Day 8

Sunday February 17, 2013

7:30 a.m Ling-Dung Temple near Shihtan, Taiwan

 

Breaking camp went relatively smoothly yesterday morning. The one big wrinkle was that I noticed that interior of my tent’s fly seems to be deteriorating. The waterproofing tape that covers the seams has completely fallen apart and is peeling off and turning into dust. The material itself also feels sticky to my fingers as if the waterproofing material is starting to dissolve. That’s not a good sign. I guess I’ll try to find a way to reseal the seams. That should be easy. And I’ll have to do a test to see if the waterproofing still works. If it doesn’t, I’ll have to deal with that or get a new tent.

I’ve developed a few habits over the years, and they are so ingrained in me now that I don’t even have to think about them. Most of these habits center on packing up in an efficient manner but mainly with an eye to keeping things clean and not losing anything. It’s very easy to get too eager and just want to hit the road the second you wake up. But that usually means you’ll leave something important behind. I make sure to always put things in their proper place and I always do a careful check and walk around the camping site to make sure nothing was left. This habit has saved me a lot of trouble in the past. I do the same thing in hotel rooms and I always do a final walkthrough of the room and check everything – the bathroom, behind doors, under the beds, behind the curtains, and in closets. I also always fold up the sheets and blankets and put them aside so that nothing can be covered up. In this case, nothing had been forgotten, and after a final trip to the bathroom, I drove my scooter down to the gate. The owner of the campsite and food stall must have seen me moving around – or more likely he heard all the local dogs barking at me as they saw me moving around – and he came over on his scooter to turn off the lights at the bathroom and otherwise check up on me. I’m pleased to say that it was a wasted trip since I had already thought to turn off the lights and had left behind no garbage or anything else. I pride myself on being a good guest in that way. I don’t like to leave a mess even when there are staff paid to come in and clean it up.

The road was free of traffic as I drove up to that Visitor Center in search of my coffee. I made the mistake of not wearing my gloves on that drive, so it took a long time for my fingers to warm up enough to be able to type anything. Plus, the coffee shop was extremely cold inside. It was also fairly dark and that made seeing the screen of my word processor quite difficult. Still, it was a pleasant way to pass an hour and I ordered two or three cups of that strong and hot coffee – always to the amusement of the two girls working there. I felt a bit large for the environment not to mention fairly uncouth and rough around the edges. I hadn’t shaved and I’m sure my hair was a mess. Plus, I ran through an endless series of tissues as I blew my nose over and over again. In normal circumstances, I go off to a quiet corner somewhere away from people to blow my nose. I won’t even do it at my desk at work. I’ll go out to the area around the bathroom. But I had to do it so many times that I really couldn’t do that, and I blew my nose at the table over and over again. And they weren’t dainty little blows either. These were full-on noisy gurgling disgusting blows. As I said, I get brutal colds lately. And I can always tell when I’ve reached the peak of the cold and it’s starting to go away when I start coughing up big chunks of green phlegm. No idea why it has to be green, but it always is. I duck my head down and spit it out into some tissues and fold it up. Don’t worry, I don’t leave these tissues behind on the table. I tuck them away and then I throw them all in a garbage can later.

After my coffee, I went up to the second floor to take in one of their scheduled movies. They had a very nice theater up there and they showed five different films throughout the day. They’d already had one at 9:30, but I didn’t make it to that one. I saw the 10:30 show, and this was a dramatic story of a village of the local Atayal people from long ago. The main point of the movie was to show how these people lived – their homes and villages, their family relationships, growing crops, weaving cloth and baskets, and hunting. The Atayal people are one of two groups of aboriginals in Taiwan that do face tattooing. The face tattoos are a mark of distinction given to men when they reach a certain age and display a high level of skill in hunting. Only those women who develop an equivalent level of ability in weaving are given the facial tattoos.

When the movie ended, I went for a short hike around the Visitor Center. The entire hiking trail consisted of a raised wooden walkway. I’m constantly amazed at the amount of effort and money that goes into building these elevated walkways. It was a relatively short hike, but it passed through a very interesting area consisting of many massive trees and thick undergrowth.

When Taiwan was a Japanese colony, this area was developed for its lumber. There was a lot of conflict between the Japanese and the Atayal over this logging and the Japanese built a number of small military posts here to control the local people. They also brought in canon and mounted them on the mountains above the larger villages. There is actually a 25-kilometer trail nearby that goes through the remains of these military posts. Unfortunately, this trail, too, was closed because of earthquake and landslide damage.

By this point, I thought I had seen pretty much all there was to see at the Visitor Center and was getting ready to leave. At that precise moment, however, I had a chance encounter with a Taiwanese family. I was going down the stairs of the Visitor Center when someone said hello in English. I said hello back and I found I was speaking to a friendly-looking man and a teenager I took to be his son. The teenager was carrying a brochure in English, and that made me think he might be American. It turns out he was Taiwanese, but he attended a bilingual high school in Taipei. He took an English brochure instead of the Chinese one as part of his efforts to keep learning English.

The man – Tony – was very eager to tell me about the Syuejian Scenic Area and I eventually learned that he was a regular volunteer at the Visitor Center. He produced an official ID stating that fact and clipped it onto his jacket. Then an employee of the Visitor Center came by with a fancy Nikon camera and took pictures of me posing with Tony and his whole family.

Tony was carrying a set of scenic postcards of the area and he gave them to me as a gift. He pointed at one of the vistas – a wide panorama of 20 mountain peaks all above 3,000 meters in height – and asked if I had seen that. I said I hadn’t, and Tony insisted that I go take a look. It turns out that this scenic viewpoint was just a kilometer away up a nearby road. I was very eager and willing to check it out. I was surprised that this viewpoint existed. I had looked at every single map available and read through every single informational brochure and nothing had mentioned this short hike leading to that viewpoint. It’s possible it was there in Chinese or hidden in the fine print in English. In any event, it seemed like it should have been more obvious as a local attraction.

I walked along with Tony and his son, Jason. It was an entertaining conversation because I spoke mainly with Tony. However, Jason was the English expert and he often corrected his father’s English vocabulary. Jason offered up such words and phrases as “sea level” and “cycling” when his father was searching for the right expression. Then later on, a woman who was also part of our party asked Jason where I was from. Without thinking, Jason blurted out “China.” It was just a slip of the tongue. He knew the name “Canada” quite well. Everyone laughed in a good-natured way at this mistake by their resident English expert.

Tony told me a lot about the history of the area as we walked along – about the Japanese logging industry and that sort of thing. He got out maps and pointed out a variety of interesting hikes that could be done in the area. I also asked Tony some questions and I found out that he worked for a bio-technology company (bio-technology being another phrase supplied by Jason) and had gone on two business trips to Canada.

It was a very pleasant encounter and I learned a lot about the area. As with all of my trips around Taiwan, this one has shown me how much more there was to see and do. Just talking with Tony gave me ideas for at least four other places I’d like to visit. Unfortunately, I probably won’t have the time.

Tony and his family were staying in a homestay in the nearby village of Erbensong. They had booked their rooms there from Taipei and I got the impression that the rooms were relatively expensive. After our visit to the lookout point, their plan was to return there for lunch. Before we parted, however, Tony showed me a large wooden structure on a post in the nearby trees. This was a home for bats and part of a project to preserve the bat population and study them. I didn’t think bats were happy living at this altitude, but apparently there were many bats up there in the mountains – over 20 species, in fact.

I waved goodbye to Tony and Jason and the rest of his family and drove down the mountain road on my scooter. I stopped at the same food stall with the campground and I got a nice lunch there before continuing on. It was quite a popular spot and it was fun to watch all the people coming and going. It made me think about the local people and how they interact with all the visitors. A group of local men had gathered there because for a reason I don’t know, they were boxing up a very large type of wooden musical instrument – a type of drum that one sees in temples and shrines. The man who owned the food stall had his own shrine there and the wooden instrument belonged to him. Perhaps he was selling it. I don’t know. Whatever he was doing, it involved wrapping it in bubble wrap and putting it in a cardboard box. There was a lot of discussion and input from all the men involved.

I practically got dizzy as I drove down out of the high mountains with the twisting and turning this way and that way. I wasn’t stopping as many places as I did on the way up, and the constant motion was like being on a roller coaster.

I had no clear ideas about where I was going to end up at the end of the day. I generally don’t like to backtrack, but my route on this trip meant that there was a little choice. If I wanted to stay in the mountains, I had to return along the same general path as I’d taken on the way out – along highway 3 and through the Lion’s Head Mountain National Scenic Area. That’s not a bad thing, of course, because it’s very beautiful there. I stopped from time to time to look at my maps to try to figure out a slightly different route I could follow – to just give my journey a little twist. There was the possibility of going up a side road into the mountains ending at the Taian Hot Springs area. This road, unfortunately, was a dead end and I’d have to come back to highway 3 eventually to continue on.

I might have gone there if it were earlier in the day. And, in fact, the decision was kind of taken out of my hands. The turn-off for this area was just a short distance past Dahu, the town that is currently hosting some kind of strawberry harvest festival and is jammed with people. Traffic was backed up for miles and it was very confusing and chaotic when I got to the intersection. I only had a split second to figure out where to go and before I knew it, I had gone past the road to Taian Hot Springs. Under normal circumstances, I would have simply done a u-turn. But in this case, it was impossible. There was far too much traffic and no guarantee that I could make the turn even if I did double back.

Maybe it was the traffic jams in Dahu. Maybe it was being back on highway 3 with so many other vehicles. Maybe I was just tired after six or seven days on the road. Whatever the reason, I was a little irritable as I drove along. I had to drive faster than I wanted to keep up with the traffic, and at that speed, I didn’t have opportunity to look around as much as I’d like. I was so short-tempered that I started to think that it might be better to simply stay on highway 3 and drive all the way back to Taipei and my cozy apartment. I just wasn’t feeling energetic enough to enjoy another night of adventure, exploring while not knowing where I was going to spend the night. While I was weighing my options, I came across a large convenience store – a Family Mart – right at the intersection with the small mountain road that leads up to the Lion’s Head Mountain area and Sian Shan – the mountain that I had climbed so successfully on my way out just a few days ago. The Family Mart seemed like the perfect place to stop and get my bearings.

It was crazy busy in the Family Mart. Taipei people on their fancy motorcycles and souped-up scooters and racing bicycles were out in force and they all seemed to stop here to rest and relax and compare vehicles and clothing. I love hanging out around groups like that. There is always so much going on. The young guys almost always have their girlfriends on the back and they are all out having fun and trying to impress each other and themselves. They drive at high speed and race through traffic. If I ever tired of watching the people, I can check out the fancy motorbikes. For such a small country with so few suitable roads, there are a surprising number of really big motorbikes – the big BMWs and Ducatis and even Honda Goldwings. These bikes would be at home on the big highways of North America and the high-speed highways of Europe. They don’t really make a lot of sense on the small roads of Taiwan. But they are beautiful bikes and I love to check them out.

As fun as the atmosphere was, it didn’t really help with my irritability. It kind of increased it. There was just so much activity and so much noise with the big bikes coming and going. There were also lots of families there in their cars with little kids screaming and crying – something that is always sure to put my teeth on edge.

So, I was sitting there and neither option seemed attractive – to drive for two or three more hours and go all the way back to Taipei or to turn back into the mountains for another night of adventure. But the longer I sat there enjoying my coffee, the more I realized that driving back to Taipei was not an option. It would be dark by the time I got there, and no matter how many times I’ve done this trip, I always get lost trying to follow route 3 back into Taipei. I always do, and if I’m in a bad mood, that could be bad news. Then a happy thought jumped into my head out of nowhere – there was that huge temple – the Sian Shan Ling-Dung Temple – at the base of the mountain. There was a good chance I could stay at that temple. I’d had good luck with every temple I’d visited so far. Perhaps my luck would hold. With that happy thought, I felt my whole body and mind relax.

When my second coffee was done, I climbed onto my scooter and began the drive back up into the mountains. It was a short and dramatic drive to Sian Shan. I could see the mountain towering right above me and in a short time, I could pick out the temple complex and even the mountain peak that I had climbed.

It was quite busy still when I got to the temple complex. I parked my scooter, grabbed my survival kit, and walked into the temple. I now had experience with this, and it only took me a few seconds to spot the temple office. I went inside and spoke to a woman there about the possibility of a room at the temple. She called over the man in charge of this sort of thing and literally within a minute or two, I was being shown up a flight of stairs to my room for the night – a big and comfortable room with a private bathroom (with hot water), big comfortable beds, a desk and chair, and even a TV and air conditioner. No one mentioned anything about paying for the room. The man simply asked for some form of ID in exchange for the key. In the morning, I’d get my ID back when I handed in the key. Perhaps they will ask for some kind of payment at that point, but I don’t think so. I certainly wouldn’t mind if they did. It’s nice that they have these rooms at the temple at all. They are much more interesting as places to stay than a hotel would be. Certainly more comfortable than camping. That they might be free is a nice bonus, but it’s not essential. I would happily pay for them. In a way I feel a bit strange not paying anything. I’m sure these rooms are meant for devotees of the temple and not for wandering foreign tourists.

The night passed very well with not quite the same number of nose-blowing sessions as when I was camping. I still went through a lot of tissues and seemed to spend more time awake than asleep. But when the sun rose this morning, I felt refreshed – more refreshed than I’ve felt in a long time. Lately, no matter how much sleep I get, I’ve had very sore eyes and an almost constant headache. My eyes would feel like they do when I haven’t had any sleep for a long time even though I was in bed all night long. This morning, though, I woke up feeling good. My eyes feel normal and I don’t have any kind of headache.

The market was winding down when I showed up last night, but I found a food stall still operating. It was the same place that I’d eaten at on my way out and I got an extremely good meal at a very reasonable price. After dinner, I wandered around in the fading sunlight and took some pictures of the mountains and the temple. Then when it was dark, I retired and spent the evening reading until bedtime. The day could not possibly have turned out better, and I now have a beautiful sunny day out there and miles of mountain road to enjoy before I get back to Taipei.

 

Tags: Atayal, CNY Scooter Trip Taiwan 2013, Dahu, Erbensong, Ling-Dung Temple, Lion’s Head Mountain National Scenic Area, scooter, Shihtan, Sian Shan, Taipei, Taiwan, temple, Visitor Center