July 8, 2006

I’ve been working in Taiwan for quite a while now. It’s been so long that the actual dates of my arrival and my first jobs aren’t in my head anymore. I’d have to look them up or think really hard to come up with them, and I don’t feel like thinking that hard.

Today is a Saturday. It’s hard to believe, but it’s already five p.m. I’m not sure where the day went. I was woken up very early this morning by a loud crashing sound. It was the arrival of a three-man construction team that was hired to fix up the roof of the building on which my little Rooftop Paradise sits. The roof certainly needs fixing up. It’s a fairly typical roof in Taiwan in that it isn’t so much a roof as an accumulation of years of junk. I think the original owners started with a framework of some kind on which they could have built a roof. But they opted instead to just throw a bunch of crap out there till it sort of covered the framework. Over the years, it served as a convenient place to throw more junk.

Occasionally, a typhoon would roar through and tear some of it away, and the response was just to throw out heavier junk to hold down the lighter junk. According to my landlady, the famous Lin Tai-Tai, there have been some leaking problems and that’s what prompted the hiring and the early arrival of this three-man construction crew.

Luckily, I was in a relatively good mood and the loud crashing didn’t annoy me quite as much as it could have. Certainly, if you got super-annoyed at loud crashing sounds at the crack of dawn on weekends, you wouldn’t last long in Taiwan, certainly not in Taipei. The people in Taipei have a love-affair with the jack-hammer. Buildings are literally gutted and rebuilt on a monthly basis, and all of that gutting has to be done with a jack-hammer. I remember one entire summer was spent enduring what felt like non-stop jack-hammers as the stairwell and front of this building were renovated. But that’s another story.

I was saying that I’ve been in Taiwan for quite a while and yet haven’t done very much in the way of exploring the country or even Taipei. I believe in the last two and a half years (outside of the recent cycling trips which I intend to talk about here), I’ve left Taipei twice. Both occasions were weekend trips sponsored by my company. There are a variety of reasons for my leaving Taipei so seldom, I suppose. Until quite recently I didn’t have any money and didn’t feel I had the freedom to gallivant off on the weekend. Plus, most of my life was taken up by my work, which I felt was quite demanding. The weekends were simply times to recover by not working and to get ready for the next work week. The weather is another reason. There are many good things about living in Taipei, but the weather is not one of them. The weather here is something to hide from, not go out into. It’s brutally hot in the summer, dismally cold in the winter, and it pretty much never stops raining. Those are hardly conditions to inspire me to go out exploring. They tend instead to keep me inside nestled up to either the air conditioner or the heater depending on the season. I suppose the cost of travel here is another factor that has kept me from exploring. Even if I had money to spend, I’d hesitate to spend it here. I’d much rather save my money and then go on an extended trip to a country where hotels cost a dollar a night rather than travel here and pay a hundred dollars a night.

However, things have been changing in my life and I’m spreading my wings a little bit and discovering a world beyond my work. The cycling in Taiwan actually began almost a year ago when I took a cycling trip during the Chinese New Year holidays. I’d purchased a bike initially just for use in the city. I rode it to work and that was about it. I can’t remember how long I had that bike, but in the end it was stolen. I came out of work one day and it was simply not there anymore. I replaced it with a different bike – a GT Nomad – which I’m riding now. The Nomad isn’t my ideal bike, especially for bike touring, but it was the only bike I could find in the city that was even close to my size and the style I was looking for. If I knew I’d be getting into bike touring while here, I might have taken my time and ordered something from overseas or even had my bike in Canada shipped over. But this GT Nomad was the bike I had when I made a snap decision to do some cycling.

I didn’t know the first thing about cycling in Taiwan at the time. I thought I could save money by camping and in a flurry of activity, I hit a bunch of camping stores in Taipei and bought a cheap tent, sleeping bag, sleeping sheet, sleeping mat, and pannier bags. This didn’t really sit well with me. For one thing, I already own all of this gear and high-quality gear at that. Unfortunately, it’s in storage in Canada. I also don’t like buying crap. Crap has a way of crapping out on you when you need it and being a pain to use into the bargain. But this is what was available. I spent a couple of evenings experimenting with how to put all this stuff on the bike and on the great day, I wobbled out of Taipei.

This is quite a long time ago now, but I still remember it very clearly. I left quite late in the day, as I had to do a lot of last-minute adjusting and packing. Then I had to navigate my way out of Taipei. My plan was to cycle to a small town called Pinglin up in the mountains south of Taipei. I knew nothing about the place, but on my maps the road looked interesting. It wound its way into mountains and that is where I prefer to cycle. From Pinglin, I imagined I would cycle down to the coast and then depending on how far and fast I was cycling, I’d either follow the coast north and loop back to Taipei, or head south and then cut back into the mountains to loop back.

Getting out Taipei on that trip was a lot easier than on my subsequent trips. That’s because I could just head south on Zhongshan Road which is right beside where I live. Zhongshan Road turns into Roosevelt Street (Yes, for reasons I can’t even guess at, one of the largest roads in Taipei is named after Roosevelt) and then it’s just a straight shot out of Taipei. One can then turn right up to the hot spring town of Wulai, or keep going towards the left and Pinglin. I was a little nervous about this trip, though now I can’t imagine why I was. I guess it was just because it was a brand new experience and I didn’t know what I would be facing. I didn’t know what I would be eating or where I would be sleeping. Of course, there were no problems at all and everything worked out fine, but there is always that bit of nameless fear when you do something for the first time.

Considering that I’d gotten pretty much no exercise for the previous two years or so, I could have picked an easier road to start with. The road to Pinglin was a steep uphill climb the entire way and I moved at a very slow pace. The sun was out despite it being winter and I sweated buckets. The road was also very narrow and the drivers were typical Taiwanese drivers – ie insane. They went around blind corners at top speed. They cut far too close to me. And I got my first introduction to what I’ve learned is a fairly large group in Taiwan – weekend motorcycle riders. Up to about two years ago, motorcycles were limited to 250 cc engines. This was done, I was told by one of these motorcycle riders, to protect the local motorcycle industry. But then two years ago, the ban was lifted and suddenly one could buy the big bikes, the Harleys, the Hondas with 1300 cc engines, and the rocket bikes. To me, these bikes don’t make even the tiniest bit of sense on an island this small and this crowded. I saw them from time to time in Taipei and I could only shake my head. There is barely enough room to breathe in this city. Just finding a spot to put my bicycle is next to impossible. How then can someone drive around on one of these monster bikes? And why would you want to? Top speed in Taipei is pretty much a crawl because of the heavy traffic. You could never get a big motorbike like that out of first gear.

The situation out in the countryside isn’t much different. It’s a small island. By the time you got one of these big bikes into fourth gear you’d be at the end and it would be time to turn around and come back. But that didn’t stop anyone here. Lots of people bought these big bikes and every possible accessory to go with them. On the weekends, these guys put on their multi-colored leathers and get together in groups of five to fifteen and then go racing around the mountain roads. They’re quite a sight when you’re puttering along and gasping for breath on your little GT Nomad.

I arrived in Pinglin in mid-afternoon and found it jammed with people. I didn’t know this before I went there, but I found out that it was a famous tea town. The main drag is lined with expensive tea houses where you can sample some of the best tea in the world. There is even a tea museum and lots of people pile into tour buses and come up from Taipei to have some tea. This was Chinese New Year and triple or quadruple the usual number of visitors were there. The main drag had the feel of a large carnival. Police were on every street corner trying to control the traffic.

The most happening spot in all this chaos was, of course, the 7-11. I was pleased to see a 7-11 as I had become addicted to their microwavable meals. I got my favorite rice and curry heated up and sat outside at a small table on the street to eat and watch the crowds. Once I’d eaten, I started on the thankless task of eliciting any kind of information from anyone. The problem is that despite having been here for years, I still didn’t (and don’t) speak a word of Chinese. I also had no idea how to go about looking for a place to stay. In most of the countries I’d been to in my life, the hotels whether five-star or absolute dives at least looked like hotels. You recognized them. They stood out from the other buildings. Even if you couldn’t read the signs, you could look at them and see that they’re hotels. That didn’t seem to be true in Taiwan. At least, I rode up and down every last bit of road in Pinglin and saw nothing that looked like a hotel. I had my new cheap tent and sleeping bag and could have camped out, but I also had seen nowhere to put a tent. The road to Pinglin was carved into the mountainsides and hillsides and there was no flat land to be found anywhere. I could also see nowhere in and around Pinglin to put a tent. Every square foot of land was covered in something. I had no choice but to find accomodation of some kind.

I first asked the good folks in the 7-11. They told me that there were no hotels in Pinglin. I found that hard to believe considering the amount of tourism going on around me. There had to be a place, if not many places, to stay. I tried varying my questions (in English). Perhaps by “hotel,” they understood that I wanted a fancy resort when in fact all I wanted was a place to lay my head. I asked my questions in every way possible at the 7-11 and then at half a dozen places in town. Then I went up to random individuals on the street. The answer was always the same – no hotels, no rooms, no place to camp, nothing. I persevered though, because it still made no sense to me. There had to be something. Finally, I got an answer from one of the cops directing traffic. I got him to understand that I had a tent and was more than willing to sleep on the ground – to camp. He said that there was a campground and he gave me some rough directions. I followed his rough directions and they took me through a heavily industrialized area. I was glad I had the bicycle. With the bicycle I can chase down leads like this even if it takes me four or five kilometers out of town. On foot, I’d be stuck.

I cycled two or three kilometers and had about decided to give up. I saw nothing but industry and couldn’t imagine a campground existing in the middle all that. But I had nothing to lose by going forward. I thought that perhaps I could find a patch of ground on which to pitch my tent. The good news was that the road was following a river and I felt that eventually the industrial area had to end and I’d find someplace to camp.

Suddenly, the road went down a very steep section of road and I found the campground. This was my first Taiwanese campground and I looked around with interest. It didn’t resemble a campground as I understood the word. For one thing, all the tent sites were actually raised wooden platforms. They were also all clustered together and not spread out through trees as they would be in Canada. They were more like picnic sites. Plus, this particular campground was also a hotel. There were six or seven large buildings with lots and lots of hotel rooms available. Why everyone in Pinglin insisted there was no place to stay while this huge and practically empty complex was right there will forever be a mystery. And I don’t think it was a communication problem. Their English wasn’t great, but they understood what I wanted and they made it very clear that there was no place to stay in Pinglin. Happily, they were wrong. I asked at one of the buildings and found out that the price of one of those tent platforms was roughly the same as a hotel room. I opted for a room and settled in for the evening. I had another 7-11 meal with me and ate it on the rocks by the river.

This was the first actual hotel room I’d rented in Taiwan since my arrival a few years back. (The rest of the time I was staying in an odd kind of hostel and then in an apartment owned by the same people who ran the hostel.) The room had a bed, a TV, and a bathroom plus the usual assortment of spiders and creepy crawlies. It was one of those places that wasn’t built to last. They’d slapped it together with whatever was cheap at the time. I can imagine that by the time they put the finishing touches on the last room, the first room would already have been falling apart. But other than the price, I wasn’t complaining. I had a comfortable place to stay when just a few minutes earlier I was homeless and wandering the streets.

The next day I discovered what Chinese New Year in Taiwan was really all about: traffic. I cycled out of Pinglin on this narrow mountain road and found complete gridlock. There was so much traffic that the entire “highway” had turned into a parking lot. I spent most of the day riding on the narrow shoulder zooming past hundreds and hundreds of cars that had come to a complete stop. Occasionally, the line of cars would move and the vehicles I’d passed would catch up with me and then stop again. I’d catch up with them and we’d leapfrog our way through the mountains. The children in the cars thought it was great fun and waved at the funny foreigner each time I cycled past.

This continued until I came to the end of the mountains – literally. The mountains simply stopped at an extremely steep cliff that went right down to a wide flat plain beside the ocean. The road hugged this cliff and twisted and turned all the way to the bottom. This was easily the most dangerous part of my little trip. I think the drivers had been frustrated by the gridlock, and when they had they chance to zoom down this cliff they took advantage of it. They drove at crazy speeds and went wide around some blind corners and cut close on others. They saw the crazy foreigner on a bike, but I didn’t seem to register as anything that they needed to worry about. They just went straight for me and on several occasions would have run right over me if I hadn’t slammed on the brakes. It was an odd experience. I’m used to drivers not seeing me and nearly killing me by accident. I wasn’t quite as accustomed to drivers who clearly saw me, made eye contact, and then headed straight for me anyway.

I missed the mountains greatly once I was down out of them and on busier roads along the coast. I had to make my way through a small city called Touchen. I understand that the new tunnel that has been cut through these mountains from Taipei actually pops out somewhere around Touchen. It would be interesting to cycle that same road this Chinese New Year and see how much the traffic flow has changed. I imagine it won’t be anywhere near as busy as most people will take the much faster and more direct tunnel.

That night, I got a tiny little room in the basement of a more normal sort of hotel. Staying there was still a bit of an odd experience, however. This hotel was clearly marked as a hotel and I walked into the lobby looking (I thought) clearly like someone who might want to rent a room. Yet, people at the hotel (once I found someone!) had a hard time understanding that. This has happened to me over and over again in Taiwan and it is still something of a puzzle. I’ll walk into a video rental store and everyone is puzzled. They have no idea what I’m doing there. I figure it must be obivous: I’m in a video rental store, therefore I must want to rent a video. But that isn’t clear to them. I have a theory, however, about why this happens, particularly in hotels. I think that I simply do things in a different way from the Taiwanese. In the case of hotels, I think it is unusual for a solitary person to simply walk into a hotel in the middle of the afternoon looking for a room. Most Taiwanese travel in large groups whether they’re with friends, family, co-workers, or part of a tour group. They reserve the room in advance or have it done for them and they don’t show up until quite late in the evening. Myself, I like to hit a town, find a place to stay, get settled, and then go out. The Taiwanese I’ve noticed will spend the entire day doing whatever they’re doing. They’ll go see all the sights and visit all the restaurants, and then go to the hotel basically when it’s time to go to sleep. So these hotels will be completely emtpy when I arrive. They’re literally ghost hotels and I figure I’ll have the whole place to myself. I get used to that fact and really enjoy it. I look forward to a completely quiet and peaceful evening. Cyclists tend to go to bed early and get up at the crack of dawn and I’m no exception, so I like a quiet hotel. So it comes as a very unpleasant shock when in mid to late evening the hotel suddenly explodes into noise and confusion as everyone arrives at once.

The next night, I stayed in the large coastal town of Keelung. I love any town that is on the water and Keelung was no exception. I spent a large part of my time there lost, but eventually I got the hang of the place and figured out where things were. I found it a pleasant place, more open and interesting than Taipei. I made an attempt to stay at a small, cheap hotel I found in an alley, but I couldn’t get past the incomprehension of the clerks. There was a language barrier there as no one spoke English, but I still thought I made my point. I was in a hotel, so what’s so hard about understanding what I wanted? Apparently it was hard, and I couldn’t get anyone to understand that I wanted a room no matter how many times I pointed at their signs advertising room rates and pantomimed laying my head on a pillow and sleeping. I eventually gave up and cycled back out onto the main streets. This search for anything in a Taiwanese city is never entirely pleasant for the simple reason that Taiwan is not set up for cyclists. For the most part, people in Taiwan drive scooters. Taiwan isn’t set up for scooters, either, but that doesn’t worry anyone. They simply park them everywhere. Scooters are the dominant lifeform and they get pride of place. The sidewalks are scooter parking lots. The streets are scooter parking lots. Everything is a scooter parking lot. And that works because to park a scooter you simply have to take out the key and pull the thing back onto its kickstand. No one can pick up a scooter and walk off with it. A bicycle is much lighter and simply putting a lock through the wheel and frame is no guarantee it will still be there when you get back – especially when you have a bicycle that looks worth stealing. Someone can just pick it up and walk off with it. The solution in most countries is to lock the bicycle to something, whether a telephone pole, a tree, a fence, a bicycle rack, or lamp post. But in Taiwan these things simply don’t exist. I love riding around on a bike in Taiwan. It’s a great way to get around even in the chaos and deadly traffic of Taipei, but once you get to where you want to go, you’re often stuck. There will be nowhere to put the bike. Keelung was no exception and going in and out of various hotels to find one that was suitable promised to be something of an ordeal, so I took a room in the very first hotel that presented itself. On the one hand, it was not really my kind of place. It was a real hotel and came with the somewhat real price of NT$3,000, or about $100 Canadian. That’s not outrageous for a night in a hotel I suppose, but it’s not an amount I wanted to pay.

But there were advantages to staying in a somewhat upscale hotel, and I didn’t mind those one bit. First, there was the underground parking. One of the friendly ladies at the front desk went outside with me and waited as I unlocked my bicycle. Then she escorted me to the car elevator that brought us down into the underground parking lot. I got a huge kick out of having my little bike raised and lowered by this giant elevator when normally I just pick it up and carry it up and down the stairs.

Once in the room I wallowed in the luxury. It was a big room and I spread my gear around. I jumped into the huge bathroom and took a shower. Then clean and refreshed, I went back out into Keelung and walked around. The hotel was right on a very wide divided boulevard with a canal running down the middle. There were lights everywhere and the nearby alleys were all part of a big night market. It was a good night.

The next day, I made the short hop back to Taipei and that was the end of my first bike ride in Taiwan. The highlight was definitely the scenery along the coast. Most of the east coast of Taiwan is mountainous and the mountains rise straight up out of the ocean. I knew about this and had seen some of this beautiful coastline further south around Hualien. I didn’t realize though that this same kind of scenery was right there so close to Taipei. The road was extremely busy with holiday traffic, but it didn’t matter so much as up in the mountains. The road was bigger and didn’t twist and turn so much. I could see what was coming more easily. There were numerous roadside stops for the tour buses and I pulled over again and again to take take pictures. There were also a number of funky little fishing villages along this stretch of highway.

 

Tags: bike, Taipei, Taiwan, tent