Trifter

In the late Nineties, I spent a great deal of my life traveling around the world as an automation consultant. The following article is composed of journal entries I made during one such trip that stands out as my most interesting, frightening, and apparently cursed trip ever. Bear in mind that it was written a decade ago, so some of the observations may seem a bit dated…

Back to Part One of ‘A New Yorker’s Adventure in Taiwan’

Part 2

Sunday, 12 PM

It’s a day off. Time to see the city. Except that it’s pouring rain. I decide it’s a good day for shopping, so I ask the concierge at the hotel where I can find a bookstore to get my phrasebook. I find that the rain makes the humidity and temperature drop considerably, to much more tolerable levels. Another 20 degrees or so and it would be downright comfortable.

Directions in hand, I head off down the cramped and crowded streets of the city in search of my prey. I find it in a huge department store known as Sogo, in the 9th floor bookstore (Ugh! More elevators).

Cultural observation #2:

Like all the other Asian cultures I’ve seen, the Taiwanese are incredible synthesists. Crammed in two-dozen to a block, the narrow shops contain everything imaginable. Chinese food shops are sandwiched between Japanese comic books and Western style women’s dresses. One shop, one of the few with English signs up, advertises Swedish massage AND reflexology.

My hotel is not actually in Taipei, but in an industrial city to the southwest called Dzhungli (China Trust), so I won’t be walking or taking any taxi rides to see the tourist areas of Taipei, as it is too far away. I’ll have to try to find a tour bus on a weeknight or next weekend. On the other hand, there are no real tourist traps here, so I seem to be seeing the real Taiwanese as I weave my way through the crowds.

Unlike the other parts of Asia I’ve been to, Taiwan seems to be fairly ethnically homogeneous. In fact in the couple of hours I’m on the streets, I don’t see a single European, Indian, or African face. Children stare at me, point and tug on their mothers’ dresses. I can see I’m not going to “blend”.

My phrase book firmly in hand, I return to the hotel. I make a fool of myself in the lobby with the concierge as the two of us practice the four “tones” necessary to pronounce Chinese words. Afterwards, I return to my room, practicing as I go. The hotel staff is further amused. At least they seem to give me credit for trying…

Monday, 7AM

Off to work! But wait, the power at the plant today won’t come on until 1PM. So we’ll go at 11AM instead, work for an hour on UPS power, go to lunch, and come back just in time for power up. And so my workweek schedule is set.

Thursday, 8PM

The week has been uneventful, a blur of taxi rides and crouching over CRT screens in the dark, punctuated by bouts of fitful sleep as my jet-lag wears off. Feeling better, and having had almost six hours of power at work today, this evening, I’m breaking out of my hotel’s protective layer of English speakers and going out with a colleague for a sampling of the local night scene.

We start out at an almost invisible second-floor pub called Good Morning Vietnam. We walk in, and it’s just the two of us and the bartender, in the dark (this block gets its power back at 9). This is not an auspicious start, but I figure a cold beer is just what I need after a week in this heat, so we head in. As it turns out, my colleague knows the bartender, and we start talking. She’s pretty good at English, and likes to teach Chinese words, so we end up staying for a few hours, and a few more beers. Through the night, other foreigners wander in, and it turns into a bit of a convention, but I pick up as much intelligence on being a foreigner in Taiwan as I can. Afterwards, we wobble over to an upscale local restaurant where, the word is, there’s a waitress who speaks English.

I guess the English speaking waitress isn’t on duty tonight, so we’re on our own with my phrasebook. Chinese is difficult enough to get around in verbally, but the hard part is the characters. You can’t look up words when you can’t even read them, and there are no pictures. We just barely get the point across that we want beer, rice, beef, and chicken. The meal we get is excellent, and although fairly expensive, worth the effort. One dish in particular stands out. We receive a plate of what seems to be kung pao chicken, except that it sits on a huge bed of what appear to be (and taste like) stir fried habanero chili peppers. Wow! That’ll put hair on your chest. We go home happy, but maybe a little more uncomfortable than any of us is willing to let on…

Friday, 8PM

The power stayed on all day today. For once, I leave work not feeling like I was run over by a hot tar-spreading machine. Now comes the nightlife. We start out at Good Morning Vietnam again, where another colleague joins us, and we start crawling the pubs. Two local women, friends of my crawling companions from previous nights on the town, join us shortly.

Note: Looking back from ten years’ distance, the next two paragraphs will seem rather dated to most Americans, but consider how prescient the observations were!

Getting together with people here is in interesting phenomenon, as everyone has a cell phone. I mean everyone. Period. Even 8-year-olds. No one seems to make plans to go out, they just go, and then call all their friends (who are also all out looking for likely nightlife prospects) when they find a happening place. The night begins to resemble a command center for a military action. When things slow down at one place, the phones pop out, and each person taps their own intelligence network to locate where the party crest is headed next. If two or more people come back with corresponding data, the situation map is updated, and the human tide begins to flow to the next locale.

It’s really rather eerie. It also makes me wonder why cell phones have been so slow to catch on in the U.S. At home, my phone still sometimes gets me stares like I’ve grown a second head. Maybe the new digital networks are what we’re waiting for, as it seems the US bet on the wrong horse in the cell phone technology game.

During the course of the evening, I discover two things. First, Taiwanese love Americans, and can’t resist the chance to talk to one. Second, discovery number one presents a big problem when trying to discern if the woman who’s just struck up a conversation with you is actually one of the local “Working Girls” who assume American businessmen must be seeking their particular brand of entertainment. Needless to say, the evening’s festivities are not without the occasional embarrassing moment.

Saturday, 7AM

Groggy and cursing myself again, I drag myself to the office. The evening’s festivities tonight include dinner at a good Japanese steakhouse, and bed. After planning out my touring activities for the next day, again I sleep the sleep of the dead.

Sunday, 5AM

Since I only have one day to act like a typical tourist, I have planned a full menu. A morning trip to the northern seacoast, an afternoon trip to the mountains (and an aboriginal village called Wulai), and a night tour of Taipei. Of course, since Taipei is an hour’s train ride away, I have to head out early. The city of Dzhungli is deserted at this hour, no one around to observe my distress as I try to match the rather fuzzy symbols on my map to those on the street signs. I make it to the train station, and find a ticket counter where they speak English. Ticket in hand, I head for the tracks. Armed with the name of my destination and the words for please and where, I manage to navigate to the right platform. There’s a quick panic as the train pulls up, as I have no idea as to which way Taipei lies, but a helpful security guard indicates that this is the way to go. And so, I’m off.

Taipei is a bustling city. I reminds me of New York City, if Chinatown took over. The streets have the same taut energy and tight spaces, only more concentrated. One colleague of mine previously described it to me as “a zoo”. I feel almost at home here. My blood pressure is rising by the minute, just like home.

Having tracked down the tour guide, I’m off to see the seacoast. The northern coast of Taiwan would be rocky, except for the fact that the rock is a particularly soft sandstone, and pieces that break off disintegrate. Instead, the coast is one solid piece of stone, weathered by wind and sea into fantastic prominences and smooth curves. There is what appears to be a field of giant mushrooms (three to four feet tall) clustered on a point jutting out into the sea. Some formations resemble human heads, others look like frogs, cars, dogs, turtles, chairs etc. The landscape resembles a Dali painting, as if someone scattered random objects on a blank field and melted them, then set the scene against a seascape.

At the water’s edge, there is a profusion of life. Without a beach, the bottom shelves off just below the surface, so bottom dwellers abound inches from my feet. Crabs, conches, cowries, and dozens of other kinds of shellfish I’ve never seen busily go about there business in plain view. Some of the life has taken root in weathered basins as much as 20 feet above the waterline, where they were presumably tossed by the waves. Locals are out in droves fishing here, with huge surf fishing poles, some at least 20 feet long. Vendors nestle among the formations, selling recovered seashells and tiny conelike shellfish deep fried and served up in plastic bags (previous to this discovery, I was alarmed by the sight of a child who was apparently sucking one of the local tide pool denizens out of his shell).

Next, I trek to the interior of the island (if you call an hour in a van trekking). The mountains are spectacular. They’re much taller than the Appalachians, and topped with narrow spires which point upward at crazy angles, yet covered with greenery all the way to the top.

The aboriginal village is disappointing at first. No huts or jungle, just another small town perched precariously on the steep slopes of a narrow river valley. We are directed into a large structure where the tribal dancing will take place. Inside, we are informed that it will be a bit over a half an hour before the next show, and surrounded by women of the local tribes who have learned foreign languages quite well. We each get assigned our own solicitous companion by some unspoken selection process. They pour us tea and ask questions about our homes, making small talk until we finish our drinks. Then the selling begins. They have quite an extensive collection of “authentic” tribal products for us to buy, and no compunction against using the hard sell. I see a tribal shirt that catches my eye, and it is my salvation. The starting price is ridiculous, about 1200 NT dollars (about $40), and is immediately “discounted” to 800 because she will “make a special deal for an American tourist”. I offer her about 8 dollars American, and keep the haggling going for a good five minutes. In the end, I pay about $17. Probably more than it’s worth, but worth it to wear her out and buy some breathing room until the show starts. And it actually is an attractive shirt.

Exhausted from my ordeal, I amble out into a courtyard to wait for the show. I am rewarded by a breathtaking view of the river valley out over the edge of a cliff. On the far wall, a waterfall hundreds of feet tall courses into the river below. At this moment, the sun chooses to come out for the first time since I’ve been in Taiwan. The mountain mists, waterfall, and river pick up the rays, and I’m surrounded by light, as though I’m looking down a crystal tunnel.

Then we are herded into an amphitheater, and the show starts. I am impressed. The costumes look like a mixture of Indian and Chinese clothing, the faces look like a mixture of Korean and Polynesian peoples, and even the dances are familiar, much like native American dances I’ve watched, but the music and singing are utterly unique. I find the combination quite entrancing. In one dance, women snap long bamboo poles together in a complex, syncopated beat, while other women dance in between and around the poles (think double-dutch jump rope, but with four ropes, all at different angles, and 8 jumpers).

After the show, we are told we will now ride in a “push-cart” down the mountain side, the way locals delivered harvested wood to the Chinese up until about 60 years ago. I’m thinking hayride, but we get cyclone. The pushcart is a mini train, powered by what sounds like a lawnmower engine. It clatters up, and we sit two abreast in the tiny open-sided cars. We then proceed to roll over the edge of a cliff. In reality, the incline is probably less than 60 degrees, but one doesn’t think of such things while careening wildly through S-curves at 40 miles an hour, tree branches whipping past inches from one’s shoulders. I manage to snap one picture out the side of the car of the receding village, and almost lose my camera (and the hand holding it) to a passing tree. We’re all a bit wobbly when we get to the bottom.

Exhausted, I return to Taipei. The night tour includes a nighttime view of the city from the observation deck of its tallest building, and an excellent Mongolian barbecue dinner. Afterwards, we go to a night market, which is a wonderfully vital Taiwanese phenomenon I’ve observed before in Dzhungli.

At a Taiwanese night market, hundreds of vendors pick a street seemingly at random, and, at nightfall, flood it with stalls and shops, all but closing it off to motor traffic. These ad hoc bazaars quickly flood with locals looking for a deal. This particular night market is a permanent one established by the Taiwan government, probably mostly so that tourists can be sure of finding one. It is much like the others I’ve visited, but it includes one notable exception, the snake shops. In each snake shop, a hawker sells a unique cuisine. He does a bit of a carny show with a rather unhappy snake, then kills it with a hammer, making sure to splash at least a couple of the onlookers, then selling shots of drained snake blood and grilled snake meat. Transfixed by this gruesome spectacle, I become involved in the second traffic accident of my trip. Apparently, my standing completely still is simply too complex a pattern of movement for the young lady on a motor scooter that runs into me from behind. Fortunately, the crowds have slowed her motion, and I weigh more than the girl and the scooter combined, so both simply stop dead and fall over, with no damage to either party, other than a small bruise on my calf.

Lastly, we tour a nearby Buddhist temple with wonderful carvings and artwork and have our fortunes cast. Mine is predictable.

Mind numbed by 17 straight hours of touring, I struggle to buy a train ticket home, as there are no English speakers on duty at 11 P.M. I finally find my train, and drag myself back to my now seemingly plush hotel bed.

Thursday, 7AM

I’m on my way home. I’ve successfully dodged earthquakes, traffic accidents, asphyxiation, prostitutes, heat stroke, Montezuma’s revenge, and being dashed on rocks at the bottom of a cliff. I’ve also had a wonderful experience. I’m happy to go home, but I’ll miss Taiwan.

This is an amazing place, so familiar in some ways, so alien in others. It has a vitality, a self assurance, that I’ve never seen anywhere else, except in the US. On the other hand, it has a cultural tradition thousands of years old, and a propensity for the superstitious that mystifies me.

I think I’ll have to come back here sometime. But first, I need to learn Chinese!