March 28, 2010

Mr. Wang had given me some maps of the area and even a train schedule. I hadn’t planned on riding the train, but he made it sound so simple, that I thought it would be a great thing to do to explore the little towns in the valley. Mr. Wang explained everything to me and in ten minutes, I was strolling through Pingshi’s old town to the train station.

Lots of people were waiting for the train, and after I got my ticket, I walked to the end of the platform and waited. I thought the train would be an old one, but what showed up looked quite modern to me – not much different from the trains that run through the MRT in Taipei. I thought I’d be riding in an old coal car, but this train would work just fine.

The first town up the line from Pingshi was called Lingjiao. It was only a kilometer away, and I reflected that on my return trip I could get off at Lingjiao and walk along the river back to Pingshi. My idea was to go to Shifen and spend some time there. Jingtung, Pingshi, and Shifen appear to be the three main towns for visitors in this valley. All three have tourist-oriented “old streets” and an assortment of attractions dating from the mining era.

At Shifen, I got off the train along with a couple of hundred other people. I’d ridden my bike and scooter past Shifen a number of times in the past, but arriving by train showed me everything that I had missed before. The old street was a wonderful collection of typical Taiwanese restaurants, lantern shops, snack shops, and other things. What made this old street unique was that there was no actual street. The street was in fact the railroad line. Between trains, the tracks would fill up with people eating snacks, writing on lanterns, sending lanterns up in the sky, taking pictures, and posing for pictures. Then a train would come and everyone would scatter off the tracks in all directions. I sat there and ate a bowl of noodles later on and was very entertained by all the activity and the occasional train thundering past just a few feet away.

One of the main attractions in Shifen is the Coal Mining Museum, and here I had one of the more pleasant and interesting experiences I’ve had in Taiwan. It’s often difficult as a solitary traveler in Taiwan to fall into the rhythm of things. Tourists here tend to arrive in large groups. They tend to make arrangements beforehand and arrive in tour buses. Failing that, they arrive in private groups of family and friends, and by osmosis they know what to expect and what to do. And they speak Chinese. For a traveler like me – alone, unable to speak or read Chinese, showing up unplanned and unannounced – things are a bit different. Odd things happen. Sometimes you end up at a total loss. You know there is something to see or do, but you don’t know where to start. What, exactly, is it? Where is the entrance? Is there an entrance? Do you have to buy a ticket? Where do you buy this ticket? There are a hundred questions like this, and sometimes it seems like just too much trouble, and you end up walking away. Sometimes, however, a bit of magic enters the equation and you have an experience unlike anything else. Luckily for me on this weekend, magic was in the air.

To get to the Coal Mining Museum, you simply walk along Shifen’s old street. At the end of town (just past the colorful “Grandma’s Flying Lantern Shop”) the old street splits, one part going up and to the right and the other sort of going to the left and continuing straight. After five minutes, you come to a collection of mining stuff. This could be the entrance to the Coal Mining Museum. It could be the whole museum. I just didn’t know, and if the woman who ran the place didn’t speak English, I probably never would have known. However, she did speak English of a sort, and through a stop-start conversation, I understood that there were tickets to be purchased. I didn’t know what the tickets were for, but this ticket was clearly the starting point for whatever experience lay in wait for me. I indicated I wanted to buy a ticket. It cost NT$200 ($6.50 Canadian).

Once I bought my ticket, things started to happen. This woman got out a cell phone and made a call. She then told me that a car was coming to get me. A car? What did that mean? I assumed she meant some kind of shuttle bus. I was wrong, though, and in five minutes an SUV showed up with a driver. He got out and opened the rear door. I looked at the woman, very surprised, and she smiled and ushered me in. I got in and closed the door. It was clearly a working vehicle of some kind. It was well-used and the back was piled to the roof with equipment and papers. The driver was a man in his fifties, and he drove down a winding mountain road with expert turns of the wheel until in a few minutes we pulled up at a larger collection of buildings – clearly THIS was the coal mining museum. Without the magic of the day, I never would have known it was there.

The magic was in full force, and when I got out of the SUV, the man ushered me through a gate. On the other side, I was introduced to Ben. Ben was a young fellow – in his early twenties, friendly, full of energy, funny, the son of a mining mother and father that still worked at the mine, and my own individual, personal, English-speaking guide. “I’m cute,” he said. “I’m handsome. I’m funny. But my English sucks.”

His English did not suck at all, and he took me on a private tour of the museum – telling me not only stories about the mine, its history, and the nature of all the equipment on display, but also personal stories about his family and himself. He brought me to wall of large black and white photographs of the mine when it was a working mine. He pointed at a photo of a group of six women pushing a huge railcar down the tracks. “Which one is my mother?” he asked. “Can you tell?” From the way that he asked the question I knew that there had to be something unique about his mother. I looked at the women and saw that one was wearing a striped shirt or sweater of some sort. All the other women were wearing plain clothes. But the woman on the far right was also different. She stood a head taller than the other women – she looked big and strong. “That’s her,” I said, pointing at the taller woman. I was wrong. The woman in the striped shirt was his mother. “She was very fashionable,” Ben said. “She liked nice clothes.”

Ben told another story about one of his first times going into the mine when he was very young. He was with a group of men and women in one of the empty coal boxcars. Many of the people were his relatives. His mother, father, aunts, and cousins all worked in the mine. At each stage of the trip, young Ben cried out in fear. “What’s the matter?” the miners asked him. Each time it was something different. It was too dark. It was too noisy. It was too hot. They all teased him. How could the son of a miner be afraid of the dark? On the way out, Ben kept asking about this bright, bright light. No one knew what he was talking about. There were no lights there. Ben insisted. And when they got to the light, it turned out to be the end of the tunnel. The light was the sun pouring into the end of the tunnel.

My personal tour of the museum and mine continued. Ben sat me down in a theater with a big TV and a DVD player. They had a video of the mine’s history in English, and I sat in the dark and enjoyed a private screening. Afterward, we looked at all the displays. It was exactly my kind of museum – authentic and gritty and interesting. The displays weren’t dry and educational and perfect. It was as if the mine had suddenly stopped one day, and they left it as it was on that day. We passed the safety board where miners took the yellow tag which they traded for their mining equipment. This left a white tag on the board under their name. At the end of the day, they had to turn in their equipment and get their yellow tag back. This system meant that at a single glance, you could tell if anyone was still in the mine. Any white tags standing out amongst all the yellow meant that someone had not returned.

We passed entire walls of helmets – yellow for the managers, blue for the workers and yellow for a third group. We passed rows of old helmet lights, rusty battery packs, and a couple of hundred of canisters containing breathing apparatus. These, once cracked open, were good for forty minutes of breathable air. We went into an actual mining tunnel – one that stretched for thousands of feet down into the earth. We went into a second tunnel that was a mock-up of what a real tunnel looked like – complete with a boxcar of crushed coal, and a thick vein of black coal running through the wall – the largest, Ben said, in Taiwan. On the right was chute leading into a narrow space. That, he said, was where the miners went – slithering on their stomachs into that narrow space to get at the coal with their jackhammers. In the many photos, all the miners looked to be wearing skintight black clothes. Not so, Ben told me. It was so hot inside the mine, that the miners went naked. I suggested “shirtless”, but he said no. This wasn’t a problem with English. They were naked – no shirts, no pants, nothing. That black was their skin – covered in a thick layer of coal.

In the main display room, there were lots of mining tools and other equipment. Some of it labeled and explained, much of it just piled together and put there. I liked that rough and ready approach. I felt that I was getting a true glimpse of the nature of the mine through this random assortment of gear. On the middle table was a pile of big slabs of black coal. Ben pointed at one of the slabs proudly. He himself had gotten that slab out of the mine. On the other side of the room, there was a large rock. In front of it were two or three pickaxes. All the displays were like this with the gear and equipment open to the touch. A sign by the pickaxes and rock dealt with any potential problems: “Don’t Knock” it said in Chinese and English. I can understand. It was tempting to pick up the pick-axe and take a swing at the rock. Many visitors had probably done so.

The tour ended at the bathing room for miners where they washed away the day’s coal dust – or at least tried to. Then it was to the coffee shop where Ben offered me a free cup of coffee because, as he put it, “My English sucks.” Only in Taiwan would you get a private car to drive you to a museum, a private tour in your language, and then a complimentary cup of coffee to make up for what they felt was their poor English.

As if all this magic wasn’t enough, leaving the museum and making your way back down to the entrance was done in an original and still functioning mining train. In the DVD video, I’d seen footage of the miners coming up out of the depths of the mine sitting hunched inside empty coal cars pulled by bright yellow engines. They’d kept these engines running and put loose benches inside the coal cars for visitors. After a photo op with Ben and with Ben and one of his “aunties”, Ben ushered me into the last car where I took my seat. The engine started up and pulled the slack out of the connections between the cars. The sudden jerk took most of the passengers by surprise and a number of us went flying backwards off our benches – none of which were actually attached to anything. Then we bumped and crashed and rattled our way happily along these tiny tracks through some greenery and past some other rough displays. Leaving the museum grounds proper, we passed through a leafy gate, and I turned and took a photo of the tracks stretched out behind us.

Tags: coal mine, Coal Mining Museum, mine, museum, Pingshi Trip, Shifen, Taiwan, train