November 25, 2006

I finished the bike ride to Pingling and the east coast very excited about doing more cycling in Taiwan. Unfortunately, it began to rain and if memory serves, it rained nonstop for six months. At least it felt like that. And when it wasn’t raining, it was brutally hot. In any event, a long time passed before circumstances came together to give me the opportunity and the inclination to get back on the bike. This second trip took me to a mountain town called Fushing. The idea was to ride along what is known as the Northern Cross-Island Highway. I didn’t think I had enough time to do the entire highway and then loop back to Taipei along the coast again. But I thought I could ride along the highway until I got to the point where the highway dropped down out of the mountains to the coast. And instead of dropping down, I’d turn around and retrace my route. It’s not something I normally like to do. Most cyclists don’t like to backtrack. We like new roads and new routes. But I thought it would be OK.

This time, getting out of Taipei was a real challenge. Simply getting out of my neighborhood was a challenge. I had to cross a river almost immediately and it was bewildering. I’d faced this river before and I always found it difficult to deal with. I simply can’t find an easy way across it. In the end, I had no choice but to go against the signs and get on a road that was meant only for cars and buses. That’s never a pleasant experience. Riding a bike where one is technically allowed to is taking your life in your hands. Drivers in Taipei don’t actually hate cyclists, but at times you’d be forgiven for thinking so. Riding your bike on bridge access ramps where you aren’t even supposed to is even worse. Luckily, I only had to go a short distance, and then I saw off to the right an actual lane that is dedicated to scooters and bicycles. To get there, I had to fight my way over several concrete barriers, physically lifting my bike and carrying it and dashing through gaps in traffic, but I got there.

Riding in that lane, however, wasn’t much safer. I’d actually say it was quite a bit more dangerous. For one thing, these scooter lanes on bridges are extremely narrow and have a high concrete divider on both sides. One feels like one is in a bob sled run. Scooters are, in their way, just as threatening to a cyclist as cars are, more so in some ways. They know no traffic law and have grown accustomed to simply doing whatever they want at any speed they desire. I think this attitude stems from the way scooter traffic is officially dealt with in Taiwan.

At every intersection, there is a large box at the front reserved for scooters. I don’t know if this was the intention when they came up with this system, but scooters will go between lanes of traffic to get to that box. It’s a great deal for the scooter drivers and lots of fun. I can attest to that because I do the same thing on my bicycle. I’ve become quite the Road Warrior in my own way. You have to, otherwise you would literally never get anywhere. You have to take advantage of every possible thing you can and that means zooming in and out of lanes and between cars to get to the front. If you waited patiently in a lane with the cars, you would never get anywhere, plus you run the very real risk of being rear ended. So scooter drivers have grown up basically weaving in and out of traffic whether moving or stopped, like Indy 500 racers. Now give them a dedicated little lane on a bridge and nothing is going to hold them back. They open up the throttle and go across as fast as they can. That cyclist ahead of them? “Eh, who cares? If my mirror clips him in the back of the head, well, he shouldn’t be on a bike anyway. This is scooter country.”

Most of the time, I don’t last long in these scooter lanes. They’re simply too unnerving. Eventually I pick up the bicycle one more time and lift it onto the sidewalk (if there is one) and ride there next to the railing. On this particular day I ended up walking the bike. This was the October 10 weekend holiday and as part of the celebrations, hundreds of Taiwanese flags had been put up on all the bridges. The wind was blowing such that the flags blew back over the sidewalk and whacked me in the face as I rode. So I got off the bike and walked it, ducking under each flag when I reached it.

At the other end of the bridge, the chaos and confusion continued. These dedicated scooter lanes go off in very odd directions in long sweeping curves and turns. They eventually rejoin the normal traffic flow, but not in the most intuitive ways and places, and I always get confused about where I am. Out comes the map for another long consultation. This process went on for a couple of hours as I tried to make my way out of Taipei. I eventually gave up trying to figure out where I was. I had a rough idea that I was heading south and that was enough. I figured that if I went south long enough, I’d eventually get my bearings. I was right about that, but I had no idea how I had gotten to where I ended up.

The idea was to get to a place called Dashi, which I’d read was the beginning of the Northern Cross-Island Highway. Because of a late start, I got there fairly late in the day. Then I had a choice. I could stay in Dashi or I could start on the highway and see where I ended up. I’d read that there was a nice place to stay in the mountain town of Fushing, but I worried that it was too far away. I didn’t want the sun to come down on me while I was still in the middle of nowhere, especially as I still had seen no possibilities for camping. On cycling trips in Canada and the States, I got in the habit of scouting for a place to camp as it got later in the afternoon or evening. There were wide open spaces, and when I saw a place that looked promising (i.e., a bit of wilderness where I could put up a tent and not be seen from the road), I’d make a mental note and then cycle into the next town to stock up on water and food and anything else I needed. Then when it was just about to get dark, I’d cycle back to the spot I’d noted and set up camp and cook dinner. So far, I hadn’t seen any possibility of doing that in Taiwan. Perhaps I just wasn’t looking hard enough or was expecting too much, but I simply saw nowhere that I could put up a tent whether out of sight or in plain sight.

In the end, I decided to look for a place to stay in Dashi. This led to an almost exact repeat of my experience in Pingling. I rode everywhere in Dashi, but saw nothing that looked like a hotel. The two buildings I thought might be hotels turned out to be government offices. Then I started asking questions. I went into variety stores. I went into restaurants. I went into gas stations. I stopped people on the streets. Everyone said the same thing: there were no hotels in Dashi. I knew this couldn’t be true and tried varying my questions again, but I got the same answer. Finally, one man on a bicycle reacted to the information that I had a tent and a sleeping bag. “Camping?” he asked. I said yes and he told me about a campground about three kilometers out of Dashi. I pressed him hard on the details of his directions and felt pretty confident that I’d understood everything and I set off.

Of course, I didn’t find it. Nothing of what he’d said matched anything on that road. But it wasn’t a total loss. There was a 7-11 right there on the corner, and I went in to start another round of asking questions. It was getting very dark by this point and I was getting a bit anxious. In the 7-11, they had the same story. There were no hotels. None. Nada. Nothing. I came out of the 7-11 and to my great surprise, I saw the man on the bicycle who had given me directions. He had gone home, gotten in his car, and come looking for me to make sure I’d found the campground. He got back into his car, and I followed him for about another kilometer (in a direction that was not part of his original directions I might add). He then stopped and pointed across the road at what he said was the campground. I thanked my Good Samaritan a dozen times and he drove off.

The campground, it’s almost needless to say, was not a campground at all. I’m starting to believe that the words “hotel” and “campground” in English don’t mean the same thing to the Taiwanese as they do to me. This place my new friend had brought me to was essentially a collection of hotels. I guess the fact that the half dozen or so buildings were spread out over a park-like area made it a campground in his mind. But I didn’t see it. And why would pointing out my tent and sleeping bag make this guy think of this place? There was no place to put a tent. They rented hotel rooms. I ended up at a place with the unlikely name of “Jessie’s B&B”. They charged $2,500 New Taiwan dollars a night and for that princely sum I got a very large ground floor room with two beds, a TV, a kettle, some complimentary tea and coffee, and a bathroom with a shower cabinet and fixtures that wouldn’t have been out of place in a palace. The showerhead must have been two feet across.

I passed the evening fiddling with my bike. I’d been having trouble in particular with my Topeak handlebar bag. The bag was meant to attach to a plastic thing that clamped onto the handlebars. Unfortunately, it simply wasn’t strong enough to stay in place. The clamp twisted on the handlebars and the whole bag flopped down. It was still useable, but it was a pain because the front pocket wasn’t accessible anymore and when you opened the main compartment, everything threatened to spill out of it. I tried a dozen different ways to tighten the clamp, but nothing worked and eventually I gave up.

 

Tags: bike, Fushing by Bike, scooter, tent