The legendary trip to Lanyu (Orchid Island) doesn’t begin until tomorrow morning at 7:18 (that’s when my train leaves for Taitung), but I’ll begin the official account today. It’s 8:30 in the morning and I’m in a coffee shop near work. I have half an hour and a cup of coffee and Beth Orton playing on the Nano.

Other than booking the trains, boats, and planes to get me to Lanyu and back (a major effort in itself), I haven’t done much in the way of preparation. I haven’t even packed. I’ll do that tonight after work. I also have done no research. Most things will be a surprise.

I’ve always wanted to see the city of Taitung, so that should be interesting. The weather isn’t looking promising, but I’m trying to have an open mind about that. I don’t want to have the idea that if it rains the trip is ruined. It will be nicer if the sun is shining, but rain won’t be the end of the world either. And I have an idea that even if the forecast calls for a bit of cloud and rain in Taitung, Lanyu will still be clear. I remember when I took my boat trip out to Turtle Island that it was perfectly clear out on the ocean while the island of Taiwan itself was completely lost in dark rain clouds. I recently re-watched the Peter Jackson version of King Kong and that island is like Taiwan – permanently socked in by a heavy blanket of clouds.

The region around Taitung has also interested me for a long time. I’ve long wanted to ride my bike around there. Taiwan does something interesting there. There are two mountain ranges – a small one that runs right along the ocean and then the main mountain range in the interior. In between these two ranges is quite a wide flat area. This is where Taitung is located.

Upon arriving in Taitung, I plan to go directly to the harbor to check up on the boats. I want to make sure that my boat is still going, and I also want to see if there is an earlier boat. I’d go that very afternoon if I could. It won’t be a terrible thing to spend a day in Taitung, but I’d rather spend it on the island. If there are no boats going earlier, I’ll look for a hotel and then a scooter. I imagine Taitung will be busy and perhaps I should have booked a hotel room, but I’m more in the mood to wing it. I’m sure I’ll be able to find something. By the time I’d finished booking all of my trains, boats and planes, I was tired of making arrangements.

 

 

Thursday April 1, 2010 7:25 a.m.

Train 1053 to Taitung, Car 3, Seat 12

The train just pulled away from the platform and we’ve begun the long trip to Taitung. Things worked out fine in terms of catching the train. I’ve caught lots of trains out of Taipei and I know exactly how to go about it. I also live one MRT stop away from the train station, so I can leave just a few minutes before my train and still make it on time. The trains here are very efficient and they leave and arrive exactly on time. The one glitch in the system (one I’ve noticed many times) is that there are no train numbers on the trains themselves. You book tickets based on train numbers (this train is #1053). The train number is printed on the ticket. You find out which platform to go to by looking for your train number on the monitors. But when the trains come and go, you can’t be sure which is yours because they don’t have any numbers on them. This has always puzzled me.

Packing last night was a bit of a chore. I just wasn’t in the mood to pack. I’m always tired at night. But I did it. And to my surprise and joy, I slept relatively well. I woke up on my own just before six this morning with plenty of time to shower and have something to eat and finish packing and then go to the train station. I even had lots of time to stop at 7-11 and get some water and milk for the trip.

I decided in the end to bring one of my film cameras – my Contax Aria. That means my knapsack is heavier and fuller than I’d like. I find that my knapsack and my backpack are unbalanced. You’d think since my backpack was bigger that it would be much heavier. However, I end up with a light backpack that is loosely packed and a knapsack that is very heavy and just jammed with stuff. That’s because I carry so much stuff that I want with me at my seat on the train or in restaurants or wherever. I have my NEO (a word processor), my digital point-and-shoot camera, a book, my Taiwan Lonely Planet, my maps, my iPod, a jacket, the Aria, an extra lens, filters, film, and other things. I need a bigger daypack and a smaller backpack, if that makes any sense.

I was glad that my train left as early as 7:18. That meant that the MRT and the train station were still relatively empty. Things don’t get jammed until later when everyone goes to work. I’m not that thrilled with my situation on the train. I have an aisle seat, and I would have preferred a window. There is enough legroom on this train, but not a great deal. I’ve been on much nicer trains than this one in Taiwan. And my seatmate is one of those large older men that spread out their arms, legs, everything, and take over the whole space. He also has some kind of throat thing going on and coughs all the time. On the other side of the car, there is a young mother with a baby and a toddler. The two monsters are sleeping right now, but I can imagine that they will be screaming and crying at some point. Hopefully, they won’t scream and cry too much.

 

As Perfect as a Day Can Get

11:10 a.m.

Time for a trip update. We reached Haulien in what felt like record time. I guess I didn’t sleep as much as I had thought last night, because I was drowsy, and I got out my neck pillow and closed my eyes for much of the trip. I didn’t feel like I was missing anything because I’ve taken the train to Hualien at least a dozen times, probably more. I used to teach classes there very Monday. I also drove to Huaien once on the scooter.

I’ve been more alert since Hualien, and I’ve been reading and looking out the window. The day is as perfect as a day can get. The sun is out. The skies are blue. This is a good time for a trip like this. In the summer, it would be extremely hot. Right now it is cool and nice. The scenery has been very beautiful, though nothing I haven’t seen before. The mountains in Taiwan rise to as high as four thousand meters, so they are nothing to sneeze at. One gets perfect views of the mountains on the right. The initial peaks aren’t that high, but you can see the central range sticking up beyond them. The smaller coastal range is visible now on the left, and the train is racing along in between the two lines of mountains. This is a side of Taiwan that took me very much by surprise the first time I saw it – the high mountains. One hears all the time about how crowded and small Taiwan is, but you would never know it from the view outside my window. It looks like a mountain wilderness. On the west coast, it is much more crowded. The west coast consists of flat plains. That is where all the towns and the people are. Here on the east coast it is fairly empty.

From another point of view, trips like this drive home just how small Taiwan is in real terms. I spend a lot of time looking at maps of Taiwan, and I think since I’m used to looking at maps of much larger places (like Canada) I have the instinctive sense that this map represents a big place – a country after all. But Taiwan is small in real terms. The whole place could fit in between my home town of Sarnia and Toronto. So even though I imagined my journey to Taitung to be a very large and long one, I’m getting there very fast. I’m surprised when I check my map to see how far I’ve come.

Taitung and the Fuh Yuan Hotel

2:33 p.m.

Hour by hour updates. I’m in Taitung and I’ve settled into a hotel and made some changes in my travel arrangements. Taitung doesn’t strike me as very special. It looks like so many of the towns I’ve seen in Taiwan. Perhaps there are nice areas and interesting areas, but I don’t really see it. It’s a lot quieter than Taipei and a lot less busy, so that is nice.

One negative thing is that they built a new train station a few kilometers outside of town. The old station, the one right in the middle of town, has been abandoned. I don’t know why they did that. They probably had their reasons, but I dislike it when train stations are outside of the town. I prefer to arrive right downtown in the hustle and bustle.

Taitung’s setting is also not that great. I’ve always liked Hualien. It is nestled right in the mountains. Taitung is far from the mountains as it turns out and there is no scenery surrounding it. The coastline might be nice, but without any transportation, I don’t know that I’ll go check it out. I really feel helpless when I don’t have a bicycle or a scooter.

It always comes as a surprise when I leave Taipei and suddenly find myself among Taiwanese that don’t speak English. I guess I take these things way too casually these days. I don’t even bother preparing anymore. So when I arrived at the train station, I had no idea what I was going to do. I just figured I’d take a taxi downtown and then walk around and find a place to stay. There was no shuttle bus or city bus that I could see, so I just hopped in a taxi. But then the taxi driver wanted to know where I wanted to go, and I had no way to tell him. In Taipei, I always know at least an intersection or something like that. Here, I don’t know anything. So there I sat in the back of the taxi realizing that I had no way to communicate with this guy. I tried out a few English words, but nothing got through. So I had to resort to my Lonely Planet. I opened it to the Taitung pages and then I pointed at a hotel’s name at random. I didn’t care what hotel I went to. I just wanted to go downtown to the area around the old train station. Once there, I could walk around and find my own place.

Once the taxi driver had a destination, things went smoothly. He used the taxi meter, and the fare came to NT$215 for the trip. He dropped me off right at the front door of the Fuh Yuan Hotel. I scanned the streets as we drove along, and compared what I saw with my maps, so I had a pretty good idea of where I was.

Once I was at the Fuh Yuan Hotel, I figured there was no harm in checking it out. There is little point in walking from hotel to hotel to hotel when they are all roughly the same. The Fuh Yuan is clearly one of the cheaper hotels, so that is good enough. And when I went through the front door, I found the receptionist to be extremely pretty and friendly, so that was nice. She didn’t speak English, but she told me with a hand signal how much the rooms were – NT$700 – and gave me the key to room 501 so I could check it out. The room was nothing special, but it had all the requisite parts – a bed, a bathroom, sheets, and pillows and towels. And it had some comforts like a TV and air conditioning. I paid my NT$700 and had a home for the night. To check in, all I had to do was sign my name in a ledger.

 

Booking the Ferry to Lanyu

I chatted a little bit with the woman at reception, and when she realized I was going to Lanyu, she offered to call the ferry companies for me. She spoke to them in Chinese and I spoke to them in English, and I was pleased to find out that there was a ferry leaving the next morning – Friday morning – at 9:00. That’s perfect. My current reservation was for 1:00 p.m. on Saturday. I really didn’t want to wait that long. I made a new reservation for tomorrow morning. Coming back is still a bit of a problem. I have a flight to Taipei on Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. However, the only ferry on Tuesday leaves at 3:30. In Taipei, they told me that I could make that connection. Here, they said it was impossible. It looks like I will have to come back by ferry on Monday and then spend the night in Taitung again before my flight on Tuesday. Not having your own transportation is a real pain. No wonder I like to ride bicycles.

There was still the option to fly from Lanyu to Taitung, and I asked the pretty receptionist to call the airline. She did, but neither of us could get much information out of them. I thought I understood the woman to say that there was a seat on a flight on Tuesday, but that to buy it, I would have to go to the airport. I jumped in a taxi (NT$195) and went to the airport. Daily Air has a counter there. I asked about flights on Tuesday, and they said that they were all booked. So that was a waste of time and money, including another NT$250 to come back in to Taitung by taxi. With all my taxi fares, I could have rented a scooter for the day by now.

Anyway, I’m VERY pleased to get a spot on the ferry leaving tomorrow morning. Ironically, this is the ferry I had originally had a seat on. Then they called and cancelled it. Now I guess it’s back on. The final result is that I’ll arrive on Lanyu at around noon on Friday. That will give me enough time to hopefully get settled and find a scooter to rent. Then I’ll have Saturday and Sunday on Lanyu, and I come back at 1:00 p.m. on Monday. It could be worse, and it might turn out to be perfect.

 

Renting a Scooter on Lanyu

6:00 p.m. update

With all the boats and flights and trains being so full, I started to worry that I might have trouble even renting a scooter on Lanyu. I don’t really care that much about accommodation (as long as I get something), but I really wanted a scooter. And it turns out that I am more prepared than I thought. As I was flipping through my various papers about my boat and train and plane reservations, I found a list of phone numbers from Lanyu that I had printed out from the Internet. I don’t even remember doing it, but I found a list of phone numbers for scooter rentals. I was going to go back to the hotel and ask the receptionist to call for me, but then I realized that I can call them myself on my cell phone. It’s a funny thing, but it never occurs to me that I can do that. I probably never think to do it because I hate speaking on phones. I always like to do things in person.

Anyway, I dialed the first number on the list. It was another cell phone number so I didn’t have to dial any special area codes. That is a convenient thing about cell phones. A man answered in Chinese, and it became clear that he didn’t speak English at all. However, there was a commotion and then a woman’s voice came on the line speaking in English.

I had no idea who I was speaking to, but she seemed willing to help, so I asked her about renting a scooter. She said that she would look into it for me. She said that it cost NT$400/day. When I told her that I wanted one for four days (actually 2 full days and 2 half days – but I was willing to pay for four days), she said that she could ask for a discount – maybe 1,500 for the four days. That was only NT$100 off. I was perfectly happy paying the NT$400/day. That seemed reasonable, and I told her as much.

No Place to Stay? Uh-Oh

Then she asked me if I had a place to stay. I said that I didn’t and I heard a sudden intake of breath. That intake of breath told me that I might be in trouble. She said that everything on the island was booked solid, and that I probably wouldn’t be able to find anything. I’m not sure if that was true or not. I was going on the assumption that I’d be able to find something somewhere. Things have a way of working themselves out. This woman said that she had a friend that might have a room available – one of the homestays. She would inquire about the motorcycle and the room and call me back.

I waited for quite a while, but I didn’t hear from her. So I finally called the same number, and we went through the same routine. A man answered who didn’t speak English. We kind of babbled at each other for a while. Then I heard running footsteps, and this woman came back on the line. This time, I learned something. The number I had called did not belong in any way to this woman. The number was for this scooter shop. This man knew of a nurse named Theresa who spoke English and who was known for helping out foreigners. So he ran across the street to the clinic and gave the phone to her. She was helping me not as part of her business, but just because she was helpful. She told me her name was Theresa, and that she was listed in the Taiwan Lonely Planet. It must be in the newer edition, because her name isn’t in my edition.

She told me that she had reserved a scooter for me. She had also reserved a room at her friend’s place. It was a homestay with a shared bathroom – not luxurious from the sounds of it – and it cost NT$400. Unfortunately, I could only have that room for one night. It was reserved already for the rest of the weekend. She gave me her cell phone number and the cell phone number of her friend with the homestay. After I got off the phone from talking to her, I called the homestay guy. He wasn’t home and he called me back about an hour later. We confirmed the room for the night (though I think he thought I was coming on Saturday, not Friday – so I’m not quite sure what is going on). He said that he was trying to find me something else for the rest of the time, and so far he had come up with some space at a local church. Apparently, this church rented out rooms or space or something to tourists when there was an overflow and a need. I couldn’t understand what exactly he was talking about, but it could be as simple as a tatami mat on the floor somewhere. Of course, I’d rather have a nice room with my own bathroom, but I don’t really care. I’ll take whatever is on offer. Arrangements like this can sometimes even be better because it means that you are forced into social settings and you meet a lot more people. It seems that the English language is very thin on the ground on Lanyu and having Theresa and then this homestay owner on your side is a good thing.

And the Rain Came Down

The homestay guy had another thing to say. He told me to make sure I brought good rain gear. He said that the weather was going to be bad and they were expecting a lot of rain. Oh, well. We’ll see what happens. I had actually thought about putting my rain gear in my backpack. I didn’t because I was already feeling overburdened with taking my camera. The way things are turning out, I might as well have left my camera behind. With weather turning bad, I might not have much use for it. However, I will want to drive the scooter around no matter what the weather, so I figured I’d better get some rain gear. That turned out to be fairly simple. There was a shop just around the corner that sold rain gear, and I got a full set plus a nice umbrella for NT$600. Of course, I already own like a billion umbrellas and three sets of varying quality rain gear, but that’s the way it goes.

Tags: Fuh Yuan Hotel, Lanyu Trip, scooter, Taitung, train