The writer of the Lonely Plant guide to Taiwan has only puked aboard a ship twice in his life - going to Green Island (1) and returning to Taitung from Green Island (2). With this knowledge we woke up two hours before departure and munched on some dramamine. A taxi driver arrived promptly at 8:30 to take us to the dock (we got an amazing package deal with all this stuff included). He had a sign with Max's name on it, and a crusty red smile full of betle nut (and in case you're curious what it looks like -
).I'd heard that betle nut was much more popular down south but it's pretty shocking to see so many men and women with rusty lips and teeth. Taitung is a much smaller city with cleaner air. It reminds me a bit of Linkou, the Taipei suburb where Sam lives, but the buildings aren't so tall and everything is a little messier, smellier, more compact. While unpacking in our dim hotel room we heard firecrackers and announcements, or advertisements, broadcast from vans. Looking out the windows we suffocated on stinky tofu smell and caught sight of a parade snaking around the corner of the street. Walking around the city that evening looking for food, we heard this strange parade over and over again, and later, from bed, we still heard it. There's something eerie and futuristic about the chirpy voices sounding from the vans. Sometimes in Taiwan I feel as though I'm on the set of the movie "2050" with no sight of green, or perhaps a few scraggly sights of green, nothing but efficient rectangular buildings and advertisements as far as the eye can see. Max and I also get that futuristic feeling riding along the Riverside Park with long views of Taipei like a pastel-colored leggo creation beneath a sky that looks as likely to host UFO's as birds.
As the Taiwanese say, "Ay-yuh." What a tangent, teacher.
Where were we, Taitung? OK.
To our delight the sickening boat from Taitung to Green Island is called, "Uranus." (As you can imagine, a series of dirty jokes followed this realization.) While waiting at the pier a woman offered us a banana and later an orange. A man looked at my hair and called me beautiful. The boat was wide and the seats spacious but so full of barf bags we approached them nervously. Twenty minutes later Uranus hiked up and down waves like shark's teeth while we knocked around in our spacious seats and watched water fall over the windows. Only a few minutes into the trip the puking began. Vivian Max and I tried to block out the sounds with our ipods but with ten minutes of boat ride left Max finally hit the bag. We walked off the boat with weak legs and collapsed on our beds at "Jack's Boutique Hotel." Right away the woman in charge of the empty hotel, Angel, set us up with a map and two scooters and off we went for lunch and then adventure. We went to the restaurant she recommended, "The Fisherman" (where Angel also happens to work). We ate beside the water, which chilled our fried rice and kept the sashimi cold. Later we'd acknowledge that we all felt a little disappointed just then. We'd only seen the least beautiful stretch of island and there is a gloomy mood to the people here - a content but sedated and dark, wintry mood - so unlike the cutesie, friendly mood of Taipei. Of course that makes sense though. These people brace against cold winds, care-free foreigners and wealthier Taiwanese. There are two or three communities comprised of a few dozen ram-shackled cottages, restaurants, some bigger but abandoned-looking homes or perhaps motels, lost roosters, stiff-eared muts without homes to lose, deer with ropes around their necks and goats attached to gates. Below is a picture of such a deer.
People sit around in living rooms with gold and red shrines, bathed in florescent lights, spitting betle nut and enjoying each other's company. Some people run errands or work in the restaurants, some fish, some find work in the tourist industry. Teenagers hang around the 7-11 slurping hot noodle soup from paper bowls or hang over the rails looking out at the ocean with cigarettes between their lips.
After lunch at The Fisherman we took a nap and woke up around dusk, scurried out the door to the hot springs, one of two natural salt water hot springs in the whole world. We took a left instead of a right out of Jack's, and, though it was dark, saw the outlines of mammoth mountains and chunks of rock like black pieces of torn paper stuck in seething water. The hot springs by the water blew us away and initiated the theme of the vacation - surprise and wonder. Max and I boiled our bodies in salt water while the wind off the water twirled our hair and burned our eyes. Eventually we joined Vivian in a warm and sheltered pool and stayed there for awhile just sitting and breathing.
We woke up the next day to the sound of a tearful Chinese voice wailing. Between two boarded up shops a crowd gathered to listen to the person in the gold robe standing before a shrine. A funeral. After breakfast we watched a somber but musical parade pass by and saw a large picture of the man who had died.
That day was one of suprise and wonder. Surprise and wonder, over and over again. I relished the free feeling of my own scooter and the cliffs hovering over the empty road, the sound of The Pacific roaring, the site of it crashing in teal and bubbling over in white, cloudy skies, palm trees and also dune grass - an implosion of vistas. We stopped and got off the scooters now and then to hop along rocks and search beaches for shells. We spent the whole morning this way and barely made it back by two for our snorkeling adventure.
In no time a man we were instructed to call "Coach" had us outfitted in wet suits and snorkeling gear. We were the only foreigners in our group but luckily one of the Taiwanese men spoke English well enough to translate for us. Unfortunately, he was a very literal man who took Coach for his word when he recommended stuffing leaves in our ears as ear-plugs... The water is a colder blue color, not aqua like Puerto Rico where the three of us (+ rum) snorkeled before, but very clear. We walked carefully out on the coral before reaching the drop-off. All the Asians in life jackets followed coach around on a chain of intertubes but we were given permission to swim around on our own. Surpise and wonder. Below the lake-blue water were thousands of the most beautiful fish imaginable, swimming inches from our faces or puttering around and sucking off mansions of coral reef below. Every once in a while Max and Vivian and I would explode through the surface to exclaim something but for the most part we just wandered around in the sea world by ourselves watching the
yellow wrasse,
moorish idol,
blackbelt hogfish,
and bullethead parrotfish.
The next morning we breakfasted by the water and took the scooters to the entrance of a trail we'd caught sight of the day before. This day was cooler and cloudier than the last, a good day for moving. The "ancient" trail was well established with stone steps and signs to help hikers identify different native plants, but no words of warning regarding the yellow and black spiders with bodies the size of our palms and legs so thick we could see the joints. We walked carefully, keeping an eye out for those spiders, which we've since learned are golden orb spiders.
(there it is eating a bird!)
We smelled the dead baby deer before we saw it. It's head had caught on a metal-wire fence and it's face had been eaten away by bugs and maybe birds. Later we saw a baby goat caught the same way and two women bent over it, helping the little one out of the trap while its mother looked on.
It was a beautiful walk. We sat and nibbled dry fruit from a look-out before hopping on the scooters again and discovering the "The Little Great Wall of China."
We confused our tired bodies in the hot springs for hours later that afternoon, moving back and forth from hot to cold springs. It was nice to see clearly what we had only seen in shadow before and Max went hopping along the rock trails by the water and eventually scaled a mountain to find Ireland. Vivian and I soaked and talked in an outdoor pool before a bearded and flanneled man talked us out of the water and into climbing up the hunk of land to see what he had seen. Surprise and wonder.
That night we ate the most delicious meal at a small restaurant owned by Green Island's most bohemian couple. She wore a long skirt and played latin music, which thrilled Vivian who's been missing reggaeton.
The next day, our last full day on the island, we set out with lose plans and found a temple inside a cave, a graveyard, an old abandoned prison, a rocky path to a beachy inlet walled in with cliffs and crags, a treasure chest of beautiful shells. I looked through shells for hours thinking about nothing memorable. Vivian searched for shells in the watery places and found tiny purple jelly fish. Max risked his life scaling yet another mountain and at the top found himself face to face with a huge black billy-goat. He sidled his way along the grassy plateau, avoiding the wrath of the horned goats, and ran back down through the Gonguan Community, through the graveyard and down the path to find me at the beach with a furrowed brow and a lap full of shells. We stayed down there for hours, mostly in our own worlds, wondering at this Green Island. Afterwards Max took us up to meet the goats in China (for some reason that particular chunk of land belongs to China). We ran around in the grass and climbed a mound of rock to look out over the grass and beach and ocean.
This morning we woke up to see the sun rise from "The Great Little Wall of China." We nibbled on bread with sweet beans and watched the clouds turn a little pink but the sun did not show itself. It was still nice to see a new day glow open.
Now we're back at Jack's, assembling our stories and clothes and things, preparing for another sickening boat ride. It feels as though I've been away quite awhile. I read over my post from the train and I'm happy to say that I fell asleep red-faced and wind-whipped after every day spent with The Pacific. I've been red-faced most mornings too, for though the sun hid it burned. I like the full circle of a trip like this... home - train- boat - island - boat - train - home... and I'll be so happy to see our little apartment on Xiamen je. Going away makes coming back so sweet.
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