. My worry was that it would not dry completely and that it would remain tacky. But so far so good. It has dried completely. I haven’t tried packing the tent away yet, so I’m not sure how that will work.

I knew that the seam tape on the fly needed to be replaced. It had, as I said, turned to brown dust. But I wasn’t that sure about the fly material itself. It was tacky and a bit gooey on the inside surface, but it was still waterproof. At least in my tests, water just ran off it as it always did. But the tackiness really bugged me and since I had started the process, I decided to complete it and waterproof the entire fly.

I intended to use McNett Tent Sure floor sealant. McNett is the same company that makes Seam Grip and SilNet. To my surprise, a local camping store actually carried the tent floor sealant. I thought I’d have to order it online (and pay yet another fortune in shipping costs). However, I walked out of the store with a different product altogether. I bought a large bottle of tent waterproofing from an Australian company called Granger’s. I changed my mind for two reasons.

One, I was confused about how to apply the McNett product. The English labels had been covered by labels in Chinese and I couldn’t remove them. I wasn’t 100% sure this was the same product I saw online. The bottle shape was a bit different and the bottle online came with a wide application brush. This bottle in Taipei did not come with an application brush, and the clerk at the store gave me all kinds of conflicting and contradictory information about it. He didn’t seem to have the slightest clue what he was talking about. The bottles also looked old, and I couldn’t be sure just how long they had been sitting on the shelf.

And two, even if this product was the one I was looking for and I bought a brush for it, I couldn’t imagine that it would be very easy to apply. The area of the tent fly is huge, and applying this thick liquid over that area with a brush seemed a major challenge. Sitting right beside the McNett product was this big, beautiful spray bottle of Granger’s waterproofing. I had never heard of the company or the product before, but the instructions were in English and clear and understandable. There was no confusion about silicone or non-silicone or whether it was for tent flies or tent bodies or tent floors. On impulse, I bought it. It turned out to be much more expensive than the McNett product. Then again, that could be because I had accidentally purchased the extra-large bottle. I get a bit flustered sometimes on these long shopping quests in Taiwan and I hadn’t noticed that I didn’t need such a large amount of the waterproofing. They probably had a smaller bottle, but I didn’t notice it. I’d already spent a huge amount of time in the camping store going over all the products and I just wanted to get out of there. Taiwanese sales clerks always seem to think me a bit mad. I don’t think I’m mad at all. I shop in the way that most technically-minded Canadians would shop. We’re very careful and we compare products and go over technical specifications and all that stuff. My impression is that the typical Taiwanese shopper will buy whatever the sales clerk hands them and then walk out the door in two minutes. I do a lot of research and a lot of reading and by the time I’m done, the sales clerks all seem to lose their patience with me. I tend to get annoyed, too, because they will tell me things that are 100% wrong all the time. Then when I point out their mistake (and lose all confidence in them), they don’t care at all and just dismiss my concerns. I was in a store two days ago holding three similar products. I asked the sales clerk about the differences between them. He pointed to two of them and said that those two had large handles and the third one had no handle. I looked at the packaging and the reality was the exact opposite. The third one clearly said on the packaging “large handles for easy carrying” and the other two had no handles. I pointed this out to him, but he didn’t care at all. He wanted to know if I wanted to buy one or not. That was about all he cared about. I was quite annoyed with him by this point and I forced him to acknowledge that he had been completely wrong about the handles by putting the packages in front of him and reading off the descriptions. He didn’t care. He said it didn’t matter which one I bought. They were all the same, he said. This annoyed me even more. I hate it when sales clerks do that. They clearly weren’t the same. He was saying that it didn’t matter to HIM which one I bought. He didn’t care that I bought the one that was right for me. He just wanted me to buy one and get out of his store so that he could go back to sitting down somewhere and doing nothing.

I don’t know yet whether the Granger’s waterproofing works as advertised, but I can’t complain about the ease of application or the initial result. I should mention that I spent some time trying to figure out whether this waterproofing should be applied to the inside or the outside of the tent fly. In fact, in all the reading I did online, almost no one – no expert or company – ever brought this up. It seemed pretty important to me and it surprised me that it never came up. If it doesn’t matter whether you apply it to the inside or the outside, then they should say that. Whatever they do, they should at least address the issue, but no one does.

In my case, I had a lot to consider. Since the inside of my tent fly had gone tacky, it was pretty clear that the original waterproofing had been applied to the inside. In fact, one of the reasons I had started this project was to get rid of that tackiness regardless of waterproofing. I had washed the tent fly by hand thoroughly and then I had gone over it with isopropyl alcohol. The fly still felt a bit tacky, but it was better.

There were videos online of people applying the Granger’s waterproofing, and they all showed people applying it to the outside of the tent fly. This made it a lot easier since you can just set up the tent, put on the fly, draw it taut, and then spray the waterproofing over the entire outer surface. But this didn’t mean you couldn’t apply it to the inside. I only found one person online who talked about this in any way, and he said something that made sense to me. He said that if your tent or tent fly had waterproofing on one side, you shouldn’t then apply waterproofing to the other side. This would create something like a sandwich – with a waterproof layer on two sides. If moisture got into the fabric between the two layers of waterproofing, it would then never dry out and would develop mold and mildew. I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but it had the merit of logic. In any event, if I applied the waterproofing to the outside of the fly, it would leave the inside just as tacky as before. On the other hand, that tackiness probably meant that there was some old waterproofing gunk still there and if I apply waterproofing on top of it, it probably wouldn’t stick.

I couldn’t really come up with a solution to this, and I just bit the bullet and applied the waterproofing to the inside. At least the outside of the fly would remain smooth and dry and slippery. I didn’t want to risk making it sticky and tacky as well.

I couldn’t set up my tent for this operation in the laundry area this time. My landlady had done a load of laundry and hung it all on the laundry lines. However, there was another spot at the front of the roof balcony which offered just barely enough room. The tent just managed to fit in between all these huge potted plants and piles of plastic pipes, old tiles, bags of cement, and other construction equipment which had gathered up there over the years. It was very difficult for me to move around the tent, but it was the best I could do.

I set up the tent and then draped the fly over it. It would have been nice to be able to affix the fly and pull it taut, but that was impossible. All I could do was move the fly around bit by bit just as I had done with the seam sealer and waterproof each panel in turn. The instructions on the bottle (and everything online) said that “if” droplets of the waterproofing liquid appeared, I should spread them out with a dry cloth. I have no idea what all this “if” business was about. There was no “if” about it. I set the bottle to deliver a fine mist spray, but it didn’t matter. The liquid was all droplets on the tent fly. Then the droplets would run together and the liquid just ran down the fly and fell onto the ground or onto the tent! It was a bit of a mess. I understood that the liquid was supposed to just land evenly on the tent fly and get absorbed. But it didn’t work that way at all. I had to spray very quickly and then before the liquid could run off the tent fly, I had to grab a cloth and spread it around evenly and let it soak into the fabric. I have no idea if this was the proper procedure. My cloth quickly became soaked with this liquid, and I wondered how much of my expensive waterproofing spray was being applied to the fly and how much was just being soaked into the cloth to be thrown away. I applied the Granger’s to the entire tent fly and was surprised that I still had much of the bottle left. One guy on a video online had commented that his bottle didn’t contain enough to finish one tent, and his tent looked to be smaller than mine. That was when I realized I’d purchased an extra-large bottle and had far more of the Granger’s than I needed. By the time I finished the tent fly, the part I had started with was already completely dry. In fact, it was impossible to tell that any waterproofing had been applied. There was nothing visible on the surface and it felt exactly the same as before – perhaps a bit drier. I decided that since I had so much of the Granger’s and since I might have removed so much of it with my cloth, I might as well apply a second coat. I quickly did that, and I still had a lot left. So I figured I might as well do the tent floor as well.

I went inside the tent to wipe down the floor, and then I realized that there was one taped seam running down the middle of the floor. I hadn’t noticed it before. And this tape was just as brown and old as the tape on the fly had been. I quickly removed it and then cleaned the seam with my isopropyl alcohol pads. Once it was dry, I applied some SilNet (from a second tube that I had purchased just in case I needed more). I let it dry for a few hours, and then I went inside the tent and applied the Granger’s to the entire tent floor. I was worried that this would make the tent floor sticky, but I was pretty sure that in this case, the waterproofing should not be applied to the outside. The outside is always against the ground and all the waterproofing would be removed through abrasion. The Granger’s went on in exactly the same way – in big and little droplets – and I spread it around with a cloth. It dried very quickly, and everything seemed to be fine. The material felt exactly the same as before, and I didn’t see any problem with moving around inside the tent. It wouldn’t be sticky. But is it now waterproof? I guess I will find out during the first big rainstorm.

I mentioned all the controversy that raged online over waterproofing tents. Much of this controversy stemmed from people who joined the conversation to simply say that it is pointless to re-waterproof an old tent. It costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time, and in the end doesn’t really work. You might get another year of life out of your tent, but that’s it. These guys said that when a tent reaches that age, you are far better off just tossing it and buying a new one. It was this advice that set people off and started the insults and aggression and hostility back and forth. Even if this were true, I’m still glad I made the attempt to fix up my tent. I really love it, and with everything that I need to do for this trip, the last thing I want to add to my “to do” list is shopping for a new tent.

 

Speaking of things I need to do for my trip, I also applied for (and received) my visa for the Philippines. It is possible to fly to the Philippines without a visa. Most nationalities get an automatic 21-day visa at the border. This can then be extended to 59 days inside the country if you want to stay longer. I am definitely staying longer than 21 days, so I decided to get a visa beforehand. I reasoned that it would be less trouble to get the 59-day visa here in Taipei than to have to visit immigration in the Philippines.

Taiwan, thanks to pressure from China, has an odd relationship with the word. Only a handful of countries have official diplomatic relations with Taiwan. The vast majority don’t, and therefore they don’t have embassies here. After all, you can’t have an embassy in a place that you can’t officially acknowledge is a country. Everyone gets around this by simply calling their embassies a “trade office” or a “cultural office”. So though you can’t find a Philippines embassy in Taiwan, you CAN find the Manila Economic and Cultural Office, or MECO, and it is essentially the same thing.

MECO is located at 176 Chang Chun Road in Taipei just a few blocks from my apartment and I set off on Friday morning to apply for my visa. There is very good information online for MECO and I knew I could hand in my application when the office opens at 9 a.m. and then I should be able to pick up my passport after 5 p.m. the same day. I had downloaded the application form and filled it out the night before, and I was all set to go.

I had my usual thoughts as I filled out the form – all of them negative. For one thing, forms never leave enough space for the information they ask for. I’ve actually had a number of jobs in my life where I had to design my own forms, and I took pride in making sure they were logical and useful. If my form asked for your address, I made sure the blank was large enough for the full address. If I asked for your name on the form, I made sure the blank was long enough for your name. Why design an official form and not leave enough room for even your name? That speaks of just laziness and a lack of responsibility.

Visa applications forms never have blanks large enough for your information. There are other problems with them. They almost always ask for your address in the country you’re going to. Yet, they know you’re applying for a tourist visa. A tourist is obviously going to be moving around and staying at dozens of different places. So how can they have an address? People at embassies know this, but they don’t care. You MUST fill in that blank. I tried once in Japan to have a logical discussion with the immigration people and explain that I had no address in Japan. I was a tourist. This didn’t fly and they literally brought me to a room with a telephone and forced me to call a hotel and make a reservation for that night. Then they wrote down the address of that hotel as my address in Japan even though they knew full well I wasn’t going to stay there. Since then, I just go through the motions. Sometimes I find a random hotel’s name and address in a guidebook and write that in. Sometimes I just make it up. I just invent a hotel and an address and telephone number. It’s not like it matters. They just need something written down on the form, so I write something down.

Another pet peeve of mind is that these forms always ask for your nationality. Yet, what they really are asking for is your country of birth. It says nationality but everyone just writes down the name of the country they’re from. I guess it’s just a language problem, but it still bugs me. I always sit there staring at the form wondering if I should write down Canada or Canadian. Canada is not my nationality. Yet, if I write down Canadian, it might cause a problem because that is not, obviously, a country. I just wish the forms were more specific.

This form also asked for my next of kin in Taiwan – someone to be contacted in case of an emergency. I have no kin at all in Taiwan let alone any “next of kin”. So what do I fill out there? I can see them actually calling this person to check up on me, so I kind of want to put down something real. But I can’t write down the name of a Taiwanese person and claim they are my next of kin. Of course, I could always ask the embassy people about these things, but I know that is a very bad thing to do. Once you ask a question, you create a problem where was none before. Just as with any dealings with the law or any form of authority, the best approach is to say nothing and do nothing. Do not call attention to anything. It’s better to fill out a form with a lie than to leave a space blank. Lies will go though, but a blank space causes no end of problems. In the same manner, incorrect or inaccurate information is better than asking for clarification. It’s like dealing with an aggressive wild animal. Don’t interact and don’t make eye contact.

I found MECO without much trouble. It’s on the 11th floor of its building, and I joined an orderly line of people waiting at the elevators. I’m often annoyed at the elevators in the building where I work, but it seems that other people have it worse. These elevators were clearly not sufficient for the number of people who needed to use them.

I was the only person in my crowded elevator going up to the 11th floor, and I was pleased to see that MECO was not busy at all. I was expecting crowds of people and lots of noise and chaos. But I was able to go right in. And unlike the Canadian trade office, there was no security at all and I could just walk in. It was very casual and friendly.

I walked up to the window in the reception area and I was asked to fill out a small checklist form. Once that was filled out, the receptionist went over all my forms and the copies of all my documents and my passport. She then stapled together all the forms and handed the bundle back to me along with my passport and a number.

I waited in the small area next door until my number was called and I handed over my package of material. This woman was clearly used to people coming in and applying for a visa when in fact they didn’t need to. If you are going to the Philippines for less than 21 days, you can simply go there and get your visa for free. She asked me how long I was going to be in the Philippines, and this, of course, led to problems. I always have this problem. Embassies and forms are designed for people going on a holiday – people who are going to a country on a specific flight on a specific day and leaving one or two weeks later on a certain flight. They have these flights booked in advance and everything is fine. My case is different. I have a flight to the Philippines. However, I don’t have a flight out. I might fly out, but I don’t know on which day I want to leave. I’m hoping, in fact, to leave the Philippines by boat. So when this woman asks me how long I’m going to stay in the Philippines, I don’t have a very good answer for her. And not being able to answer simply suddenly brings complications. I don’t want to say “two weeks” or something acceptable like that because she will then only give me a two-week visa. But I don’t want to say “four months” either, because no country wants anyone to stay for four months. That sends up warning flags. Also, they won’t give a visa for that length of time. In the end, the conversation itself is illogical. It’s like going to a restaurant whether they don’t have a menu. The waiter asks you what you want, but you don’t know. You then have to ask the waiter what they have. In the case of the Philippines, they offer a 21-day visa on arrival and a 59-day visa when you apply in advance at an embassy. That’s it. Those are my only two choices. So why ask me how long I’m staying? No matter what I say, I can only get a 59-day visa at this office. They will either give it to me or refuse to give it to me. With only one item on the entire menu, why go through the charade of asking me anything?

Essentially, what I want from the embassy is the longest visa they will give me. Yet, I know that the maximum I can get is a 59-day visa. They know that. And I know that. So why don’t we just talk about that? It’s the only option on the menu. Yet, it isn’t that simple. She asked me how long I would stay in the Philippines. The honest answer is that I don’t know and that I would probably stay as long as they’ll let me stay. But that is not an acceptable answer. So what I end up doing is giving an answer that sounds genuine but leaves her no option but to give me the 59-day visa. At the same time, I would feel silly saying I am going to stay for 59 days. Who stays anywhere for that exact amount of time? I’m not going to say 55 days or 45 days, either. People usually speak in terms of weeks and months. In retrospect, I should have said “six weeks”. That’s longer than 21 days, shorter than 59 days, and it sounds reasonable. However, my brain was thinking in terms of visas, and I think of visas in terms of months. Plus, I’m always worried that they’ll somehow make an exception and if I say six weeks, they’ll give me a visa for just six weeks – and probably a non-extendible visa at that. So I said “Two months.” This was a mistake because two months is 60 to 62 days, and even a 59-day visa won’t cover it. So now she’s concerned and she asks to see my tickets. I don’t have any tickets. No one does anymore. We just have computer printouts of our e-tickets. I had brought along a printout of my e-ticket, but it only had my flight into the country. There was no flight out.

The funny thing is that this woman had no real authority for any of this. At each stage and with each answer I gave her, she then turned around and shouted across the room to a man sitting in a little office. She first shouted at him that I was a Canadian and did Canadians have to get a visa at all? She then shouted to him about my going there for two months. Finally, she shouted at him all the details from my flight, about how I was flying from Taipei to Manila to Legazpi with no return flight. This no return flight was the real problem, and I ended up having this long discussion with this woman about how I was riding a bicycle and wasn’t sure how long it would take and that I was hoping to leave the Philippines by boat to Malaysia or Indonesia. All this was done with me crouching over and trying to speak through the little gap in the bullet proof glass separating us. Most of the time, I couldn’t hear her at all and I had to ask her to repeat what she said while I jammed my ear right into the little gap at the bottom. Not surprisingly, none of what I said made any sense to her. She was used to people going to Boracay for a week. My travel plans didn’t make sense to her and she clearly thought I was crazy. She had never heard of any ferries leaving from Zamboanga. Why would she have?

After all the shouting to the man in the office, I think he got fed up. He looked over at me, found me acceptable in some way (was it my collared shirt?), and then just waved at the woman to let it go and accept my application. I’m guessing that my having a Canadian passport was the deciding factor. I’m sure they have bigger problems than some nutty Canadian who wants to ride a bicycle through 7,107 islands. If I were carrying an Ecuadorian passport or something, they probably would have insisted that I have both a flight in and out and show sufficient funds, etc. I had, in fact, brought printouts from my bank accounts to show that I had enough money to support myself, but they weren’t needed.

This woman stamped all the forms and gave them back to me with the instructions to take them back to the woman at reception. This puzzled me, but I went back to reception. The receptionist looked at my forms and then gave me another number for the cashier. With that number, I returned to the room I’d just left and waited for my number to be called at the cashier. There was some chaos and confusion there, but eventually I handed over my forms along with NT$1,200 (about $40 Canadian) and was given a receipt and told to return after 5 p.m. to pick up my passport. I returned at the appointed time and was handed another number by the receptionist. A minute or two later, my number was called and I signed a form and was given my passport with my new 59-day visa for the Philippines inside. It’s a big sticker that takes up a whole page and even has my picture on it. Very fancy.

 

Most of my other preparations over the last few days have had to do with little travel gadgets and doo-dads. One thing I wanted to buy was a lightweight travel towel. I’d had a bad experience with one of these “micro-fiber” towels before, but I wanted to give them a second chance. A regular cotton bath towel is very comfortable and feels nice on your skin, but they are very bulky and they take a long time to dry. To deal with these problems, companies like Sea to Summit have come up with these high-tech microfiber towels. They are made of nylon and polyester and consist of thousands and thousands (millions?) of little tubes that soak up water like crazy. Despite soaking up a lot of water, they are very thin and light and they dry very quickly.

I did a ton of research online and discovered that Sea to Summit’s range of towels had expanded to three types. They had Pocket towels, Drylite towels, and Tek Towels. The Pocket towels were the thinnest and lightest. The Tek towels were the thickest and heaviest. The Drylite towels were in the middle.

I assumed I’d have to order one from overseas and get shafted on shipping charges again, but to my surprise one of the camping stores near my apartment carried the full range. Not only that, they cost the same as they do online. Finally, they were on sale at 40% off.

I quickly dismissed the Pocket towels. They were as thin as the thinnest silk garments. They felt like silk scarves or silk handkerchiefs, and I didn’t see them working very well as towels. I also didn’t want a Tek towel. The one I’d had before was a Tek towel, and it felt awful on my skin. That left the Drylite model, and everyone online had great things to say about this towel. The camping store had a sample of this model. It was a big sheet of the material that had the different sizes marked out on it. I was surprised at how good the material felt against my skin. And after some thought, I decided that I would get the extra-large version. I could probably get away with the large, but I wanted to be able to wrap it around my waist like a normal towel. And, I reasoned, that even if I decided I didn’t need the extra-large towel, I could just cut part of it off and make it smaller. If the towel I bought turned out to be too small, I’d be stuck. No way to make it bigger.

They only had the extra-large towel in one color – jade (essentially bright green). I had been hoping to get a more subdued color, but I figured I’d get used to it and I bought one. I usually end up paying too much for everything, but not this time. To buy this towel online would have cost $32 plus probably $30 for shipping. With the 40% off, I got it for about $20 right here in Taipei and no shipping. I was happy about that.

I’d read that these towels were not colorfast, and it came with instructions to wash it once in warm water being using it. I don’t know why that would be, but they seemed insistent on that. My washing machine only has cold water, but I used my 10-liter dromedary bag to carry hot water from my bathroom to the washing machine. After a few trips, I had a good load of hot water and once I turned the machine on, it added cold until it was just warm. I did that once, dried the towel, and then washed it a second time for good measure. With my luck, if I don’t do something, I will end up someday coloring everything I own bright green. I used the towel once after taking a shower and so far I am very pleased with it. It absorbed water very well, felt fine against my skin, and it dried very quickly. Once dry, it is very light and packs down very small. I’m hoping this purchase will be with me for a long time and serve me well. It’s large enough that I can use it as a beach towel or whatever else I want.

I’ve also been looking for a good travel alarm clock. This has turned out to be a challenge and I haven’t found one yet. I haven’t found one anywhere in Taiwan. This makes sense, I suppose. The Taiwanese don’t travel that much, so there is no market for that sort of thing. Plus, if they did need an alarm, they’d just use their iPhone or Samsung smartphone. A foldable travel alarm clock would be considered quaint if not laughable here.

That leaves me with ordering one online, but I haven’t had any luck there. There are lots of different models out there, but based on customer reviews, none of them are any good. Even those that are good generally have some fatal flaw. The best I’ve come across, for example, was panned by customers because the big button across the top which activates the backlight comes on all the time when you pack the clock. Therefore, the light comes on all the time while you’re carrying the thing in your knapsack, and it runs down the battery. Everything else is great, but this one flaw is a big one. Every other clock had similar problems or was just really cheaply made. Braun does make some high quality travel clocks, but then they go in the other direction by making them too high-tech. The build quality might be good, but then they are voice-activated or have motion sensors or are radio-controlled. These high-tech features double or triple the price and make them far less durable.

I still haven’t found a good clock, and the only ones that are good enough were quite expensive – even $60. So I started to wonder if it didn’t make more sense to just buy a good watch alarm. So I started looked at the range of Casio Triple Sensor watches. These watches have a barometer, altimeter, and compass built in – all of which I would find quite fun and handy if not, strictly speaking, necessary. I had one of these watches a long time ago, and I loved it until it fell apart. These watches seem to have gotten much better and even cheaper. The basic model seems to go for about $150, which is nothing for a watch like that. And they are solar now, which means that you never have to buy a battery for them. That sounds like a recipe for disaster, but according to customers, they work very well. The one problem with them is that they are quite large and extremely geeky. Geeky to the extreme. It’s like carrying a small computer on your wrist. A Finnish company, Suunto, makes a similar line. They are much slimmer and much more stylish. Altimeters also seem to be more accurate – accurate to the meter whereas the Casios are accurate to within 10 meters. However, the Suuntos are much more expensive and from what I can tell, the interface is actually far worse. They might be slimmer and more attractive, but at the cost of button size and information display. The Casios might look clunky and geeky, but they do the job.

I’ve got about a dozen other things on the go. I was looking into getting a silk sleeping sheet. I currently have a cotton one. The cotton one works fine, but it is much bigger and heavier than a silk one. I was going to sew on an extra bit of sheet to the cotton one to make it more suitable for me (it’s too short), but I was wondering if a silk one might be better in the long run. It would at least be lighter, and that is a good thing. I carry enough heavy things that going lighter and smaller when I can would be a good thing.

Other stuff going on, but my coffee is long gone, and it is time to start my day.

 

Tags: DryLite, fly, Granger's, McNett, MECO, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Seam Grip, SilNet; Sea to Summit, tent, visa, waterproofing