Written at Changi Airport, Singapore, and in-flight between Singapore and Auckland, New Zealand
After a modest flight-time from Bangkok to Taipei it was a little tricky finding Pei. The couple who sat next to me on the flight were both Americans, teaching English as residents in Taipei... we got to chatting and once we landed they escorted me through; Taipei is actually very Englishised.
I was wearing my PhD hat, so while Pei was on the look-out for a 6’1” red-head among Asians who were no more than 5’8” she had the grievous problem of picking out a tall guy in a hat. After being called to the visitor information desk I found Pei’s sister (Angel) and her friend (Eno) – the visitor information centre was bright yellow, and it still took me three passes to find it.
Eno grabbed the car and drove to the Raohe Street Night Market. Vehicles in Taipei include the usual German and Japanese cars with a few home brands, the big difference is the number of Vesperesque scooters. They scroll around, darting in swarms: at left turns (vehicles drive on the right in Taiwan) motorcycles aren’t legally allowed to turn left directly, but duck into the right lane of the perpendicular street and follow on at the next green light.
There are two types of car park in Taipei: the first is the usual concrete tower block; the second is rather cool. Like the Harvard book repository, the cars are stored in ‘boxes’ in an automated store-and-retrieve system. Drive into the ground level onto a yellow frame valet, leave the garage and the doors close… and tadaa! When the doors open again the vehicle’s been transported to a pod somewhere in the megalithic set of drawers that is the building above – use the dispensed ticket to get it back afterwards.
After depositing the car we walked up and down the market for maybe an hour. As Pei said, there are two things that the population of Taipei do with their money: spend it on food and give offerings to the gods. All I did for four days was the first. The street market was busy, even though it was midnight. There was nothing there that you can buy as-is in the UK, besides an omelette made with what looked like milk, onions, an egg, another helping of onions/milk and then fried, topped off with soy sauce, flakes of fish and mayonnaise.
I hit upon some Mario slippers, tried some gulva – a pitted fruit with a flavour similar to an apple and texture like a hard grainy pear – and sampled a sweet, a centre of flavoured powder wrapped up a tasteless gummy rice-flour coat. There was plenty of stuff-on-a-stick: quails’ eggs, meat chucks and then Pei grabbed something that could really make it in the UK, strawberries dipped into boiling syrup and left to harden.
I was feeling very full by the time we’d gone up and down just half the market. I couldn’t see from one end to the other. In the end Eno drove us all back to Pei’s place. It wasn’t until the next day that we actually hung out. Angel wasn’t feeling well and Eno took her straight off to hospital after dropping off me and Pei. Pei waited around until they came back but we weren’t far into a movie (Yes Man) before I slumped into bed. I did take a shower beforehand and was confronted with a bathroom with a drain in the floor and no shower enclosure. It means mopping up a little after but it does save on worrying about dripping all over the bathroom floor.
One more thing, I ended the first day thinking I’d lost my phone, to find I’d left it in the car.
Ah, my first morning in Taipei. Awaking from broken sleep, we headed to breakfast: given the option of rice milk or soya milk to go with my dumpling I opted for rice. I was expecting a cold glass, instead I got a bowl of warm milk infused with peanut butter – who knew? Most of the food I’ve tried in Taiwan wasn’t bad in any way, simply different – sweet, when I expected plain, gooey, when I was expecting rough. The pancake however was perfect.
After breakfast there was another market. Waiting for Eno to find a parking spot, Pei and I wandered round an ancient house, preserved and still occupied in places. Built in the 19-hundreds, the beds were solid wood and all the smaller furniture was made of bamboo. Bamboo is amazing: stripped down, it’s a straight, flexible and strong building material that can be used to make anything from chairs to cups, all without adhesive. A tradition in Taiwanese homes is a form of piggybank, a thick bamboo segment with a slot in the side for slipping in money. The one in this particular house had a smiley face and “It’s good to be rich” written on the side. It’s a shame that a cultural ‘refresh’ in China resulted in the destruction of all of these old houses.
Eno and Angel caught up with us and off to the market we were, more things to try, more things to buy. There was an ice cream food that was pretty good, a few scoops of the slightly stodgy ice cream that seemed ubiquitous around Taiwan plus scrapings of peanut brittle, all wrapped in a pancake. The peanut brittle came in blocks about a foot square, scraped into powder using a planer.
There was something I tried that I won’t miss. Smelly tofu is sold under the slogan that if you don’t find it delicious, you don’t have to pay. The tofu’s cooked on long cocktail sticks and painted with a thick brown sauce. The smell is engulfing, and the taste is good… unfortunately, like a lot of the foods in Taiwan, the aroma overwhelms the throat in a way I’m not used to and I couldn’t eat more than a couple of bites.
Most things in Taiwan are cheaper than they are in the UK: food, drink, souvenirs etc., everything except electronics. The exchange rate’s plummeted against the pound, making the 1:60ish rate of yesteryear seem like a dream; my trip out I was getting 43 New Taiwanese Dollars for each Pound Sterling. At the market there were a million little things to take home, and I had to find the largest marble this side of a bowling alley. I have yet to identify the material; I think it might be tiger eye. It’s blue, and acts a lens. The imperfect crystals scatter the light leaving arcs of lighter colour as one rotates the orb. I hope it makes it through the flight to Auckland.
One more market down, a few more stomach-entrancing enticements tried and conquered.
Ever since Pei had described it, I’d been looking forward to the infamous Skylantern Festival. This year it was flooded with some 40,000 people. A great idea of the organisers was to bar all traffic to the event except designated buses. The queue for seats at 5 o’clock was about a dozen buses long, the main festival started at 6 so we went for the shorter queue for standing on the bus. The journey took half an hour and when we arrived there were people already leaving – we didn’t find out until later exactly why.
The festival took place a little way into the mountains. The trees were littered with spent lanterns, half-burned out frames of message-laden paper, caught in the branches after carrying their wishes as high as they could.
Never once in the five days I was there was there a burst of sun through the thick clouds above Taiwan. As we approached the line of festival-goers the clouds were accepting a sporadic stream of flickering lights. It was barely dark enough to make out the flames at the time.
Up a hill, in a plaza of asphalt, sat the stage for the night’s entertainment and a large roped-off area for the big launch. As 6 o’clock came round, the sky darkened, the plaza filled out and – with the introduction from the stage by a drumming band – troupes of people filed into the centre. After 15 minutes the whole area was packed with purple-shirted staff, holding tight to large white lanterns. The officiators were welcomed into the middle where a lantern was alive with the hot air from a gas burner… I don’t know exactly what they wrote, my Chinese has expanded as far as “Hello”, “Thank you” and the written form of 1, 2, 3 and 10.
The stage light dimmed and all the work I’d done trying to get the perfect exposure settings for my camera were tested in the instant of lift-off. 200 bright white wish-wellers ascended into the deepening darkness. It was spectacular. It wasn’t just once that this happened, it was every half hour. By the time we’d got down to the fair and signing our names and wishes on our own lantern there was a second shower of lanterns lifting off from the performance area. On the way down the hill I bought a couple of model lanterns – shake them and they light up!
Once our lantern was flying high there was the problem. There was a reason that people had left early. With 40,000 people coming to one event in a small area served by an ordinary one-lane road there were bound to be… flow rate problems. The queue for the bus, at 6:30, was about a mile and a half long. There was one advantage to this, at least from the point of view of Pei and her relentless mission to feed me things I’ve never tried before.
Squid’s all very well, I’ve had it before and the gummy texture was odd at first but the meat’s actually pretty flavourful beyond that. Then there was the stuff that looked like meatloaf, a mixture of peanut powder and rice, cemented with cooked pig’s blood… yummy! The corndog was a welcome reminder of my American trip. The icing on the “Try this, you’ll love it!”-cake got me the closest I’ve got to retching of anything I’d tried. Chicken feet are very chewy and have nodules that roll over the teeth in a very unpleasant way. I did finish it, and a piece of pig skin from the same stall, however it’s the one thing that I will not try again out of all the things I ate.
In the end it took 2 hours to get to the bus. In that time Pei and Angel were ducking out the queue to buy me things to eat. It’s here that my height and hair colour, and propensity to wear red along with that, came in useful. People would sprint to fill gaps left by boarding parties at the head of the line, the queue could move in spurts and loose twenty or thirty metres in an instant. Pei and Angel could find their way back no matter what because they had a signal fire shining above the sea of black hair.
We stood again on the bus-ride back to save time, picked up the car and I stayed up a bit to write notes for this post. Eno opted to forgo heading back to his place for the night and crashed with me at Pei’s place (Pei’d been sleeping in Angel’s apartment for the time I was there). The thing is that Eno speaks very limited English – this has been borne out by the fact that since leaving our main form of communication on facebook has been poking back and forth – and Google translate wasn’t helping. When I tried to turn out the light so he could sleep, he turned it back on and tried to explain that I shouldn’t care about him… unfortunately it came out as “Don’t kill me anything, just sleeping”. I didn’t kill him, and we’ve been teasing him about it every since.
I’m grateful to Pei for choosing to start Day 3 with a breakfast I considered ordinary. We went to a café and I ordered a Bagel with ham, cheese and salad, I was content.
The market we went to that day was more a fair. Spiral crisps on a stick, ice cream served by a Turkish guy who toyed with my with games with the cone, I bought a couple of ocarinas, tried some great fried chicken and we had lunch of rice noodles and tofu.
After a fruitless look at cameras (I was hoping things would be cheaper than in the UK, they weren’t) we drove to see Pei’s uncle in Wulai, taking about an hour. He turned out to be a uncle through a grandmother or great grandmother, a line of the family that had happened to maintain ties with Pei’s mother and, despite my impressions, Pei and he had never met before.
He immediately treated us to an hour-long session in a private bath (myself and Eno, and Pei and Angel) fed by the local hot spring. After an hour I was rather restless, and there’s only so much stretching I felt comfortable doing – I was naked. Despite the cold of the evening, I didn’t feel a thing once I got out and we headed off to dinner.
Pei’s uncle introduced himself as Steve. His English was good enough for us to talk, with the occasional clarification from Pei, and before the end of the meal I had been christened曲少玉(Chiu Shao Yu), meaning young gentleman. Dinner was delicious. Since Steve followed a religious diet similar to vegetarianism, there were certain dishes he avoided, but that didn’t stop him ordering them. Among my favourite was pleasantly seasoned water lettuce, and a special variety of spring onion: pearl spring onion grows only near Wulai and each onion is about 4 mm wide and maybe 3 cm long; the flavour is identical to regular spring onion save for the texture, which had an extraordinarily delightful crunch. River prawn and river fish in batter, chicken on the bone, fish soup and mushrooms rounded off the menu.
Steve is a violin teacher, but he lives in Wulai because of the serene beauty, and I can’t blame him. His house is a few rooms under corrugated iron overlooking a brook, hemmed in by a sheer green hill-face. In the evening, the sparse light from the porch was barely enough to illuminate the current. It wasn’t until the next morning that the full beauty was revealed, clouds hovered over the trees across the valley and the sound rising from the water cemented the area as one of the most idyllic in the area.
Before going to bed Steve toasted the evening with some Kaoliang wine (53%); proving a little strong I rushed to finish it so I could make my way to bed. I wish I hadn’t: Steve is definitely a guy I’d like to get to know better.
The decision of the previous evening had been an early start, and a hike through the hills. Steve was reluctant (Pei labelled it lazy) come to the morning and the compromise was a train ride from Wulai to a waterfall 1.6 km down the line. The train itself resembled something that Top Gear might try, a few theme park carriages chugged into motion by a diesel engine in the front. We reached the awesome velocity of 18 km/h (otherwise known as 12.7% of the speed necessary to initiate) time-travel.
At the end of the track was a street of shops, selling custom of the indigenous people. We also met a dog. He decided to follow us around, Pei said he liked me. I named him Pinto. He followed us for the whole walk back, even as far as the car park. If he’s still following me he’s probably paddling somewhere in open water by now.
Steve had students in Taipei to visit, so after the trip to the waterfall he drove us back; Eno hadn’t stayed the night and had driven back the previous evening.
The next stop was Steve’s brother’s seafood restaurant. Beef and onion, mussels, clams, prawns with rice, halves of passion fruit layered with seafood and melted cheese, spinach and to drink, tea. The next stop was Taipei 101, where Steve bid farewell.
Taipei 101 is the tallest building in Taipei – roughly equivalent to saying that Bruce Lee is the best martial artist on a trip with the girl guides. At 101 storeys tall, it dwarfs every other building in Taipei at least twice over. Designed in segments, inspired by bamboo, it is a beautiful piece of architecture, tastefully garnished with sculpted metal spirals at each new section.
Weather precluded visiting the external viewing point on level 91, but the views through the windows on levels 88 and 89 were nothing short of spectacular. The lift is an engineering marvel, ascending 84 floors (starting on level 5) in less than a minute – the only thing limiting the speed on the way down is the need to avoid freefall during acceleration. No skyscraper would stand against typhoon winds without a damper, and rather cutely Taipei 101 has a personifies damper: Damper Boy. The structure itself is a huge lump of, I think, metal but Damper Boy is a colourful Marvin look-alike (from the HHGTTG film). The two floors of the observation area we could visit had some amazing artwork, a lot of which was made out of coral gemstone, jade and other brightly coloured materials.
Pei had booked a Japanese restaurant for dinner, and after grabbing a coffee we were treated to one of my favourite culinary experiences in Taipei. The chefs cook at the table, tempting different combinations of beef and pork with egg, cheese, vinegar dipping, mushrooms, vegetables and a few other things. I apparently interrupted things by doing things myself, but I was having fun. I hadn’t cooked in a while. I also tried some Sake, which was rather refreshing and not nearly as strong as I’d anticipated.
Of course as Fred said, all good things come to end. My final day consisted of a lie-in, a sushi lunch, a final wander around Taipei and some KFC. Packing was an interesting experiment, as of this moment I’m not entirely confident that my over-packed back, loaded like a coiled spring, has concussed a customs official on its journey to Auckland.
I’ll miss Angel and Eno, and especially Pei, here’s to a visit some time while I’m in NZ.
Getting from Taipei to Auckland was easy. Fly from Taipei to Singapore, wait around for 14 hours, and then fly from Singapore to Auckland. There really isn’t a better place to have a lay-over. Changi Airport is very English-friendly, full of things to do and a lot of them are free: massages, films, internet and even a bus tour. My plane landed at 5 AM, the first thing I did was put my carry-on in storage and try and find an internet hotspot. It was lovely to hear Liza’s voice.
Since the bus tour was the only thing that I felt I could do to get me out of the terminal without getting lost, I signed onto the first one out, at 8 AM. After passing through customs, I boarded the coach with about twenty others. The tour guide was a laugh, and even though I was almost falling asleep I found out a number of interesting things about Singapore. Firstly, all the area on which the airport and the serving road was reclaimed from the sea across the 70’s. Secondly, approximately 11,000 Singapores can fit into Australia. The architecture is also worth looking at… a lotus flower houses one of the nature and science museums and every year the city is converted into an F1 track.
I nearly fell asleep on the tour, it was about two hours long but I can just about remember half an hour. The coach returned to the terminal and I spent the rest of the time writing this entry and reading A Clockwork Orange.
