Sunday February 6, 2011

8:00 a.m. Still in Baling

My goal for yesterday was to drive my scooter into the mountains southwest of Baling. When I drove to Upper baling, I could look across the valley and see other mountain roads climbing and climbing higher into those mountains. It was impossible to tell from my maps where those roads went or what was over there, but that didn’t matter. I’d find out by driving there.

The garage wasn’t open, so I couldn’t top up the gas tank on my scooter. I just had to hope I had enough gas. And I figured that if there were villages up in those mountains, there would have to be gas there, too. I quickly got completely lost. There are an extraordinary number of roads in Taiwan, far more than you’d think were possible or worth building. Luckily, being lost on a trip like this doesn’t matter. I was lost in the sense that I had no idea where I was or where I was going. However, I didn’t have a destination, so being lost was natural.

I’d asked a lot of people in Baling about that area and those roads, but I didn’t get much useful information. Everyone told me something different. I think I’ve mentioned this aspect of life overseas before. It also puzzles me. If you asked 100 people in Sarnia how far it was to London and what was the best way to get there, you’d probably get 99 people telling you exactly the same thing. One person might be wrong or have no idea, but that would be the exception. Here, no one ever seems to know anything about even their closest neighbors. The result of all my questions was a vague idea that the roads over in those mountains were very bad and that the villages there were all aboriginal (the Atayal people), and that the last village on the road was HsingHsing and it was very far away. The only thing that people got right was that the villages were aboriginal. The road itself was fine. It was steep and narrow, but all the roads here are steep and narrow. Most of the time it was paved, and the only dangerous thing about it was the other drivers.

At first, I was surprised at how many people called out to me and waved at me. People in Taiwan are all very friendly. However, they can also be shy, and all these people greeting me so loudly seemed a bit odd. When I arrived in HsingHsing (much sooner than expected) and I stopped to talk to some people, I understood why people were so friendly. It was only 11 in the morning, but they were all drunk out of their mind.

I had stopped in this village when a young fellow said hello. He seemed to be educated and I thought he could tell me the name of the village and how much farther the road went. I was quickly surrounded by about six people. They were all drunk and they got a glass and instantly poured me some beer. One very large woman (whom people called Elephant) said “Happy New Year I love you!” over and over again as she weaved in front of me. More people poured out of the wooden buildings (more like shacks) at the side of the road and they got more and more boisterous and practically tried to drag me off my scooter and into one of the buildings. Years ago, I might have thought hanging out with a bunch of drunk villagers would be an interesting experience, but it is an experience I’ve had many times and it really isn’t that interesting. Everyone shouts at you and wants to clink glasses with you. They usually forget what they’ve said and repeat the same things over and over again. They then run off and get some local delicacy for you to eat and you have to eat it and it’s almost always disgusting from a Canadian-at-11-in-the-morning point of view. I figured if I wanted to hang out with these people, I could do so on my way back and I made my excuses and I said goodbye to Elephant, who at this point wanted to marry me, and I drove away.

The young educated fellow in this village wasn’t aboriginal. He was Chinese, but his family had grown up there and had a farm there and he had returned for Chinese New Year. All these people, he said, worked somewhere else and had come back for the holidays. Only the very old and the very young still lived in HsingHsing. Everyone else had to leave to go to school or find work.

The aboriginal people are another interesting slice of the odd pizza pie that makes up Taiwan. Taiwan is actually a pretty complicated place in terms of the people and history. Long ago, the island was inhabited by the ancestors of these aboriginals. I’m not entirely sure how many different tribes there are. I’ve heard the number six thrown around. And they seem to have the same origins as the aboriginal people in all of Asia (and perhaps the world). There are a chain of small islands stretching from the northern tip of the Philippines towards Taiwan, and the theory is that these people migrated from that direction. At some point, the Han people from China started to move onto the island, and like in places all over the world, the aboriginal people were pushed deep into the mountains while the newcomers took over the fertile coastal land and started farming and building cities.

As in places all over the world, the culture of the aboriginals is disappearing. The people who run this restaurant are half aboriginal and half Korean. The grandfather and father are aboriginal and they speak Tayan. All the children speak Chinese and are studying English. They only speak a little Tayan. Soon, that language, like all aboriginal languages, will be gone. The culture is kept alive only in the shallowest of ways. You know you are in an aboriginal village because there are often paintings on the cement barriers keeping the highways in place. These paintings are of people in traditional aboriginal clothing living in villages hunting wild pig and all that sort of thing. In towns like Baling, there are cultural performances as the local people put on traditional clothing and perform traditional songs and dances. There was such a performance in my hotel the other night, but I couldn’t face the crowds and the noise and I didn’t go to see it. It would have felt weird, to be honest.

The relationship between the Chinese and the aboriginals seems to be peaceful and good. The aboriginals all have to go to the big cities to go to school and get jobs and they intermarry and everyone seems to get along. In fact, in Taipei I never even think about it. Everyone just seems to be Chinese. I can’t actually tell the difference between the aboriginals and the Chinese. The young fellow in HsingHsing who translated for me seemed a bit insulted that I had assumed he was aboriginal. I suppose if I looked hard at his features and then at the features of all the other people around me, I could have seen the difference, but I’m not used to looking for those differences. One difference was alcohol. He was the only one there that wasn’t drunk as far as I could tell.

When I made my escape, I thought the road would continue for quite a long ways, but it quickly fell apart. Right on the edges of HsingHsing, the smooth pavement was replaced with rough concrete, dirt, and rocks. I kept thinking I shouldn’t go any farther, but I kept saying I would turn around after just a few hundred more meters. I was worried that I would get a flat tire out there. That wouldn’t be a disaster, but it would certainly make my day more complicated.

I’m used to these sorts of roads just going on and on and getting worse and worse. So I was surprised when the road went down a steep hill and then stopped in a big open field. At the other side of the field there were the beginnings of two trails. After I turned around, I ran into a hiking party of about thirty Taiwanese. They told me that one trail led to a hot spring and the other trail led to a forest of large trees. They said it was about a 3-hour round trip. That’s good to know if I ever wanted to go for a hike.

When I returned to HsingHsing, I got off my scooter for a few minutes to chat with some of the people. Three women were sitting at the side of the road on plastic stools and they held up a bottle of beer and a glass to invite me to stop. I didn’t want to be rude, so I sat down. Luckily, someone tracked down the Chinese fellow to come talk to me. Until he showed up, our interaction consisted solely of these women weaving from side to side, nearly falling off their stools, and clinking glasses with me. A determined set of people came dancing (well, half dancing and half falling down) out of a building and tried to drag me inside for karaoke. I managed to get out of that and then the young fellow showed up. He studied English in university, so we could talk a little bit. He translated what the other people were saying, but that soon became tedious because even in their own language they were saying the same thing over and over again – that I was welcome, that they were glad to meet me, that they couldn’t speak English, and that I should drink some more. Such a large and unruly crowd gathered that my guide actually suggested that it was probably best that I leave. I wouldn’t have minded staying longer, but things were getting out of hand, and I decided he was right. The problem with drunk people like that is that they won’t even remember anything that happens. And they can take offense very quickly over nothing. We’d had a nice friendly chat and a drink together, and it was time to go. I got back on my scooter, waved goodbye to teary Elephant, and went on my way.

I eventually found another incredible road that went into a new set of mountains and through another set of villages. I was a bit worried about running out of gas, so I didn’t go as far as I wanted. I was very curious about this road. It seemed to be going somewhere important, but no one could tell me where it led. I really wanted to follow it all the way to the end, but I didn’t have enough gas. And I think after days and days of following these mountain roads, I’d just about had my fill for now. There had been no Lalashan forest of giant cedar trees, but it had been an interesting day nonetheless, particularly my encounter with the people in HsingHsing.

Baling was really hopping when I got back. Actually, I returned to Baling by a completely different route thanks to an incredible suspension bridge. The road had been following a river and at one point, I came across a huge suspension bridge. It was a narrow footpath made of cables and steel plates, just wide enough for one person to walk along. It was very sturdy, but walking along it maybe two hundred feet above the river rocks below was very scary. I had parked my scooter on one side and walked across to take pictures. When I was halfway across, I saw that there was a woman on a scooter waiting at the far end. I got the impression that she was waiting to drive across, so I quickened my pace to get to the other side. Sure enough, once I was past her, she gunned the engine and raced across this narrow bridge. I have no idea if the bridge was designed for scooter traffic. It was certainly not safe in even the remotest way. There was barely room for the scooter to fit, and if you lost your balance, you and the heavy scooter would be hurled into the steel fencing on either side. I’m pretty sure the fencing would hold, but you never know. And it wouldn’t be pleasant. I couldn’t resist, however, and when I had walked back across, I hopped on my scooter to drive back. My scooter was considerably heavier than the smaller one the woman road, and I was much heavier, so the overall load was much greater. I kept imagining the bridge collapsing as I drove across, but it seemed to hold me up no problem. I doubt very much it was intended for scooters to use, but you never know. This is Taiwan, after all, and they let people do things here that they would never allow in Canada for all the safety, safety, safety reasons.

Actually, I was talking about that with Carlson, the Taiwanese guy who had lived in Montreal. He had noticed that I was covered in prickly things. I told him I had walked through the bush down a trail to an old suspension bridge by the river. I had noticed this bridge earlier and wanted to take a picture of it. There was almost nothing left of the bridge. It was just a set of rusty cables with rotten bits of timber still attached here and there. There wasn’t enough wood left for anyone to cross over. Yet, it was the kind of structure that kids in Canada (at least when I was a kid) couldn’t resist. It would be a great place to hang out and to climb on the cables and that sort of thing. Of course, it wouldn’t be allowed to exist in Canada. Such a dangerous thing would be torn down or at the very least fenced off with a gate and a lock to keep people out. Here, though, they don’t worry about things like that. I kind of like that approach, of course. They credit you with enough common sense to know when something is too dangerous.

Once I had driven my scooter across this suspension bridge (the good one, not the rotten old one), I thought I was back on highway 7 leading to Baling. To my surprise, it was a completely different road. I had no idea where I was and all I could do was keep driving and hope that something would start to make sense and I’d recognize where I was. That’s one thing about driving in mountains. I get completely disoriented. Even now I think I’m facing west sitting here in this restaurant, but according to my compass I’m facing north. That feels completely wrong to me, but compasses don’t lie.

I didn’t do very much once I got back to Baling yesterday afternoon. I gassed up my scooter and tried to get ice cream. There were so many Taiwanese passing through and stopping for ice cream that I couldn’t get anywhere near the front of the line. I eventually gave up and went back to my hotel and spent some time reading a book on my Kindle. I still love reading on the Kindle, but battery life has become a problem. That makes me unhappy. It’s a pretty useless device if it constantly runs out of battery life in the middle of reading a book. I understood that it would last for weeks on a single charge. Right now it barely lasts two days. It could be because it has been so cold. Batteries tend to lose their strength when they’re cold.

I had dinner in the hotel’s restaurant along with a hundred or more very loud Taiwanese. The sound was deafening, and I ate as quickly as I could so that I could get away. Everyone was very friendly, however, and they all felt sorry for this lone foreigner sitting at a table all by himself. Table after table offered some kind of snack or drink. A man from one table brought me a glass of some very powerful locally made liquor. I appreciated the gesture, but it was hard to drink. A woman from another table brought me some peanuts and other snacks. A third woman walked over a glass of Johnny Walker Blue Label whiskey. All these gestures meant I had to stay longer and longer and return all the Happy New Year greetings. By the time the amplifier was turned on and the microphones plugged in for karaoke, I figured I had done my duty as a foreign guest, and I headed back to my room for some more quiet time with my Kindle. I walked around the town and out along some trails later in the night. The stars and the moon were out, and it was cold but beautiful. Finally, it was time for bed and I put in some earplugs to drown out the karaoke and the slamming doors.

 

Tags: Canada, Happy New Year, North Cross-Island Highway, scooter, Taiwan