Monday September 21 4:30 p.m.

7-11 in Chiahsien, Taiwan

It was a good day of cycling. It had many of the elements that make for a good day of cycling – including the feeling that the day was much longer than it actually was. It feels like Tainan was a long time ago. It feels like I’ve been traveling for a long time and over a very great distance. That’s one of the benefits of cycling. It really is astonishing, this sensation of a tremendous amount happening in one day. It is even confirmed by the pictures I took. I’ve only taken a digital camera on one other trip, so it is still a somewhat unique experience. I looked through my pictures just before I came to this 7-11 to get a cup of coffee, and I was astonished at how many pictures I took. And seeing the pictures reinforced just how far I had come and how much had happened.

The day began around 6:00 when I woke up. I knew the hotel started serving breakfast at 7:00 and I thought I would take advantage of that. I had gone to bed very early, so getting up at 6:00 was not a hardship at all. In fact, I was quite awake at 5:00 a.m. and I considered just hitting the road at that time while it was still cool. I didn’t, however, and after a shower and a shave, I went down for breakfast. It was the same breakfast as the first morning, and I did my best to fill up on the food that was there. I knew that I should keep on eating even if I felt full. I was going to need the energy, and it wasn’t clear when the next convenient meal was going to show up.

When I started to pack up my bags, I had that sinking feeling again that I had WAY too much stuff. I took all my luggage down in one trip, and the weight of it nearly took my arms off. Yet, once it is all on the bike, it doesn’t seem as heavy. The bike certainly is heavy, and you wouldn’t want to pick it up and try to carry it, but it moves smoothly and with little effort. Once you get used to the presence of the bags, you tend not to notice the weight that much. Even when I look at pictures of the bike, it doesn’t look that bad.

Loading the bags on the bike did not go as smoothly as I’d hoped. I did the loading inside the lobby of the hotel since it was nice and cool inside. However, the floor was slippery and the bike tended to slide out from under me and tip over. I looked like quite the amateur, so much so that the hotel staff came rushing over to hold the bike up and otherwise help me. I didn’t come across as the experienced world-cyclist as I’d hoped…

I had scoped out the route out of town the previous afternoon, so there was no problem leaving. I knew exactly which streets to take, and I was soon zooming along. Despite the ease of my start, it took a very long time to feel that I had left Tainan behind. I guess it’s the same with cities all over the world, but Taiwanese cities seem to stretch on even longer than most. I rode and rode and rode and rode, and I still seemed to be inside a city. I was surprised actually to reach the first town on my map when in fact I hadn’t really left Tainan yet. I thought there would be a period of rural countryside before the towns of Yungkang and Hsinhua, but for all intents and purposes, I was still inside Tainan when I reached them. The change to countryside was so gradual that I barely even noticed it when it came. And there was nothing to get excited about anyway. Flat Taiwan is quite boring. The towns and houses are quite squat and ugly and covered in debris. It isn’t garbage exactly, but the accumulated old furniture and junk of many years. I’m guessing that it isn’t easy to get rid of garbage in Taiwan. One probably has to pay a lot for the privilege, and the Taiwanese are quite careful with their money. They won’t part with it for non-essentials.

I quickly remembered a few key facts about Taiwan – facts that are essential if you are going to ride a bike here. The first fact is that the spelling of everything in English is very random. You almost never see the same town named in the same way. It’s a bit of a historical problem in that people have developed different ways of spelling Chinese names with English letters. Different governments and businesses and individuals use entirely different systems, and none of them match up. The town I’m currently in is called Chiahsien on one of my maps and Jiashin on another. You have to be careful when following road signs in order to end up where you intended to go. In my case, I nearly took a wrong turn when I looked on one of my maps and almost headed toward a place called Chisan. I had mixed it up with Chiahsien.

Another trick is to remember that the counties are named for the cities. And it is impossible to know what the signs are referring to. On previous trips, I often thought there were only five kilometers or something like that to the next town. Then after five kilometers, I realize I’ve just entered the county, and the city is another five kilometers away. That can make a big psychological difference when it is late in the day and you are a bit cranky and tired and hot.

Today’s trip was fairly uneventful as far as things like that were concerned. I was nearly tricked a couple of times, but it all ended up okay, and I got to my destination without any long detours. I don’t think I was lost even once during the entire day, and that is quite rare.

The heat hit very quickly as I started to cycle. What with having breakfast and moving slowly, I wasn’t on the road until 8:00 a.m. That’s natural for a bike trip. The first day, you always leave fairly late. Part of it is again psychological, because 8:00 a.m. really isn’t that late for beginning a trip. If you were going to work or taking a bus somewhere, 8:00 a.m. would be a pretty decently early time to get going. However, when you are on a bike, you are very much in tune with mother nature. And though I was on the road at the early hour of 8:00 a.m., the sun was WAY up in the sky already. Hours and hours had passed since dawn. And that isn’t a good thing. That always takes me by surprise – how high the sun is at that time of the morning.

The second day of a bike trip, you might leave a bit earlier, perhaps by 7:45 a.m. And if you continue cycling for a week or two or a month or two, you find yourself leaving earlier and earlier. In Ethiopia, the process continued until I was leaving in the pitch black of the hour or half hour before dawn. The big problem for me is that I then start to skip breakfast. I want to get on the road as soon as possible, and I don’t eat. I can do that physically, but looking back, I can see that a lot of the irritation I felt in Ethiopia at the children and the mobs of people came from being hungry. It’s not a good idea to ride for hours each morning without eating. If you are going to leave that early in the morning, you have to cook your own breakfast, or prepare something that doesn’t require cooking. There will be no restaurants open that early. Well, in a place like Ethiopia or Guinea, good luck finding any restaurants.

It’s surprising when cycling how quickly one gets reduced to what I’ve always thought of as the hunter-gatherer. Life becomes very simple very quickly. A lot of the things that might have been weighing on your mind (the search for love and the meaning of life and that sort of thing) suddenly become less important or vanish altogether. Instead, you suddenly find yourself thinking about the physical essentials of life – water, shelter, and food (probably in that order). This is one of the pleasures of cycling as well. Perhaps it wouldn’t be that special to someone who makes a living building houses and that sort of thing. You would work up an appetite and a thirst just in your day-to-day life. But for an office worker like I’ve become, a real thirst is a rarity. Not when you’re on a bicycle. When you’re cycling, a cold drink of water is the greatest thing you’ve ever experienced. Today was only my first day of cycling, and when cold water hit my throat, I nearly swooned. It was that satisfying. I don’t think I was very prepared today as far as water was concerned. I decided to go on this trip at the last moment, and the one thing I couldn’t find were my three water bottles. Stupidly, I had decided to leave my water bottles behind in Canada. I already had bottles here, and I was having trouble getting all of my luggage into my bags. But somehow my bottles here have gone missing. So I had to put bottles of water inside my pannier bags. It’s easy to forget how much you have to drink when you’re cycling. I remember in Ethiopia occasionally being seduced into buying a cold bottle of Fanta or something like that. It tastes good, but it does nothing at all for your thirst. The bottles are designed to look big, but they in fact contain very little liquid. You’d have to buy seven or eight of them to equal the amount of water I might drink when I stop for a rest. Even bottled water you can buy in a variety store tends to come in small bottles. You might think you’re buying a lot of water when you buy two or three bottles, but you really aren’t. In Ethiopia, I used a water bag that could hold ten liters. I filled it each evening at the village well and then filtered and purified it for the next day. I actually have a water bag with me on this trip as well, but I didn’t bother to fill it up. I bought water here and there, and I thought I was keeping up with my thirst, but I really wasn’t.

When I finished my cycling for the day here in Chiahsien, I was very happy to find a 7-11. And once inside, I bought and drank a huge amount of milk and water. I kept drinking and drinking and it didn’t seem to come close to satisfying my thirst. I then finished off all the water that was still on my bike and in my pannier bags, and I was still thirsty. It’s incredible how much water you can lose through sweat in a climate like this.

And that brings me back to my day of cycling. If I had to define it with one word, that word would be “hot.” I sweat so much that I spent the entire day dripping. I don’t have any kind of special cycling clothing – just a cotton t-shirt and cotton shorts and cotton underwear. Cotton is comfortable, but it soaks up liquid and stays soaked. The most important thing to carry on a trip like this (just like in “the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) is a towel. I always have to carry a small hand towel and keep it on the handlebars. I have to wipe my face all of the time or the sweat gets into my eyes and I can’t see.

It wasn’t until later in the day that the other word for this trip started to make an appearance: steep. The whole idea for this trip is to cycle through the central mountain range and towards the end of the day, the land started to rise and I started to see some small mountains in the distance. People often have the idea that a cyclist likes to ride on flat land, but for me the opposite is true. I far prefer to ride through mountains. The terrain is much more interesting. It’s physically challenging to ride up the steeper slopes, but then you get to zoom down the other side, so that makes up for it. Plus you get all the great views. Riding on flat land is also good. I rode across the prairies in Canada and enjoyed it very much, but there is nothing about flat land that is by definition better than mountains.

Today, of course, the mountains were more challenging than they normally would be. This was my first day of cycling (in fact, my first day of exercise other than working on my friend’s farm) in a long time, and no matter what the terrain, it was going to be difficult to ride any distance at all. The final tally for the day was 60 kilometers, which isn’t far for a normal cyclist. But it is a long distance for me. I was pleased actually that I handled it as well as I did. I got a bit tired toward the end and had to stop to rest and get my heart rate down below the “my heart is going to explode” level, but overall I could just keep going. The heat was far more difficult to handle than the steep climbs and cycling.

I said at the beginning of this that a lot happened during the day, but there weren’t any big adventures in there. It wasn’t like Ethiopia or Guinea where I had to deal with crazy locals, thieves, corrupt soldiers, and stone-throwing children, not to mention the brutally difficult conditions. Still, it’s surprising how much one sees and experiences while on the road like that. I stopped here and there to have a cold drink, and each stop was an interesting experience. A typical roadside stop in Taiwan is difficult to describe. If you didn’t have experience with them, you probably wouldn’t recognize them as a place where you could get a cold drink let alone anything else. They’re very old and dirty. They often look like thousand-year-old garage sales. At one place, a woman was playing with her toddler. Beside her in one of the many half-broken plastic chairs, sat an old man who was probably her father. He was basically in his dirty white underwear – a very common thing for older men here. They lounge inside and outside in their underwear. He had just finished eating some bits of chicken, and some of the flesh and all of the bones was scattered over this plastic table and inside a plastic cup. Hundreds of flies had discovered this feast and covered everything. I sat there drinking my Sasparilla as long as I could, but the flies drove me away.

At the next stop, the woman in charge had put out a big sheet of fly paper. Several hundred flies were already stuck to it, and as I sat there drinking my SuperSau (some kind of health soda), I watched fly after fly touch down and then get stuck. It was very satisfying. I’m sure David Suzuki would tell me that we need flies and mosquitoes for a healthy ecosystem, but I hate the monsters and would be very happy if they all died.

Rare are the cycling days that end as well as this one has. The hardest cycling came at the end of the day as I entered the mountains, but the town of Chiahsien has everything that I needed – including some items of interest. The most interesting thing so far is that the bridge into town was one of the many bridges that were destroyed in the latest big typhoon. In fact, it’s kind of lucky that I can even get over this mountain range right now. The road could still easily be out. But I guess they’ve had enough time to do some basic repairs. In this case, they haven’t had enough time to rebuild the bridge, but they had put down a temporary bridge and traffic was flowing across. I’d heard about the damage that this latest typhoon had done, but it was interesting to see it for myself. It would have been interesting to see the river flood and take down that bridge. I took a number of pictures of the damage as I crossed over on the temporary bridge. Then I found that Chiahsien was a fair-sized town – big enough to have lots of interesting restaurants, some hotels, a 7-11, a Family Mart, and lots of people. In the time that I’ve been writing this, I’ve witnessed all kinds of interesting street traffic including about a hundred monks boarding a bus after a trip to a local holy site. And I’ve chatted with a whole bunch of junior high school students. They don’t often see foreigners here and they descended on me to ask the questions they always ask foreigners and to practice their English. I’m in a good mood, so I don’t mind talking to them at all.

My first stop was the 7-11 for a long drinking and eating session. Then I went out to find a hotel. In the past, I’ve had trouble finding hotels in Taiwan. They don’t always exist where you think they should exist, since the Taiwanese have their own ideas of what makes a good tourist attraction. (The little fishing village that I might find fascinating holds little interest for them.) And sometimes when hotels exist it is difficult to spot them. I still don’t know what a hotel is supposed to look like here. If it doesn’t say “Hotel” on the outside in English, then I might not recognize it as a hotel. This town is different though in that within five minutes of riding my bike around, I spotted three hotels all with the English word Hotel on the outside. I picked the nicest of the bunch and had a very easy and enjoyable experience checking in. A great room cost NT$600 ($20 Canadian). It is a very new building and the room is new and clean. It has a clean bed, a TV, a fridge, a nice bathroom, and an air conditioner that works. It also comes with a kettle and complimentary tea. No coffee though, which is why I’m back at 7-11. I’ll have to buy some packets of coffee to throw into my luggage.

I took a long shower and then I rested for a while before heading out into town. I’ve had two cups of coffee here at the 7-11 and soon will have dinner.

Tags: bike, Ethiopia, South Cross-Island Highway Trip, Tainan, Taiwan