January 5, 2019
A walk in Taipei
A placeholder for now, because I’m behind on the journal and we fly out in a few hours. I’ll come back to this day (which, surprisingly, was one of the best of the tour) and wrap up the journal in a few days, after we get ‘home’.
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OK, we’re stateside again. I’m too wrecked by jet lag to sleep yet, so I might as well wrap this rag up.
The day begins with breakfast at the hotel, followed by suitcasing the second bicycle. For a nice change, everything goes fine this time and I really have no trouble fitting the bikes in. I think I’ve ironed out the wrinkles that gave me grief when I repacked them with great difficulty back in Barcelona. I did find it obnoxious though that I allegedly took good notes after the last packing (at least that’s what I said in the journal a month ago); but I have no idea where I stashed them.
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We stayed last night at the same hotel we booked when we first arrived in Taipei a month ago. When we shortened our tour though, we had to rebook this reservation; and unfortunately it was only available for the first night. So, this morning we have to check out and relocate to a different nearby hotel. Our plan for the day is to pack up and check out from this one, and then call a cab to move our belongings to the new one. We’ll leave our luggage there and then take a walk for the rest of the day while we wait for our new room to become available. We could just haul our bags to the next hotel, but the taxis here are so inexpensive that it seems worth the expense to me. It only cost us $3 US to get here from the train station last night, and this ride is even shorter. About the cost of a cup of coffee.
I take our luggage down to the curbside while Rachael checks us out of the hotel and asks the hostess to call a cab. Rachael soon arrives accompanied with our hostess, who says the other hotel is so close that a cab doesn’t make sense. She even offers to walk there with us and help carry our bags. These people!
We won’t let her do that of course, but she at least walks us to the corner and says it’s just past the light. We cross the street and start walking down the street to the next light, about six blocks away. When we get there we check the map and are confused as the hotel now looks like it’s back behind us rather than further ahead. We misunderstood when the woman said it was just past the light, apparently. It was just past the light we were standing beneath, not the next one further down the street - in other words, it was just across the street and in view already. The two hotels are only about 100 yards apart, but we walked the better part of a mile in getting there. Ha, ha.
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The walk we have planned for today was Rachael’s idea. We’ll walk north across the Keelung River and hike up into Jiantan Park, on the wooded hillside behind the Grand Hotel. This is the same trail we looked at earlier in the tour on our ride to Yangmingshan. It looked very attractive and inviting then, so this plan sounds like a fine use of our last day.
We begin by walking most of the way down toward the river, stop for coffee and a snack, and then detour a few blocks to visit the Confucius Temple. I was really pleased when we mapped out today’s ride and saw how close our walking route was to this temple. We visited it on our first tour of Taiwan also, and I’d been hoping we’d get a second chance to see it.
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The temple was well worth the detour, but this delightful girl and her mother were an absolute delight. When we came on the scene, the girl was circling the stage almost dervishlike, repetitively singing na, na, naah as she skipped and danced. From time to time she would stop and approach her mother, who looked to be coaching or cueing her. At the end, she varied her act and added hand motions, looking like she was making heart shapes with her hands or imitating a cat.
I’m sorry the video isn’t longer, but I didn’t start filming until well into her performance. It still doesn’t occur to me very quickly to take videos, and I might not have thought of it at all if Rachael hadn’t prompted me.
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Immediately adjacent to the Confucius Temple is the equally remarkable Baoan Temple. I remembered it too from our first visit. This one has the feel of a traditional shrine, with worshipers lighting incense and bowing before the temple. I find it wonderful for completely different reasons, but mostly for the extraordinary set of painted panels that adorn its walls. They’re all fantastic works of art, portraying scenes of village life or battlefields. It’s like walking through an outdoor art gallery.
Leaving the temples, we soon came to the Keelung River, crossed it on one of its many bridges, and before long found ourselves at the base of the walking trail, not far from the Grand Hotel. As I mentioned last month, this trail is part of The Grand Hike, the loosely connected set of trails through the hills that encircle much of the city. Like Tainan and Kaohsiung, Taipei is remarkable for being such a large city with a virtual wilderness right on its doorsteps.
It’s a beautiful walk, climbing steeply through the dense forest up a well maintained staircase. It is a very interesting walk. The lush vegetation is of course as noteworthy as ever; but it’s also interesting for the human activity that abounds. There are the walkers on the trail, but we also regularly pass clearings or small shrines buried in the trees, where a variety of activities are unfolding: exercise centers, tennis games, and what looks like a small ballroom dancing class. Music is often involved, and as we walk we pass within earshot of one piece of music after another.
We continue walking until we come to a high point with a good clearing and an impressive view across Taipei. We walk down toward the river again from here, but it looks like we could continue on walking like this for miles, or days.
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http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?taxonid=282057&isprofile=0&
5 years ago
Partway down from our high point, we come across another, larger temple. There’s music here also, but this is different. There is a service of some sort underway, and a small group of worshipers is chanting or singing repetitively, accompanying themselves on a piano and percussion instruments. Especially surrounded by the forest as this is, it is a serene, calming scene. We stand to the side watching and listening to them for quite a while before we finally move on, the sound of their chanting gradually tapering off in the distance.
After leaving the trail we walk along the busy riverside highway, following it east toward the next bridge across the Keelung. Soon, we come to another of Taipei’s great sights: the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine. I’m such an undisciplined traveler, and I hadn’t even known this shrine existed, much less that it was right on our route. It’s a vast structure and complex, built to honor the almost 400,000 nationalist soldiers who died in the civil war, fighting during the Japanese occupation, or in any of several other major conflicts.
I wish we had had the time to explore the shrine itself, but at least we were just in time to witness its best known attraction - the hourly changing of the guard. It is fascinating to watch this slow moving performance unfold on it’s vast scale - the new contingent slowly marching forward to the front gate, advancing stiffly and precisely in sort of a slow motion, stop action ballet ritual. The still photos might give a bit of sense of the performance, but This video is better. As so often happens, our experience was really heightened by the fact that it was completely unexpected.
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The walk was just perfect - filled with many wonders, some expected and others a complete surprise. The walk back to the hotel was increasingly stressful though. As happened in our visit to Barcelona a month ago, we managed to kill off almost every electronic device with us. My primary camera died up on the hill, followed later by the zoom camera; and then Rachael’s phone, which was our primary navigation aid; and then our GPS device. My phone still had a bit of charge left, but didn’t offer adequate mapping support.
So, In a huge city (with a population of about twenty million, Taipei is the 40th most populous urban center worldwide), we found ourselves generally in the vicinity of our hotel, but lost. Not the best. I did know the name of the MRT station near our hotel as a navigation point, but not well enough to pronounce it so that anyone would know which station I meant. I know, because we stopped someone and asked which way the Zhongshan Station was, and they obviously had no idea what I was talking about. Finally, it occurred to me to stop in a hotel. They have maps, the people there often speak at least some English, and we can show them the address. We were relieved when we were told we were really quite close. They gave us a map and pointed us down the street. In fact, we were just about at the point where we had turned around with our suitcases earlier this morning.
Back at our hotel, we quickly check in to our new room and get cleaned up to walk over to Merlo Bistro & Cafe. We have a dinner reservation at Bob’s place we need to hurry off to, where we enjoy one more fine meal and more enjoyable conversation with Bob and Vicky. It’s like dropping in on old friends again. To our great surprise, by the end of the tour we have come around to having a fine time here, and over dinner we find ourselves discussing whether we might try a Taiwan threepeat some year down the road. If we do, we’ll certainly stop in at Bob’s place again.
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 7 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 6 |
5 years ago
Wish we could be in Portland to welcome you home in person!
5 years ago
5 years ago
Hope you had a good trip home. Yes we can say home, can't we, even if you don't live there.
Your time in Taiwan was fascinating and ended on such a good note.
5 years ago
The GBO is quite heavy for its size .. but think of the joy it has added to your lives!
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