Taiwan Adventures, IV

Saturday

Yesterday was epic. I got up at about 6 am to get ready for my trip to Gold Ecological Park. After scarfing a quick breakfast at McDonald's, I came back to the hostel, filled my hydration pack, woke up this French college-level PE teacher named Patrick who was flying out that day, grabbed the next MRT & got off at Taipei Main Station.

Taipei Main Station is nothing short of a bona fide mass-transit interchange. From the station, you can catch any of several bus lines—both local & inter-city; you can catch MRT trains for 4 of the 6 city lines; you can purchase tickets for & board Taiwan's High Speed Rail service (trains that whip across the country at 350 km/hr.) and you can do the same for the regular—but much more extensive—rail service, and for all four classes. It's intense: there are at least three underground floors and at least two above ground. All the trains leave underground, which means that you have rows and rows of train platforms crisscrossing each other in three dimensional space. It's nothing short of an engineering marvel.


The Train Ride

At the station, I purchased my ticket to Rueifang (pronounced "Roo-fahng") for something like 24 NTD (under a buck), whereas Lonely Planet said that the price would be somewhere around 80... I was having the sneaking suspicion that the train I'd be getting on was a.) either heading to the wrong place, owing to the communication barrier, or b.) a super-slow, stop at every station kind of train. It turned out to be the second type.

Once boarding the rail-car, I was a bit surprised to see about 6 bicycles in the back wit their owners. Everybody else seemed to pay it no attention, so neither did I. Next, I noticed that there was a general absence of seating on this train—again the others paid no heed as we sandwiched ourselves into the passenger car like there was no tomorrow. Then, after a ring of a bell, off we went! The next 70 minutes went by as you'd expect, but I feel I must mention one interesting detail: A girl climbed on the train wearing a black felt mask (as is common over here when people are sick, though the mask colour / design varies by personal preference), then she pulled out her mobile phone. Attached to the phone, along with a fist-full of other random keychain baubles was a square, yellow package with the number "18" printed in black but placed inside a red, slashed out "do not" circle. I was wondering what this might mean, and on closer inspection, I noticed that this plastic square was the right size and shape for a condom package. Looking even closer, I noticed the slightly raised form of a disc underneath the red "do not" circle. I have no idea why he had it on her keychain—I mean who in the world carries around a condom on their keychain that says "not 18" on it anyways? A couple of ideas come to mind, but really...?


Gold Ecological Park

Okay, off the train at Rueifang and on to a bus heading to Juifen. Arriving at the park, I'm informed that the 110 NTD ticket price will be waived if I have a receipt from any purchase that I've made in Taiwan. Score. Free admission!

Then the bliss begins: a day of pure mountain hiking. It was _awesome._ I climbed several hundred stairs to a long-disused highway (at many points, there was only a dirt track on this "highway") and followed the highway up to a mountain pass, where the trail veered off onto a 1.x km ridge-walk.

It was on this ridge that I ran into a Taiwanese gentleman who was taking a break for lunch. He offered me some of his green tea, and we struck up a conversation that continued along until we had traversed the ridge, passed "through" Teapot Mountain & climbed down from the summit to a pavilion where we then parted ways. He was a pretty interesting individual, who happened to teach himself English because of a failure in his first business promotion. One of the jobs that he was given was to translate a document from Mandarin to English, and when he told his boss that he couldn't speak English, his boss said, "Just use a dictionary!" After the translation was done, it was deemed a failure, but his boss covered the shame by saying, "Perhaps he just didn't realise the context" from over 200 of the words that had been mis-translated. As a result, this guy went home in personal shame, closed the door to his room & vowed to learn English. So, for the next who-knows-how-many days, he would spend hours after work teaching himself English until he became so proficient, that his company chose him to be the international sales-rep. For their manufacturing business. It's a pretty amazing story.


The Knee-buster & 13 Levels

After we parted ways, I proceeded to descend the entire mountain on the hundreds of granite & concrete stairs below. The decent was too steep & the soil too hard or too overgrown with vegetation for me to avoid the knee-jamming stone steps, but where I could, I did.

Further down the mountain, I ran in to a WWII memorial, recognising that the gold & copper mines in the mountain (hence thee park's name: Gold Ecological Park) were at one time POW camps in service of the Japanese, employing Allied prisoners as workers to collect the valuable ores. Further down the mountain was the remains of the copper refinery, called The 13 Levels (aptly named because of the number of levels the complex had in the side of the mountain). The refinery had three concrete "smoke tunnels" that traced their way up the side of the mountain to very much near the summit. These "smoke" conduits looked like blood vessels or concrete train tunnels that spread out up the mountain. I put "smoke" in quote, because I'm pretty sure that this is only the official statement for what these concrete tubes—6 feet tall and 4 feet wide—were used for... If that truly was their purpose, then why did these "smoke tunnels" have windows built into them every 20 metres or so? A better explanation would have been that the Japanese constructed them to hide the existence of POWs as they mined the mountain.

After passing the 13 levels, I reached the ocean shore. I knew at that point that it was time to catch a bus, for my water had long since run out (here I where I mention that I found 500 NTD on the ground while exploring in one of the mining tunnels-proper by the 13 levels. Score.). The lat bus stop that I had seen, however, was up at about level 7 of the refinery on a municipal road, and my feet/knees (more the knees) were not really interested in any more elevation change. Hoping to find another bus stop along the coastal highway, I started walking back to the train station...


Hiking to Für Elise & Standing in 1st Class

But no bus station ever appeared. I passed by a flood diversion spillway (huge), past a cave of which I had been told about, past a small town wherein the garbage trucks blare out "Für Elise" to signal to the people that it's collection time (the sound at which the people obediently stand at the curbside waiting, garbage bags in-hand, for the small yellow trucks to accept their offerings. It made me feel a bit creeped out, as images from Soylent Green and other dystopic Pavlovian-abusing sci-fi depictions of the future popped into my head.

I stopped in at a 7-11 on the highway—the first I'd seen that day—and bought a Pocari Sweat drink (which makes Gatorade hang its head in shame) before continuing onward. Then, there was a fork in the road, and one pointed to Keelung, while the other pointed toward Jinguashi (a town on the way back to the train station). It was getting dark, and the thought of walking along the side of either a mountain highway or a coastal one really didn't appeal to me, so in order to minimise the chance of taking a wrong turn, I went over to the gas station at the same corner and asked, while pointing in the alternate directions, "Rueifang?"

The kind guy tried asking a clarifying question in Mandarin, to which I replied apologetically, "I don't understand."

He lifted an index finger and aid, "Wait," while he rushed into the station & grabbed his mobile phone. After a minute of Mandarin conversation, he hands me the phone and said, "My teacher ask you."

His teacher was on the other side of the line, and after a few moments, we figured that there indeed _was_ a bus station that would have the correct bus to take me back to the train station. And it just so happened to be directly across the street [who would have known that being able to read Chinese could've come in so handy? : ) ]. After a 20 minute wait, the bus came & about 2 km later, I was at the train station. But the adventure doesn't end there...


The next train to Taipei wouldn't leave for an hour, which gave me little else to do but wander the streets, looking at the night market & food courts before boarding the (now) 80 NTD train. I'm pretty sure that this 1st class train had reserved seats on it, because my ticket said on it (I think): Car 3, Seat 33. When I got to the car with my seat in it, there was a gaggle of uniformed old ladies who were sitting in mine & 3 other individual's seats. Not knowing Mandarin proved to be another issue in getting this sorted out, as only the Taiwanese lady whose seat had been usurped received a sitting location. The couple from Hong Kong & I were relegated to standing between cars right outside of the bathroom until we arrived back in Taipei.