Sunday December 23, 2012

7:15 a.m. at 7-11 on Zhongshan Road in Taipei

Now this is more like it – an actual weekend day. No traffic on the streets, no people in my 7-11. Having a work day on a Saturday was very strange. It felt like there was no Saturday, except, of course, that I didn’t go to work.

I’m not sure you could come up with a gloomier day in terms of weather, though. It’s just grey and cold with more grey. No rain, though. From what I saw of the weather forecast this morning, the weather gods are saving the rain for the 4-day weekend coming up for New Year’s Day. They’re going to hit us with some sun during the week, but then it’s all rain all the time for the long weekend. That will likely mean no road trip. But that’s okay. As a man en route to cycling through the Philippines in two months, I have plenty to do at home.

Yesterday, Saturday, was not a particularly busy day. I downloaded all my ramblings from my NEO (my wonderful battery-operated word processor) to my computer and then uploaded all of that to my online journal on Penzu. I love Penzu. While doing that, I went over my computer and tracked down every single journal entry and letter that I have not saved over the past few months and uploaded them to Penzu, too.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll tell you that Penzu is simply an online journal service. It allows you to keep a journal and store it online and it is kept private there. It’s not a blogging platform because it has few layout options and it is not intended to be for public display. It’s just for you. Anyway, I love it. I wish WordPress were as simple and elegant as Penzu.

Once I’d gone through my computer and archived all my journal stuff on Penzu (it actually took a long time, since I had a lot of material that had built up or slid through the cracks), I spent some time cleaning the apartment. I had a specific reason to do that. My landlords, the Lins, have been renovating the hostel. They did a really nice job from what I can tell, and they now are furnishing the new rooms. The beds in my Rooftop Paradise actually belong to the Lins, and they asked me if I would mind switching my beds for something new. I basically have four single mattresses and two frames in my place that are all stacked up and pushed together to make one large bed. The Lins wanted to take those mattresses and frames out and put them in the hostel and give me a single large bed to replace it. So I cleaned up the joint and stripped the beds and lifted up the frames and vacuumed out all the dust bunnies and all of that.

Of course, it turned out that I misunderstood everything, and Lin Tai Tai showed up with two of her sons to get only two of the mattresses for now. She only wanted two of them. And they took away two mattresses while leaving behind the bed frame for them. I had actually been looking forward to the extra space in the apartment, but with the frame left behind, I didn’t really gain anything. I could have asked them to take the frame as well, but I find things get very complicated if I ever open my mouth around them. We speak in English, but the meaning never seems to get across with the words.

Lin Tai Tai knows that I am leaving Taiwan in a couple of months and she is quite emotional about it. I got three big hugs while her sons were in the process of moving the mattresses. She told me how much she liked me and how much she would miss me when I was gone. And then she would run across the room and throw her arms around me and give me another big hug. I always thought of her as a fairly thin and insubstantial woman, but she turned out to be pretty solid and thick. Being so short, she wasn’t easy to hug, but when I got my arms around her, I was surprised at just how much of her there was.

The rest of the day was spent reading and packing and planning with the occasional bit of movie-watching. This week shouldn’t be nearly as exhausting for me. I’m finally over that brutal cold. I’m still coughing pretty hard in the morning, but that’s probably just a natural reaction to how cold my apartment can get at night even with my heater on full. When I had my cold, I practically gave myself a triple hernia with the strength of my coughs. I also only have one school trip on my schedule – a return to the school in Sanxia on Thursday. A ton of other work has piled up in the meantime. Sigh.

Today, I believe, will be something of a red-letter day for me. (A tiny red-letter anyway.) It is time to take my bicycle out of the hallway and into my apartment and give it some tender loving care. The poor thing has been sitting there for a long time unused – having been replaced in my life by my scooter. During the hostel renovations, massive amounts of concrete dust floated up through the stairwell, and my bike ended up covered in it. I need to give it a good cleaning and start tweaking it and getting it ready. There isn’t a lot to do, to be honest. I could leave today and it would be fine. What I really need to do more than any maintenance is simply get used to the idea that in the near future my life will be reduced to what I can put on that bike. So today I am going to clean the bike up and then put my various pannier bags onto the bike and start packing up my camping gear and getting organized. Essentially, whatever I can put on the bike goes with me. Whatever doesn’t fit on the bike has to be sold, shipped back to Canada, or left behind.

This ought to be a very interesting trip. I’m very curious to see how I’ll feel once I actually land in the Philippines. I’m not making a lot of definite plans because I know that it is impossible to predict how I’ll feel. I know from experience that how I feel is very often a product of my surroundings. So if I try to make plans for the future based on how I feel NOW in Taiwan, it won’t work. I really have no idea who I will be once I land in the Philippines. I have a vague idea based on similar moments in the past, but I don’t think these ideas are accurate. People say that people don’t change. I don’t believe that to be true. I believe people change a lot, and I’m a completely different person now compared to the past.

This trip is also quite different. Anything could happen, but the general idea at the moment is to cycle through several if not many, many countries. And I’ve never done that before. I’ve always gone to just one country. That makes a difference in terms of planning. When I went to Ethiopia and Guinea and even to Cambodia and Palawan, I planned for just those places. So I read a lot about those countries, I got maps to just those countries, and I got visas for just those countries. That was all by design, and it kept things simple. Now, I’m finding it hard to focus on details since all the countries are mixed up in my head. I love maps, but I can’t buy maps for every single country that I might be going to in advance. I can’t carry that many maps with me. Yet, I know from experience that it is extremely difficult to get good maps inside the actual countries. Odd as it may seem, it is extremely difficult to get a good map of Indonesia in Indonesia. It’s a lot easier to get that map here in Taiwan or back in Canada. I’ve also never had to really worry about spare parts for the bike. If I do end up travelling through many different countries for an extended period, I might have to come up with a system for buying things online and having them shipped to addresses ahead of me. I have no idea how to do that, though. The logistics seem daunting. Another complication is that I’ve learned the value of staying in one place and exploring in depth. So there is a tension between my idea of cycling long distances and my interest in staying places. I could easily stay in Manila for a month just exploring that one city. But, as I said, that is based on how I feel right now. It’s been so long since I’ve felt the wind in my face on a bike trip, that I don’t even remember those pleasures. Maybe once I hit the Philippines and start riding, I’ll be taken up with the thrill of the road and find a nice balance between moving and staying in one place.

Lots of tingles moving up and down my limbs as I think about this.

So far, I’ve resisted the urge to pick up a netbook computer or some kind of smartphone. For keeping a journal, I have this NEO. And I think it will be nice to be totally unplugged for a while. I’m tired of computers at the moment. I think having easy access to the Internet while on the road would be extremely distracting. There are advantages to having access to all that information, but one can get by without it. It isn’t absolutely necessary. And the Internet can be a problem, too. It can be a barrier between people. You need information as you travel, of course, but it’s more fun to get that information from people than from the Internet.

 

Tags: bike, Canada, Lin Tai Tai, Taiwan