Friday July 9 2010

This time it was a snap decision to go to a small town on the west coast called Lukang. I hadn’t even heard of the place until a couple of days ago. It has a population of 87,000 and on the surface looks exactly like every other town I’ve seen in Taiwan. If someone blindfolded me and moved me to a street corner in Lukang, and then took off the blindfold, I’d swear I was still in Taipei. There is the same 7-11 on one corner, the same other stores on the other corners, the same endless traffic noise, the same non-stop flow of scooters, the same lack of space, and the same hot sun beating down. However, I was told that hidden here and there around the city are old temples and interesting old streets. Lonely Planet calls that the other 10%.

Lonely Planet also told me that the town started as a Dutch trading port back in the 17th century. By the 18th century, it had become a bustling and prosperous town with a busy harbor. I’m not sure why this would be, but immigrants came from different parts of China and they built temples and buildings in various regional styles. By the late nineteenth century, however, the harbor began to silt up and when the Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895, they closed the harbor to large ships. This is a common story for much of the west coast of Taiwan, I understand. A lot of silt comes down off the mountains during the heavy rains and gets deposited along the coast. The west coast keeps growing and growing over time as more and more land gets deposited there, and harbors tend to fill up.

What Lonely Planet calls “conservative elements” fought against any highways or railways being built near Lukang, and the town became a sleepy backwater but with all the temples and old districts still intact. Today it is a fairly popular tourist attraction within Taiwan and hordes of people come here on the weekend. And I became a part of the hordes.

Lukang is too far from Taipei to be easily accessible by scooter just for a short weekend. I’m sure it’s possible to get to Lukang by bus from Taipei, but I didn’t even look into that possibility. I avoid buses as much as I can. The next most convenient way to get here, and the next cheapest, would be to take a regular train to Chunghua and then get on a bus. I tried to do that, but all the trains were booked. In order to take a regular train, you have to book them quite a long time in advance.

That left me with the high speed rail plus bus option, and that is what I ended up doing. I’d been on the high speed rail on two previous occasions, but those trips were long enough in the past that the prospect of taking Taiwan’s bullet train was an appealing one. The closest the high speed rail comes to Lukang is the large city of Taichung. I learned that a bus to Lukang left right from the high speed rail station.

I decided to go down on Friday night right after work. Ideally, I’d take Friday off and make it a 3-day weekend, but having just come off a 4-day weekend to Alishan, I felt it was a bit much to take another day off so soon. With only Saturday and Sunday, I didn’t want to spend most of Saturday getting to Lukang and then most of Sunday getting back. Going on Friday meant arriving in Lukang late at night, but it would at least give me all of Saturday to just be there. Also breaking with tradition, I had a co-worker call a hotel for me and make a reservation. I didn’t know if that was necessary, but I didn’t want to arrive late at night and then find out that there was nowhere to stay.

As with most things in Taiwan, once you figure out the system, booking a high speed rail ticket is very easy. The online system has an English menu, and it is a simple matter to find out when trains leave (pretty much every 10 or 12 minutes) and book a seat. If you have a local credit card, you could pay online and then pick up your ticket at one of the ticket vending machines at the station. You can also go directly to the train station and purchase your ticket from one of these vending machines. I remember, though, trying to do that once or twice before and having to give up. There was something odd in the menu system and I couldn’t figure out how to get it done. And with lots of people waiting in line behind me, I gave it up and went to the main ticket counter to deal with a human.

There was an odd wrinkle booking online in that I had to enter my ID number. I have an official Taiwanese ID and I entered that, but it wouldn’t accept it. It kept saying that it was not a valid ID number. There was also a space for a passport number, and I used that instead. However, on the next part of the screen, I had to fill out more ID numbers and there it accepted my Taiwanese ID number. It was a confusing screen though, since it seemed to apply only if you were handicapped or elderly. I tried to skip that screen, but the system wouldn’t let me. So I filled it out.

Once I’d booked my ticket down and my ticket back, I could either go to the train station to pay for them and pick them up or go to any number of convenience stores. They have these odd machines in convenience stores that are kind of like ATMS. They are hooked up to dozens of different services in the city and the country. Unfortunately, the menu system is only in Chinese, so I’ve never been able to use them. In this case, once I’d booked my train tickets online, I could have them issued through one of these machines and pay for them at the convenience store.

The wrinkle came when the machine asked for my ID number. Then I didn’t know which number to give it – my passport or my ARC. I’d entered both. I got some help from the clerk and we entered combinations of numbers until we got it right.

At the last minute, I decided to leave from work two hours earlier. I had timed things so that I could leave work and get home to take a shower and still make it to the train station on time for my 7:30 train. It still seemed a bit tight, though, and by leaving at 4:15 instead of 6:15, I’d give myself more than enough time. I did that, and then I had so much time that I decided to go to the train station early and see if I could get on an earlier train. I thought I was being very smart. I didn’t feel quite as smart when I got to the train station and was confronted with a huge lineup.

This is one aspect of the high speed rail system that puzzles me. They have trains leaving practically every ten minutes, and yet, as far as I can tell, there are only two ticket windows operating at the main train station. Only two. That hardly seems sufficient to handle the high volume of passengers. I must be missing something, but I could see only those two ticket windows and there were a lot of people in line. There were even more people in line at the ticket vending machines. Add to those crowds, the flow of people getting on and off the trains, and it was pretty chaotic as well as hot. I was just standing in line doing nothing, but sweat ran down my body in rivers and my T-shirt and even shorts were soon soaked through with sweat. It’s an embarrassing thing. The Taiwanese are experiencing the exact same conditions, but none of them were sweating at all. Meanwhile, I looked like I’d just come in from a rain storm.

I changed my ticket without any problem and then found my way to the right platform where the train was waiting. It was all very easy to do. I do find, however, that my attitude toward the high speed rail doesn’t quite match the reality. The high speed rail is much more expensive than a regular train. It is also much faster. But this doesn’t equate to a sense of luxury. When I handed over my NT$700 for my one-way ticket to Taichung, I had this feeling that I was going to get some pampering and luxury in return. But pretty much all you get is the speed. The bathrooms are clean and modern, but they are much smaller and less convenient than the bathrooms on a regular train. They are more akin to the bathrooms on a jet. The seats are also much smaller than those on a regular train. There are even five seats across each row as opposed to four, so if you are unlucky, you can even end up sitting between two people, all three of you jammed in there like sardines with no room for your elbows.

Taking the high speed rail, I also have this instinctive feeling that I’m going to be rubbing shoulders with the elite and the rich and the famous and the powerful – all those men and women you see in business magazines with their business suits, briefcases, and razor-thin laptops. The reality is that these trains are used as commuter trains for people who study or work in Taipei but live in satellite towns. My train left at 6:18, which means it was dinnertime. Even after all this time, I don’t know much about the Taiwanese, but I do know that nothing gets in the way of a meal. So everyone pouring onto the train was carrying a biendang or meal of some kind. Carrying the meal in one hand and their luggage in the other, it was a bit of a madhouse and I got smacked in the head a dozen times. People also seemed to be going short distances, so at every stop, lots of people poured on and poured off. It gave the whole experience a frantic and stressful tone when I was expecting luxury and peace.

My personal experience got even worse when my seatmate, who got on at Bianciao, turned out to be a typical Taiwanese grandmother with two grandchildren – two wild and crazy young boys. She had paid for only one seat, so all three of them jammed into the window seat beside me. It being 6:18, she had brought meals and drinks for all three of them. She was completely oblivious to my existence, and her shoulder bag smacked me so hard in the side of the head that I winced with the pain of it. The two boys were so excited to be on the train that they hardly knew what to do first – raise and lower my seat table twenty times or raise and lower the window shade a hundred times or eat the greasy chicken and rub their hands all over my legs or take sips from their giant drinks and spill it all over my legs. All of that eating and drinking meant trips to the bathroom for all, and they went back and forth like an army on the move. The boys eventually became so accustomed to me that they climbed over me as easily and comfortably as they climbed over their grandmother and each other. I was surprisingly cool with all of this. That was probably because I knew it was only going to last an hour. That’s all it took the train moving at 258 km/h to get from Taipei to Taichung.

I’d been to the Taichung high speed rail station once before and remembered it as a very spacious and comfortable station. It matched my memory perfectly, and I was glad of that. I must say, though, that if someone were traveling around Taiwan to have a cultural adventure, the high speed rail wouldn’t be the way to do it. The high speed rail station at Taichung is wonderful, but you could be anywhere in the United States or Europe. Arriving at a station like that has nothing of the flavor of, say, arriving by regular train in Taichung. That is much more interesting.

Once I’d arrived at the high speed rail station in Taichung, I was entering uncharted waters. I’d found out that there were buses from there to Lukang and that the buses left from exit 5. And that was all I knew. I went down the escalator to the first floor then down another escalator to a level below that where I found exit 5. Just outside that door was a series of parking spots for buses. At each spot was a post with a list of buses and times. Most of it was in Chinese, but the main destinations were given at the top, so it was an easy matter to locate the post with Chungwha/Lukang written at the top. Beyond that, I was a bit lost. Many different buses stopped at that same post, and there was nothing on the buses themselves in English. So I had to go up to every bus that pulled in and say “Lukang?” They all said no, and I started to wonder if perhaps the buses to Lukang had stopped running. This is one of the many aspects of buses that I don’t like. They are as subject to the vagaries of traffic as everyone else, so they can’t keep to a schedule. I end up sitting at bus stations or bus stops unsure if a bus is ever going to come. You just don’t know. And you don’t know what route buses will take.

It always works out, though, and in time a bus showed up and the driver, a large, brusque, and tough kind of man, barked something that sounded like “yes” when I asked, “Lukang?” He had a machine right beside him and he punched up the figure of NT$78 for my ticket to Lukang. I tried to give him a hundred-NT bill, but he waved it off. I guessed that meant he didn’t have change. I dug out some coins and put NT$80 into the slot, and he printed out a ticket for me.

I was surprised (and not surprised) when the bus turned out to be something of a local. It wound its way through endless narrow city streets stopping at practically every corner and when anyone waved it down. Many of the passengers were students trying to make it home after a long day at school. All the seats filled up and then the entire aisle filled up with standing passengers. This made it difficult for people to get on and off and I got smacked in the head a lot more times.

It was dark by then, and I had no sense of where we were or where we were going. I was saved only by the occasional street sign or highway sign in English that seemed to indicate we weren’t anywhere near Lukang yet. After a very torturous route, we stopped at a bus station that I guess was the Chunghwa bus station. A lot of people got off and a lot more got back on and we took off once more. The city of Chungwha seemed to go on forever. In fact, we never seemed to leave urban sprawl the entire time. It gave me an idea of just how crowded the west coast of Taiwan was. Only briefly did we emerge from the city and go down a bit of countryside before we plunged back into the urban sprawl around Lukang.

In Lukang, I was completely lost and disoriented. Almost everyone got off the bus on different streets, and then streets started to get less and less busy until I thought that perhaps we had left Lukang and I should have gotten off long ago. I hung on though in the belief that the end of the route was going to be the bus station. And I needed that reference point to find my way through the streets and to my hotel.

The bus station was on the outskirts, and I was the last person on the bus when we got there. Then I had to find my way back into Lukang comparing the names of streets to streets on my Lonely Planet map. They never matched completely since the English spelling of Chinese names is so irregular, but they were close enough that it was a simple matter to walk the ten or twelve blocks to my hotel.

The hotel is the only one listed in Lonely Planet. It could be the only hotel in town for all I know. It is called the Quanzhong Hotel and is located at 104 Jungshan Road. I had a reservation, but it hardly seemed necessary. The woman at the counter just wrote down 700 – the price for a night – and then gave me a key and a TV remote when I gave her the money. Then she waved me toward some stairs and went back to her TV show.

The hotel is pretty standard for Taiwan, but also pretty interesting. It seemed to be made up of three or four buildings that had been crudely joined together by smashing down some walls. To get to room 352, I had to follow a series of narrow hallways and stairs. At times, I was clearly on a landing that was adjoining two separate buildings. The room itself was small with a hard and creaky bed, but it was comfortable. Everything in the bathroom worked and they supplied soap and shampoo and toothbrushes in tiny packages. There was even a little desk with a chair. Most important, there was air conditioning. That was the first thing I turned on. Second thing I did was take a shower and change into some dry clothes. Mine were soaked right through.

 

Tags: Friday July, Lonely Planet, Lukang Trip, Taipei, Taiwan, train