March 27, 2010

Any scooter trip begins with the decision to go. I made that decision when I opened my eyes Saturday morning and I saw a new quality to the light that was seeping under my bathroom door. Normally, that light is grey and dim – the usual light that comes with a rising sun that can’t get through the eternal clouds and rain that hover over Taipei. When I opened my eyes on Saturday morning, however, the light had a brighter quality to it. I opened the bathroom door and through the large window on the left, I saw the sun and blue skies.

The next step is to pack. That was easily done. I was still packed in a way from my trip to Palawan. And with that trip still in my mind, it was a simple matter to figure out what things I needed and how to pack them. Within a very short time, I was standing at my scooter where I’d parked it the night before on Chungshan Road, the main road near Rooftop Paradise.

Getting the scooter ready was not as simple as it normally is. On Wednesday, the spring on the large kickstand had somehow broken or fallen off, with the result that it now dragged on the pavement sending sparks in all directions. I had jury-rigged a repair with a bungee cord hooked over the kickstand and jammed under the seat. This temporary repair worked, but it made it a little complicated to get my helmet out and to get the scooter out of its parking spot. Normally, I’d just flip the scooter forward off the kickstand and pull it backward. But that didn’t work anymore because the dragging kickstand prevented the scooter from going backward. This meant I had to push it off the main kickstand and then lean it to the side on the small kickstand. Once it was resting on that kickstand, I could open the seat, get out the helmet, hook up the bungee cord, slam the seat down, and then pull the scooter back and out. Easy under normal circumstances, but, in Taipei, scooters are generally jammed in so tightly that there is only an inch between your scooter and the one on the right and the one on the left. Often, you don’t even get that inch and the scooters are pushed right up against each other. Working things loose when everything is right is difficult. With a bungee-corded main kickstand, it takes a real effort.

Next step is to get gas. I have a routine for that, and I always go to the same gas station. It is conveniently located for me being near my commute to work and right on the usual route I follow to drive to places like Pingshi and Jioufen – places I go to quite often. The only trick is that you cannot make left hand turns at most intersections in Taipei. To get to the gas station, I have to go through a large intersection and then make a whole series of right hand turns to make my way back. In this case, my first right hand turn was blocked by construction. I was driving on autopilot and not paying much attention, and only at the last minute did I see that my way was blocked. How I didn’t see the giant dump truck and the oil slick earlier, I don’t know. But I didn’t. I hit the brakes as I was turning and the rear wheel slid out from under me. Luckily, that wheel found some solid and dry pavement before the whole scooter went out from under me, and I stayed upright.

I don’t know much about the ins and outs of the gas stations here. I know enough to get the gas I need. When I bought my scooter, I found out that a particular gas labeled 95 was the right gas for me. I simply unlock the gas cap and point to that pump and indicate to the attendant to “fill it up.” Fill it up in my scooter’s case amounts to somewhere between $4 and $6 Canadian depending on how empty I let the tank get. The fuel gauge stopped working five or six months ago, and I now stop to get gas based on the odometer reading. I also top up the tank every time I leave Taipei no matter how much gas I think is left. There is no point running out of gas in the mountains.

All the details taken care of, I drove down Fushing to get out of Taipei. Fushing, in fact, any of the main roads in Taipei, are a dream on weekend mornings. There is little traffic, and you can race along without too much trouble. It used to feel like it took forever to reach the city limits and get into the mountains. I’ve done the trip so many times now, that it doesn’t seem to take as long.

The region I was heading to is sometimes referred to as the Keelung Valley. I don’t know if that name is in common usage, but I’ll use it here. The Keelung Valley stretches from Taipei to the coast at Keelung. The whole valley was once based on the mining industry. Now the economy of the valley is based on tourism. The railroad that was built to transport the coal out is still in operation. But instead of boxcars filled with coal, they now carry modern train cars jammed with tourists.

Nearly twenty trains a day run in both directions starting at 4:40 in the morning and ending at 10 or 11 at night. A ticket on this train costs only NT$54 or about $1.80 Canadian. This is an all-day pass that you can use in any direction and as often as you like – simply hopping on and off as the mood strikes. On the weekend, the trains are crowded, but that is normal for Taiwan and is a small price to pay for the experience. People-watching can be as entertaining as the towns themselves. Costing only $1.80, this train has to rival the Star Ferry in Hong Kong as one of the truly great travel bargains.

When I set off on Saturday morning, I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going to spend the night. I thought I might stop in Pingshi, but I was just there for the Lantern Festival a weekend or two earlier. I thought I might also continue down the valley all the way to Jioufen. I hadn’t seen the coast for a while and being on the ocean might be nice. However, when I reached Pingshi, I decided to stay. It is one of the great things about Taiwan that the longer you stay in one place, the more you see that there is to do. I had been to Pingshi during the Lantern Festival. I had even passed through Pingshi perhaps a dozen times before either on my bicycle or on my scooter. But when I stop to look around, I see roads and trails heading into the mountains all around. I could base myself in a place like Pingshi for a week and still not feel discontent or run out of things to do.

My first stop was a little coffee shop on the main drag heading out of town. Coffee shops are incredibly popular and common in Taipei and the other large cities of Taiwan. But in these smaller mountain towns, the café culture hasn’t really caught on. The older generation lives here and they have better things to do with their time than to sit around sipping $4 cups of coffee. When they want something hot, they have tea. However, I spotted a sign in English that said coffee and tea, and I turned my scooter around, parked it, and walked over.

It was a fairly typical place for Taiwan – an odd mix of a public business with family and personal life. The place itself is less a restaurant or café as we would think of one in the West – with a door and a set of tables and a cash register – and more of a converted garage or car port. These places are generally rectangular and deep – in shape like a large shoebox, with a big metal screen at the front that they pull down at night to close and roll up in the morning to open. There were some random tables and chairs in the back on which were piled old newspapers and other things that belonged to the family. At one table, a young boy sat at a laptop computer doing his homework. The computer station was a permanent one, and this boy obviously did all of his schoolwork there. As a customer in Taiwan, you have to feel comfortable hanging out with the family. Grandma and Grandpa are often sitting in the back or out front. They look at me as if they are wondering what I’m doing walking into their living room. But it isn’t like that at all. They are comfortable mixing family with business, and, as a customer, you have to be as well.

It’s also not always clear what services and products a place offers. Without the sign out front in English that said Coffee and Tea, I never would have thought they served coffee. I never would have stopped there. From the front and the décor, I couldn’t tell what the place was at all. Even when I went in and spoke to someone about getting a cup of coffee and had a chance to look around, I wasn’t sure what kind of place it was. All the tables looked like the family had co-opted them. Was it okay to sit at them? I wasn’t sure. There was a popcorn maker at the front, and it was popping, so I know they sold popcorn. They sold paper lanterns. And behind a big counter wall, I saw apparatus for making coffee. Grandma and Grandpa in this case were sitting out front peeling some kind of vegetable in a big plastic tub. This could have been for the family meal, or perhaps they also served meals to customers. It’s impossible to say.

I took a seat at a rickety card table at the front and sat down on a low plastic stool – the sort of thing you get at Walmart for five dollars. The family dog was a huge friendly white creature and he quickly claimed me as his new best friend. He was an environmentalist apparently. He left me from time to time and went out onto the street to search out plastic bottles that people had tossed aside. He brought them back and set them by my feet. I think he liked the sound they made as he crunched on them.

The woman who made me my cup of coffee didn’t speak any English, but she understood that I was looking for a place to spend the night. She pointed up the main drag and got me to understand that there was a homestay at #52. You can’t get any clearer instructions than that. I walked along till I got to #52 and found a wonderful little café – a place that almost puts the lie to my assertion that these small towns don’t have a café culture. The café was decorated with a railway motif, as many things in Pingshi are. The owner – the friendly and interesting Mr. Wang – had even gone so far as to put a set of railroad ties and rails right down the middle of the narrow space that leads back to the tables.

Mr. Wang is in his fifties or early sixties, I would guess. Pingshi is his family home, and his mother always lived here. When he retired from his work in Taipei, he moved back to Pingshi and built this café and homestay. He had eight rooms that he rented out for NT$1,200 a night.

Mr. Wang spoke good basic English and he went far out of his way to help me. His rooms were all full (as they are every weekend – reservations definitely recommended for anyone wanting to stay here), but he said that his friend also had a homestay. He ran across the road to a store and shouted something through the door. Five minutes later, a woman showed up to take me to her homestay, which was only two minutes up the road on foot. Homestays like this are common throughout Taiwan, and unlocking their secrets would go a long way to making a trip around Taiwan easier. I don’t think there is an easy way to recognize them. One simply has to be aware that they exist and then keep asking people about them until you find someone that can point you to them.

This was my second experience in a homestay – my first being on that trip to Jingtung long ago – and if these two places are indicative of all of them, I have to say that they are a great option. I thought a homestay would be like a bed and breakfast, but in fact they feel more like hotels – just slightly less formal. This woman’s homestay was located just slightly back from the main road in a modern four-storey building. At the steel door, you take off your shoes and try to jam your Western-sized feet into the tiny plastic slippers. I managed to get some of my toes into them, but that’s about it. She then led me up a few flights of stairs in a white and spotless stairwell. At the top, we entered what felt like a typical Taiwanese living room, though empty of people. Off the living room were several rooms. I was given the key to room 302, which looked in every respect like a hotel room. It had a nice bed with a comforter, a TV, a blow-dryer, a nice bathroom, and a toothbrush and toothpaste in white wrappers. She also charged NT$1,200 a night, but since I was alone, she gave me a discount and asked for NT$1,000.

Tags: Pingshi Trip, scooter, Taipei, Taiwan