Sunday September 27, 9:00 a.m.

Taipei, Taiwan

Well, here it is – the final installment in this long letter. I’ve come full circle and I’m back in Taipei. And, fittingly, it is raining outside. I say fittingly because I associate Taipei with rain. It always seems to rain here. Perhaps it is also raining down in Tainan where I just came from, but I doubt it. I imagine there are clear blue skies down there as always.

The rest of my trip yesterday was quite enjoyable. The weather was as nice as I’ve ever seen it in Taiwan. I was lucky in that it didn’t rain while I was cycling on this trip. Still, the weather wasn’t as nice as it could have been. It was very hazy, so the views were not that great. I couldn’t see much of the mountains. But yesterday was a very clear day. The visibility was great and I had great views of the mountains as we got closer to Taipei.

My seatmate was a friendly first-year university student studying in Tainan. He was going back to a small city near Taipei to spend the weekend with this family. At first, I thought he was an agricultural student. He said that he was studying “sheep.” But as he talked about his subject area, I realized he’d meant “ship.” He was learning how to build ships. He said that he wasn’t particularly interested in ships or ship design. He just figured that not many people studied this, so he had a better chance of finding a job when he graduated.

We had another amusing misunderstanding. He spent a long time with his phone in his hand, and I looked at it at one point and saw that the large screen was filled from top to bottom with Chinese writing. I asked him what that was about and he said that he was writing a novel. That surprised me – a young Taiwanese novelist ship-builder so dedicated that he even wrote on his cell phone. However, I’d misunderstood again. He wasn’t writing a novel. He was reading one. He’d downloaded it onto his cell phone.

As we got closer to Taipei, a lot more passengers got on and off the train. People were using this long-distance train as a local train just hopping from small town to the next small town and even from station to station. That’s another convenient thing about the transportation system in Taiwan – it’s quite integrated. The national train system meets up with the Taipei MRT system. So you can get off the train at any number of places and hop right onto the MRT and continue your journey by subway.

The train’s final destination wasn’t Taipei. So the train stopped only for a minute or two at the Taipei main station. People got off and new people got on. The doors closed and the train left. I wondered how in the world they could get my bicycle off the train in that short amount of time. However, when I walked across the street to the baggage claim building, my bike was already there waiting for me. It had actually beaten me there. I can’t imagine how since I had stopped for nothing. I had walked directly from the train. So how did the bike get there before me? Amazing.

I hopped on the bike and rode back to my apartment in just a few minutes. It wasn’t that hot and it was a comfortable ride. I carried my bags and my bike up the six floors to my rooftop apartment, and I was home once more. After a shower and some limited unpacking, I started downloading all the pictures that I’d taken, plus this journal.

 

Tags: bike, South Cross-Island Highway Trip, Taipei, Taiwan, train