Saturday February 26, 2011

8:25 a.m. Neiwan, Taiwan

The stage for this little trip in Taiwan will be pretty difficult to set, as there are very few places like this little town anywhere in the world. I guess you could call it a tourist town. At one time, Taiwan was a Japanese colony, and the Japanese built a number of narrow-gauge railways to serve mining and forestry companies. There is very little forestry and mining today, and these railways have all been converted into tourist attractions.

There is one, the Pingxi line, very near Taipei. I go up into the region very often on my scooter or bicycle. The railway still functions, but now it carries people instead of timber or ore. All of the towns along the track now have dozens of restaurants and cafes and other things for tourists.

A second line goes up to the Alishan region in the south of Taiwan. Its terminus is the Alishan National Park, which contains dozens of giant millennia-old cedar trees. That particular line was badly damaged in a recent typhoon and still hasn’t been repaired. I believe it crosses over a hundred bridges, so you can imagine the kind of damage that can be done by the massive typhoons that hit Taiwan.

The third line (that I’m aware of) is this one, which runs from Hsinchu to Neiwan. I knew very little about this line before yesterday. In fact, I knew nothing, having never visited it before. Neiwan is the last station on this line, and it has turned into a bustling little town.

Neiwan is perhaps much more touristy than the towns on the other railway lines. I arrived here quite late in the day yesterday and had only a few minutes to wander around, and I was struck by the gaudiness of the place. The Chinese sometimes care little for the outward appearance of buildings and towns, and Neiwan is a good example of that. One can see what Neiwan is supposed to be: a quaint mountain village at the end of an historic railway. In fact, all the elements for a beautiful little village are here. The original railway station is still here. The village is surrounded by mountains. There is a beautiful river nearby with a number of suspension bridges across it. I’m sure there were lots of interesting wooden Japanese buildings at one time. All of that, however, has been buried under hundreds of gaudy signs, full-size super-hero figures, and junk. At the entrance to the town, I saw a sign that said “Fantasy Space.” I think I understand that sign now. I believe the community chose that theme for itself and they are trying (in a very loose way) to make it like a Hollywood theme park. On my stroll this morning, I passed Spiderman and ET, for example.

Now I think I’m going to surprise you by saying that despite all of this gaudiness, I really like the place. That’s what I mean when I say that these places (and Taiwan in general) are hard to describe. The town is ugly and cluttered and bizarre, but underneath there beats a very good and interesting heart. The Taiwanese are, if nothing else, very good-natured. They don’t take stuff like that seriously. It’s gaudy and touristy, but it isn’t gaudy and touristy the way that Niagara Falls once was. It isn’t a touristy style that gets between the people and the place. It’s natural and they don’t take it too seriously. The Taiwanese love to come to places like this. There is very good food for one thing, and the Taiwanese love their food. I’m not sure if I got across what I’m trying to say. I guess it is this: I can imagine that in Europe there are dozens of quaint mountain villages picture-perfect in every way. Yet, I can see how that quaintness might feel like a veneer. This place has no veneer. It is all right there out in the open, bursting with life, and ugly as can be. The ugliness comes naturally.

I had no idea yesterday that I would end up here. I didn’t even know this town existed. I had my sights set on a region in general, not on any particular town or place. It took me a while to get ready, as I was writing and having a cup of coffee. I almost didn’t leave at all. It started to feel like it was too late in the day. However, I got myself together and threw some T-shirts into my backpack and my camera into my knapsack and took off.

It took me an hour and a half to get out of urban Taipei. That’s a long time, but it is an interesting drive. It isn’t like sitting on a highway in Canada. You go through very interesting neighborhoods and have to stay very much on your toes the entire time. Driving here is not safe, but neither is it boring!

I don’t know what was wrong with me yesterday, but I got completely turned around twice on my way out of the city. I’ve done that trip many times, but it is very confusing and I took the wrong turn twice and found myself completely lost. I had to backtrack like a bloodhound sniffing out familiar sights to eventually find my way.

There is a very direct route from Taipei to this region, but it isn’t an interesting route. I took the longer route up into the mountains through a town called Fushing. I discovered Fushing on a trip several years ago and have gone back many times. They have a very inexpensive hostel-type place there that was built on the site of one of Chiang Kai-Shek’s old villas. It’s a beautiful region and I love driving down the twisty mountain roads.

Past Fushing, I turned right onto route 118. From that point, it was all new ground and I slowed down the scooter to take in my surroundings. Most of the mountain regions in Taiwan are aboriginal, and this region is the home of the Hakka people. For me, the Taiwanese and the various aboriginal groups are indistinguishable. I recognize aboriginal villages, because they are decorated with aboriginal symbols and paintings and that sort of thing. But in my day-to-day life, I’m not really aware of the co-existence of the Chinese and the aboriginals. Everyone seems to just live together without much effort. I generally don’t know who is aboriginal and who is Chinese.

I don’t know why, but it felt like a very long drive on my scooter yesterday. It seemed to take much longer than normal to get out of Taipei and up to Fushing. Then 118 seemed to go on for a very long time. That’s an odd thing about Taiwan: it feels very dense. The distance I covered was extremely small in Canadian terms. Yet, I seemed to be traveling all day long. I suppose it is partially because I gravitate to the smallest and twistiest mountain roads I can find. And twisty mountain roads take a lot longer to drive down than straight highways.

One of my greatest pleasures here in Taiwan is simply driving my scooter down these mountain roads. I’m astonished, in fact, at how many roads there are. I choose the smallest road I can find on my maps, but then off that road there will be other even smaller roads not marked on my map. And they branch out into still other roads. They cover this small island like a spider’s web, yet you often feel like you are in the middle of nowhere. I’m constantly wondering why they built this road and where it could be going.

I was on several such roads yesterday, including #60. I’d arrived in the region I wanted to explore, and I turned into the mountains on the first road that I came across. Then I spotted a still-smaller road numbered #60, and I turned down it to see where it would go. In most countries of the world you can rely on a good map, guidebooks, and other information to learn about a region. Here, I find that is unnecessary. There is so much jammed into the country that it is impossible to list it all in a guidebook or anything like that. The Lonely Planet guidebook, for example, lists some places in Taiwan and describes them, but it is nowhere near an exhaustive list. It feels like a random assortment of places that the author just happened to stumble across. Another visitor would stumble across an entire book’s worth of entirely different places. I could write an entire book about the places I see on just one of my weekend trips.

I have to say that the places I see are often a complete mystery. That is one of the pleasures of travel here. Things can be very strange. The Taiwanese do things in a different way. They have their own rhythm, and things often make no sense. Add to that the fact that all the signs are in Chinese, and you are left simply guessing as to what things are and what is going on.

It was fairly late in the day yesterday when I turned down #60, and I was thinking in terms of finding a place to stay. I didn’t think there would be anything down #60, but I suddenly saw a large number of signs for hot spring hotels and spas. I also saw two government signs for what they called “Economic Hostels.” I had never seen such a sign before, so I was curious what an Economic Hostel could be. It certainly sounded right up my alley, but try as I might, I couldn’t find them. That is another aspect to Taiwan. There are a lot of signs, but their placement generally doesn’t make sense. They often send you down the wrong road. There will often be signs (lots of signs) far away from the attraction in question. However, once you get close, the signs disappear. There is rarely the sign at the very end that just points to where it is. The signs will lead you from very far away to the area where the attraction is. Then they will peter out and suddenly disappear leaving you lost. I believe one explanation lies in how the Taiwanese don’t need the signs. They don’t go wandering around looking for things. They grow up here and they know everything already. They know where everything is. And they generally make reservations for all their trips and they go on group tours. So the signs serve no purpose. I think they are put up just out of habit, but they aren’t needed. No one relies on them, so the fact that they are confusing never occurs to anyone but the odd foreigner like me.

In the case of the Economic Hostel, I was led up a beautiful river valley with a half a dozen old suspension bridges across it. It was a fantastic drive and I was happy to follow the signs this way and that. Suddenly, the signs stopped completely, and I found myself at a complicated intersection of roads. (You haven’t seen a complicated intersection until you’ve been in Taiwan.) This one was interesting because one option was to go across a huge bridge to a road that sliced through the mountains. A thirty-foot statue of a Hakka warrior towered over the road. I have no idea why it was there. It was the kind of thing that generally welcomed you to a big town or something. But there was nothing there. It felt like a left-over bit of civilization from hundreds of years ago. Yet, it was built just recently.

I couldn’t resist the bridge, the road, and the statue and I turned that way. The road was narrow but in very good condition and it twisted and turned high into the mountains. I kept hoping to come across a perfect little village with a perfect little hotel (or at the very least an Economic Hostel), but there was nothing but forest and mountains. I came across a couple of cement trucks and one truck with a huge load of bamboo. It was coming down the mountains and its tires were giving off clouds of steam. I assumed the braking had heated up the rims and the brakes were red hot.

Had I stopped to look at my map, I would have realized that this road went all the way across the mountains to the Northern Cross-Island Highway. However, I didn’t look at my map and I just drove and drove and drove waiting to see where it would end or where it would lead. I would have kept on going except that it was very late, and I wanted to find a place to stay. I had to leave it for another trip and I turned around.

I went back to the intersection and chose another road that also led deeper into the mountains. It led me past several hot spring resorts and all kinds of crazy buildings, but there was no Economic Hostel. I didn’t even bother to check out the resorts. They are generally way over-priced and they don’t offer much of interest for me. I stayed in one hot spring hotel last year because I had no choice. I had a huge tub in my room with hot spring water and I climbed into it. I only lasted five minutes. I just got bored. I never got much pleasure from just sitting in a hot tub of water. The Taiwanese, however, are crazy for hot springs.

The Economic Hostels would forever have to remain a mystery. Try as I might, I couldn’t find them. The signs led me to that intersection and then vanished. On my way down, I saw a big complex of buildings that perhaps could function as a hotel. One never knows in Taiwan. So I turned down the steep driveway and asked around. It took me a while, but I finally figured out that it was a church complex of some kind. I became a center of interest for half a dozen older men and women and there seemed to be the possibility of a room there. It was hard to be sure. All I could do was wait it out and see what happened. I’m so used to these sorts of vague situations that I have no problem with them anymore. My whole life seems to consist of standing around with a bunch of people in some country somewhere with no idea what is going on. I just wait until it all becomes clear.

In this situation, a woman suddenly appeared and she gestured me to follow her. I guessed she was going to show me their rooms. Again, I can’t really describe this place. There is nothing like it in Canada or anywhere I’ve ever been. Words fail me. Nothing like it would be allowed to exist in Canada. It would be shut down by every possible government agency. I’m sure the buildings were structurally unsound. They were filled with garbage and junk. It was just nasty. And they brought me to this bizarre hallway with curtains about four feet high on each side. You pull back the curtains and you look into what felt like a crawlspace. And it was filled with old clothes and dirty sleeping mats and food pots. The only reason I saw this was that I had my own flashlight on my keychain. There were no lights that anyone could find or turn on. If you saw footage of this place as part of a news story on a third-world prison where hundreds died, you’d believe it. Yet, this is where people from this church slept and lived. She was showing me this place as somewhere I could crawl inside and sleep if I wanted to. It was very bizarre and matched nothing in my experience. If there was any kind of an actual room with a bed, I might have stayed. The complex was very interesting and strange. It looked like they were setting up for a big revival meeting outside, and it might have been interesting to hang out there. But I didn’t want to crawl into that space and just lie there in the dark. So I thanked them and got back onto my scooter.

And after that, I ended up in Neiwan. Another odd angle to Taiwanese tourist towns and tourist attractions is that they shut down early. People generally go on day trips. They don’t stay anywhere unless it is “famous” or is a luxury resort or they are with a school or work group. There is little sense of staying overnight in a place like Neiwan. When I showed up, it was just getting dark and it was still hopping. I drove my scooter up and down the narrow streets looking for anything that looked like a hotel. Hotels are difficult to find here. They often don’t exist, even in tourist towns like this. And they don’t look like hotels. You can’t tell a hotel is a hotel just from looking at it. There are also usually no signs in English. Finding one is a hit-or-miss affair, and I’ve learned that the only way to find one is to ask people. Even that can be difficult. The lack of knowledge that people have of their own town is often a source of astonishment to me. In this case, I happened to be standing right beside a hotel and didn’t know it. I asked a man if there was a place to stay in Neiwan – any kind of hotel or B&B or hostel or homestay. He said there was nothing. He called out a man from his neighboring shop and he also said there was nothing like that in Neiwan. They both said I’d have to go to those hot spring resorts I’d seen in the mountains. I drove away and explored a few more streets and alleys and then came back to get my bearings. I was right beside the men I’d asked previously, and a woman came up to me and said that her son could help me. He was at another shop right there. He was educated and spoke English. I mentioned I was looking for a hotel and he pointed to the door right beside us and said that it was the door to a hotel. He called the owner over and in two minutes, I was being shown floor after floor after floor of hotel rooms. And this hotel was immediately beside the shop where the man had told me there were no hotels in Neiwan. You’d assume it was just a language problem or miscommunication of some kind, but this happens to me all the time, so there must be something else going on.

In any event, it was no big deal. I was just extremely happy to find this place right in the town itself. It wasn’t terribly expensive at NT$1,000/night (about $33 Canadian) and it came with its own bathroom and a nice bed and a TV and the usual towels and free soap and shampoo and toothbrushes and toothpaste. It was actually a pretty bare and ugly room and not worth NT$1,000 in the Taiwanese market, but I guess being right in a tourist town they charged a premium.

I settled in and stepped outside and found that the town had emptied and everything was shutting down. I actually like this aspect to Taiwanese towns. I usually feel like the only person there at night and I enjoy the quiet. It feels like my own place at night. I walk around the streets and watch the local people shutting down and cleaning up after the busy day. Then in the morning, I can watch as they get ready for the thousands of new people. If you came just for the day and endured the crowds and went home, you’d have a completely different experience. I think many foreigners I know in Taiwan might dismiss this kind of tourist town for that very reason. They’d only see the crowds and the gaudiness. By staying overnight, I get a feel for the reality underneath. The people who arrive each day are like an ocean tide washing over a harbor. At night, the tide goes out and reveals everything underneath the water.

Taiwan feels somewhat like my home by now. I’ve lived here much longer than anywhere else. Still, it feels like I keep rediscovering it. It’s like the old onion analogy from Shrek. I’m peeling back the layers. In the past 18 months, I’ve been doing much more traveling than before and experiencing Taiwan in a brand new way. I’ve certainly enjoyed my life here lately in a way that I didn’t before. I worked far too much before and the weekends were just a time to recover for more work. My life was also complicated. Now my life is very simple and I spend all my time planning trips like this – big and small. I think trips like this give me more pleasure than anything else. There is nothing like discovering a new region and finding a temporary little home for a few nights.

Tags: Canada, Economic Hostels, Hsinchu County Trip, scooter, Taipei, Taiwan