Monday December 6, 2010 8;45 a.m.

Formost Hotel Lobby – Kenting, Taiwan

Today is my last day in Kenting. My ticket on the High Speed Rail back to Taipei is for 7:30 tonight, but I’ll probably end up going back earlier than that. I tried to arrange to keep my room until mid- or late-afternoon, but no one really understood what I was talking about. Hotels want you to check out in the morning and that is the end of it. I offered to pay extra to keep the room for another half day, but that is so unusual I guess that they couldn’t grasp the concept. I was so impressed when the scooter lady actually adjusted her thinking so that a “day” of scooter matched the customer’s needs instead of the calendar. That way of thinking hasn’t trickled down to hotels as yet. I suppose it makes sense for them. Every morning I’ve been here, most of the guests have trotted down obediently first thing in the morning, checked out, and piled into cars. Morning is time to go, not time to stay.

It probably won’t make much difference anyway. I thought I could do a few last things in Kenting before heading back, but the timing probably won’t work out. The bus back to the HSR station takes 2 hours. And I’ll need time to wait for the bus here and to make my train, so I’ll have to leave pretty early anyway.

Yesterday turned out to be a return trip to the aquarium. I gassed up my scooter for a big journey around the peninsula, but there wasn’t much out there to explore and it started to rain. I went into the Kenting Forest Recreational Area, and I guess it’s possible to go hiking in there and explore some caves, but I was more in the mood for driving, so I just drove through the hills and along the coast. I then turned inland, but the scenery wasn’t what I expected. Then the rain started, and by that point I wasn’t far away from the aquarium. I was disappointed that I hadn’t seen the giant octopus and the penguins, so I thought it would be interesting to go back to the aquarium. It seemed like the best way to spend the afternoon, and I was absolutely right.

I knew exactly where the aquarium was this time and I drove straight there, got my ticket, and was inside in short order. I went straight to the Waters of the World complex, where they housed the giant octopus. I found the Deep Ocean exhibit, stepped inside, and there was the giant octopus – a computer 3D projection onto the wall! I guess that is why the brochure was so glib about how the octopus was poised to attack. It was poised to attack because that is how the artist created it to look. I asked at the information counter and the woman there confirmed that there was no actual giant octopus. The computer projection was the attraction.

I was disappointed not to see a giant octopus, but I didn’t regret my decision to revisit the aquarium at all. There was so much to see that it was like a brand new place. The penguins were a lot of fun. They were actually aware of the people watching them and they swam up to the glass and interacted with the people. I’m not sure what effect this would have on the penguins in the long term, but most people were waving their fingers in front of the penguins and tapping on the glass and making faces and posing with the penguins for pictures. The penguins were right with them and snapped at their fingers (probably thinking they were things to eat). I was amused at the number of people who held their digital cameras out at arm’s length and snapped portraits of themselves with the penguins behind them. The height of the water was such that the penguins were bobbing at exactly the same height as the heads of the people. I snuck a picture of one guy who kept posing with the penguins again and again.

Most of the fish were behaving in entirely different ways and I was seeing them in a different light and seeing entirely new fish, so I ended up going through the entire aquarium a second time. I even found completely new exhibits that I had missed the first time.

The highlights though, were the whale shark and the beluga whales. This time, the whale shark was swimming differently and going directly past the glass window again and again. It was a very impressive fish. The room was quite crowded and a big sigh went up from the crowd each time the shark appeared. The room got more and more crowded and people started jostling for seats, so I started to think that something was up. Sure enough, a young woman came out with a microphone and gave a long speech in Chinese and a big TV screen at the end of the room turned on. The screen showed the top of the tank and a man was swinging out to the center on a hydraulic lift. I began to understand that it was time to feed the whale shark. That’s why so many people had gathered and probably also why the whale shark’s behavior had altered. It was getting close to lunch time.

I’d seen a notice on my previous visit about feeding the whale shark, and I wondered how you did it. There is no way that you could simply put food in the tank and expect the whale shark to get it. The hundreds of other faster and smaller fish would easily get it first. I assumed that the whale shark would have to be led into a separate tank and fed there. I’m sure the whale shark would easily learn how to get to a new tank, but how do you accomplish that without all the other fish following? The whale shark had a regular entourage of fish who swam with him the entire time. And now that lunch time was approaching it seemed that the entire tank of fish was following the whale shark.

I suppose this was a good test of Occam’s razor. All of my ideas for feeding the whale shark were very complicated, and none of them seemed possible. But I wasn’t thinking simply enough. How do you feed a giant whale shark when there are hundreds of other fish in the tank with it? Easy. You simply take a big scoop on the end of a long stick and when the whale shark comes to the surface and opens his giant maw, you tip the scoop and dump the food right into his mouth. The man on the hydraulic lift over the water had a large basin of food and he filled his scoop from the basin. Then he reached out over the water and moved the scoop around the surface to get the whale shark’s attention. This got the attention of all the fish and they mobbed the scoop, but they couldn’t get at the food inside. Eventually, the slow-moving whale shark made a turn and came by. He rose to the surface, opened his mouth, and got a liter or two of shark food poured into his mouth. It was simplicity itself and the whale shark swam around twenty times or so and got a big mouthful each time. I assume the people in charge of the place know how much one is supposed to feed a whale shark, but considering its size, it didn’t seem like enough to me. It would have been nice to understand what the woman and the man were saying. The man had a wireless mic around his head like a stage performer and he explained what he was doing. I’m sure they said how old the whale shark was and how much it was fed, but I missed all of that. Certainly, the whale shark had been around long enough to know the routine. It had likely been fed in this way at the same time every day for years and years. It was incredibly exciting for us spectators, but it was probably business as usual for the whale shark. The whale shark seemed to know exactly when the last scoop of whale shark food made its appearance. Then it went right back to its stately swim around the top of the tank – always counter-clockwise. Most of the rays and sharks swam clockwise. The whale shark always counter-clockwise.

The beluga whales were also behaving in a completely new way. The first time I saw them, they were both just hovering at two big grates. Later on, I came across an outdoor area above a tank with the belugas inside. A performance of some kind had obviously just ended and people were leaving. This told me that the belugas knew that they were about to be fed and they were waiting for the grates to open so that they could swim through to that other tank for the performance and their lunch reward. When I saw them yesterday, it must have been post-lunch, and the belugas were back to their normal selves and they were a joy to watch. In fact, seeing them was quite a shock. I turned a corner into a tunnel and several thousand pounds of white beluga suddenly flew right past me. I was astonished. The belugas, my brochure told me, are loquacious animals, and I saw that for myself. These two swam around like puppies at play. They went around the tank in several different patterns, and one pattern brought them straight to the glass wall of the tunnel, where they would turn on their backs and curve past, their body touching the wall and literally inches away from the faces of the people watching them. They’d bottom out upside down and skim along the floor and then zoom up to begin the circle all over again. Occasionally, they’d change direction at the last minute and flow over the top of the tunnel and above our heads. It was extraordinary to watch and I stayed for over an hour. It was also fun to watch the reaction of the people coming into the tunnel. Many, like me, were blown away by the sudden appearance of the belugas and they’d shout at their companions to hurry up and see them. Others, to my great surprise, would barely glance at the whales and simply hurry through the tunnels. To be honest, this was the more standard reaction. I was surprised, actually, to see how most people behaved in the aquarium in general. They went through the exhibits like they were in a kind of race barely stopping to look at anything. Most who stopped did so for a photo op or because it was a scheduled show like the whale shark feeding. I wondered why this was so. Was it because the Taiwanese grew up on the ocean and were blasé about fish in general? Whatever the reason, most people blew through the exhibits at a pace that astonished me. I wondered if perhaps the tone of the exhibits was wrong for Taiwan. The place had clearly been designed and built by non-Taiwanese. It had a tone that would be familiar to most westerners – a kind of understated design. I thought it was very well designed and very interesting. But for the Taiwanese, it might be too understated – not enough noise and light and showmanship. It was, perhaps, too quiet.

I stayed at the aquarium until 5 p.m. or so, leaving me enough light to make my way slowly back to Kenting. I wanted to follow the coast this time and make my way along the small roads. It was impossible to find the coast road on my way to the aquarium, but leaving from the aquarium, it was right there and it was a pleasure to drive back. I thought the coast road would be a small and bumpy back road, but it was actually very new and very smooth and suitable for buses and cars. The scenery wasn’t that great, but it was pleasant, and I took every side road into the small towns. Some of them had a hotel or two and a dive shop, but most were just ordinary towns where people grew up and lived their lives. I still find those lives very mysterious. In these towns I see the elderly and the very young. I rarely see anyone in between. The most visible are the elderly. They are sitting outside their cement homes, the men just staring, the women usually preparing some kind of food in wide plastic basins. The men often have motorized wheelchairs or carts and they are driving from place to place. I don’t know what people do in these towns. I don’t know what the various buildings are. That is one big difference between just driving around a place in Canada and a place like Taiwan. In Canada, I can tell you what the various buildings are. They make sense to me as either places where people live or where commercial things are going on. Here, I never have any idea what is going on. I see buildings everywhere that make no sense to me. I have no idea what they are or what they’re for. I can’t even tell you if they are in operation or abandoned. Buildings that are still being used look abandoned and empty. Many have that half-completed air like construction was halted halfway. Then there are so many buildings that really are abandoned. Things that fall apart here never seem to get cleaned up. They are just left there to rot and crumble and gather garbage. The piles of debris attract more debris until you see piles of junk everywhere. Even the homes don’t make sense to me. They don’t look like homes to me and I can’t tell how people live their lives in them – the pattern of their lives is mysterious to me. It’s a very foreign place even after all this time.

Tags: High Speed Rail, Kenting Trip, Monday December, scooter, Taiwan