I'm in Tainan now, on the south-west coast of Taiwan, having arrived yesterday evening after about 12 hours in transit. The bus from Taidong left at 6:30am and went from town to town at about 30 km/h on the narrow, winding road through the mountains. We (it was just the driver and I for most of the time) got up to almost cloud level, and the views were amazing (the route down is a popular hiking trail).
I chatted with the driver a bit, and of course SARS came up when I mentioned I was living in HK. He had an interesting viewpoint on it. "SARS ... well, they have that in Taipei and Kaohsiung, maybe, but not here in Taidong. Look around you," he said, waving his hands at the beautiful mountain landscape, "The wind comes in and blows everything away. In Taipei the air is dirty and contaminated and that's why people get SARS. It's an air pollution problem."
At Tianchih ("heaven's pond") I switched onto a local bus to Tainan which took an interminable amount of time stopping in every little village picking up little old ladies and carrying them 10 minutes to the next little village. Finally got into a hotel room in Tainan at around 7pm.
But enough whining. Tainan is great -- it's a smaller, more laid-back version of Taipei, but with enough trendy boutiques, tea shops and computer stores to keep the kids happy. The air is much better, too. It also seems like you can't go a couple of blocks without running into another big temple, replete with several vendors selling paper money to burn, monks with donation boxes, and a decent amount of worshipers "bai"-ing before the featured deity. They even have Tin Hau -- Hong Kong's favorite Taoist fishing goddess, and the name of our local subway stop in HK -- here, but she's called Matsu here (?).
The typhoon I was worrying about got downgraded to a tropical storm and never materialized, which is good. I'm heading to the mountain retreat Alishan tomorrow, and by all accounts it should be as nice as when I visited Huangshan on the mainland.
There are some army surplus stores here that I've been eyeing up. It would be pretty cool to come home with a Republic of China jacket or backpack, something with a big ROC/Taiwan flag on it, then wear it on my next trip to the mainland.
My hotel room is pretty nice this time, and I get 100+ channels of Taiwanese cable TV. They have this great commercial for monosodium glutamate (MSG) where the guy sprinkles a bit of white powder over his stir-fry, and then everything tastes better. And if you think professional wrestling is surreal in English, try it with a Chinese announcer translating everything: "ROCK shuo ta yao ... aiyah, GOLDBERG lai le!" And then Goldberg appeared out of nowhere! And sucker-punched The ROCK! Wait, I'm getting excited over wrestling. That's enough for now.
Posted by cce at April 24, 2003 09:18 PM | TrackBack