Scooter Trip

Day 1 (Saturday)--It didn’t start raining until we were up in the mountains, past the right turn we would have made had we been going to the jungle town of Wulai again. We stopped at an intersection somewhere near Pinglin to put on all our rain gear. In all of our warmest things we got North America-cold in our toes and fingers as we looped up the hills. Max says at some point he had to remind himself that he was just cold and that he used to spend months and months that way. We left early in the morning, before seven, with the hope we might see daylight flood clear skies but the light stayed dim all the way to Ilan and through most of the afternoon. It was just that kind of thick day.

In Ilan we made our first stop. Long before we rode on it we saw the flat land like a spread quilt, not unlike American suburbia from the sky, only the patches were rice paddies instead of yards.



We walked around Ilan looking for breakfast. The town was slung in red and gold signs, red lanterns and carcasses. Inside stands, women ripped apart chunks of flesh with their hands while chatting neighborly with customers. Picture raw hearts pierced through shiskabobs, pig heads with still-hairy snouts resting on tables, and young girls and boys hunched over buckets tearing out chicken feathers. These market streets smelled like rain and blood. The main street, which smelled less bloody, was very busy, which sort of surprised me because it was New Year's Eve. The electronic stores blinked, the jewelry stands twinkled. Whole families sat together around fold-out tables on the street, filling their mouths with dumplings.

We found a breakfast place down a market street and ordered san ge dan bin and warm nai cha. The boys ordered Taiwanese-style breakfast sandwiches too. It was a good place to warm up a little bit. When we asked about bathrooms, the cook asked a little boy lead us to the door of the family home, right through the living room and kitchen, past a grunting grandmother, to the family bathroom. "Happy New Year," the boy said in Chinese as we walked out of the house, before picking up a toy gun again and pretending shooting his didi.

Back on scooters, all three of us sporting ponchos now, we picked up an escort. His name was Eddie and he was intrigued by our foreign faces and the bundles attached to our scooters. To get to Hualien, and, before that, the Taroko Gorge, we had only to go straight on route 9, but he insisted on guiding us. We chatted with Eddie at red lights and learned that he is from South Ilan and was on his way home from Taipei to celebrate the New Year with his family, like everyone else on the island. We told him we were on the lookout for waterproof foot coverings and he took us to the right kind of shop, talked to the woman working the shop, and waited while we put the waterproof gear on. He even waited for Max and Sam to purchase some beetlenut, crack off the top of a couple of nuts with their teeth and begin to spit. He thought it was pretty funny that the wai guo ren liked bing lan, laughed and declined when they offered him some beetlenut. He turned off 9 at one point and I looked down the little road her drove down, hoping to get a sense of where he grew up.

Silly pictures in ponchos:






The rain cleared as we got closer to Taroko and Hualien. 9 crept nearer to the coast and finally we were right alongside it, reveling in epic views. We hollered through tunnels and blazed through town after town, past rows of banana trees with their clumps of fruit bursting through the burlap bags farmers had wrapped around them. People sold these bananas and other fruits at road-side stands. Whole families sat beneath umbrellas and shacks. The little kids ran around barefoot, the older men and women sucked their teeth and sat back, but more often than not the young women looked meticulous, as they do so often in Taipei, with perfectly combed and pinned hair, the same trendy sweatshirts, shiny leggings and neon sneakers.

By the time we got to Hualien the sky was sunny. We drove deeper into the gorge and set up camp beside a collection of cheerful Taiwanese families before it got too dark.


See a little bit of color in the trees? That's where we camped.

For dinner we headed into the mountain town of Tienhsiang, and, for about 10 USD, devoured delicious food at a New Year's buffet hosted by a Catholic Hostel. Full and exhausted, we went to bed soon after returning to the campsite.

Day 2 (Sunday)--In the morning we saw more of the gorge in daylight. We visited a temple and took a walk along the edge of a mountain. These pictures do better than words--look!







Around lunchtime we left Taroko to continue south. We stopped in Hualien, which was quite busy and bright and beautiful, tucked between smoky mountains and the Pacific. We ate omelets and vegetable pasta at a bakery on the main strip. (So yummy! Coffee/tea, fresh baked bread, omletes, orange juice, soup/salad… all for 200NT!) By then I felt strange. Before getting back on the scooter I took medicine and fell in and out of sleep all the way to the campsite on the water we’d read about in the Lonely Planet Guide. Most of the official campsites had been snagged so we set up our tents in “rest pagodas” close to the water and planned on playing dumb if we got in trouble. It was so beautiful there, with that quenched green color in all the grasses and shrubs and up into the mountains on the other side of the road, by then the “scenic highway” 11.




Night fell fast, just as we finished setting up the tents, and I fell asleep with it. Max and Sam went somewhere nearby for a Taiwanese-style fish dinner, then made a long trip to the nearest 7/11 for water. They woke me up and fed me medicine and then set off fireworks with kids hanging around the camp site. (Throughout the whole trip we heard sporadic cracks and pops, whistles, and saw carnations burst open in the night, leaving the smell of gunpowder in the air.) Sometime in the early morning hours after my fever broke the wind picked up and brought rain with it. The rain-cover began to beat on the tent like a broom on a rug. The wind sunk the walls of our tent and jammed into one side of the pagoda. At one point Max had to get up and tie it down with bungee chords.



Day 3 (Monday)--When we woke up for the last time the rain had stopped but the wind was still unforgiving. We laughed at it and packed our things quickly like all of the other campers eager to be done with the weather. We were smack between Hualien and Taitong by then, and only 5KM from the “marker” of the Tropic of Cancer, which excited Sam, who is a self-confessed sucker for cartographical landmarks.



Throughout that gray afternoon we passed through fishing villages with Catholic churches and graveyards instead of 7/11s. We saw hundreds of rice paddies protected by floppy scarecrows hung up on poles and sometimes crosses (which is sort of strange when you think about it). Though the road was flat and straight, mountains loomed over our right shoulders. The tangled tropical growth wove into a matted blanket of green color, up into mountains that became paler blue as they faded into the distance. To our left it was always the water, also extending in layers of blues toward the horizon.

In one town we passed a dead dog on the side of the road and a little boy’s firecracker hit the back wheel of our scooter. A couple of towns later Sam’s scooter stalled. It started back up ten minutes or so later at the touch of a confused mechanic, and because we were in a fishing town with an aquarium significant enough to make an appearance in the guide book we stopped in to look at lots of clown fish, two reef sharks, and an incredibly rotund bottom-feeder looking as depressed as any living thing possibly could. We also saw lobsters with bolts of neon through their bodies and feelers as long as yard-sticks. After the aquarium we walked through the fish market--another smelly and wet market--and watched fishermen mercilessly take knives to fish bellies. Women brush barbeque sauce on the whole squids sizzling on grills. Sam tried some fish soup with big hunks of meat and a gingery broth and then it was back on the road.

The next big city we came upon was Taitong. We had planned to stop by the train station for information about tickets back to Taipei and room on the back of a truck bed for the scooters. We purchased tickets for Friday and received confirmation that there were such services available for moving scooters around the island. We only saw the outskirts of Taitong, the city where Max and I stayed with Vivian before shipping out to Green Island. We had a place called Taimali in mind for our next campsite. There was no designated camping area in this town but the guide book said it was fine to sleep along the beach. Worried about the falling light we took a turn toward the beach as soon as we hit town and traveled down empty roads leading past eerie factories sectioned off with wire fences. We found an entrance to the beach but saw a nearby sign saying “No Camping” so we decided to get back on the road and look for a place on the beach closer to town. We set up camp next to big rock puzzle pieces. Ancient looking raft-like boats, made of what looked like tree trunks and pieced together with thick ropes, rested in the sand near the entrance to the beach. From a perch over the wall a spotlight scanned the shore. The spotlight did not hit our tents but we watched it a little nervously while we ate our 7/11 dinners and wondered about the four wheeler stopping and starting along the beach. Eventually it passed us by. Max and Sam made a fire and roasted pumpkin seeds on driftwood branches.





Day 4 (Tuesday)--We woke up early the next morning, before seven, to the puttering of scooters and the heave-hos of men pulling the strange boats into the still water.

At the next town we joined a long line at a popular breakfast place and ordered vegetable sao bin, dan bin, milk teas. For a while the road to Kenting was flat and the salty breeze was just a little bit warm, enough to tease us. We took a little detour to check out some of the hot springs we had read about in the guide but south of Taitong, we found sad evidence of the tsunami in leveled ground and pock-marked towns littered with driftwood, rocks, trash, splintered wood from houses, sheets of painted metal and tiles. We were bumping along a rocky road toward a hot spring when a police officer stopped us. He told us that the hot spring was no longer in operation in brief Chinese and did a tsunami impression that involved a lot of flailing. Another police officer in that same town offered Sam a water bottle and wished us a Happy New Year, as did so many of the people we saw.

We found another hot spring a little ways down a different road. It was a small operation at the foot of some hills. Families had set up camp in the parking lot and in the covered pools and patios a hundred or so people swam or sat or ate. We felt many stares but everyone was friendly. The pools stank of sulfur, a smell that reminds me of the well water we used to drink at 46 Lakeside Drive. My stiff body melted a little into the warmth and realigned.



By this time we’d taken to smaller roads. One road on the map led nowhere but a real busted town, with piles of driftwood like dug-up dinosaur graves. We ended up at a modest country house guarded by tied-up dogs. Their shirtless owner motioned for us to turn off our engines, bowed in gratitude when we did, and returned to pulling weeds out of his garden without any explanation as to why a marked road led to his house. He didn’t even seem surprised to see us there. I won’t forget the bemused look on his face, a peaceful and kind face like the face I imagine on Rin Poche.

We turned around and Sam hooked us back up with more major roads. Throughout the entire trip Sam did most of the research and navigating, and I am so grateful for that. These last roads took us up into more mountains. They were packed with travelers in cars and on bikes, which amazed me because some edges were without rails and caused my stomach to leap up into my throat. I never got tired of looking at the mountains folding into each other and the strip of ocean in the triangles of their meeting places. Toward the top of the hills the trees hid these views but it was nice to ride through dense forest, too. Back at sea level, fleeing farther and farther south, the plants began to look dried out, the grass shot out in browns and cream colors like grasses on Green Island and Maine. Once again, we saw the black rocky hills standing at the edge of the ocean. The water ate away the base of these bold hills but along the grassy tops of the crags kids ran up and down. The wind exhausted us. We stopped so that I could take a picture.

Cars started piling up closer to Kenting. When we saw “Smokey Joe’s Tex-Mex and Steakhouse” we knew we’d made it to the cheesy tip of Taiwan. It started to rain so we put our ponchos back on and weaved around the cars and pedestrians. We rode almost to the next town before we realized that we’d missed the turn for the campgrounds on the west side of Kenting. We rode back toward the water and came upon a rest stop, where other people had decided to camp, before we found the official campground. Though we weren’t on the beach, from that rest stop we could enjoy a view of the water and the company of playful kids. By the light made from our neighbors' generators we set up our tents between a big rock and a tree and hopped back on the scooters to look for some food. We made an accidental detour and drove down some completely black roads, which reminded me of country roads around home. We passed a few towns and gawdy hotels and finally we were back on the main strip of Kenting, which was even more disturbing by night than by day. Along the sidewalks we followed the herd past the food stands, keeping an eye out for an affordable restaurant. We found a place not too far down the road. We ate on the porch outside and felt a little like zoo animals sipping our beer and eating our fried rice and Thai chicken while kids pointed and tugged their parents’ shirts. Their obvious fascination surprised me, because there seemed to be as many foreigners in Kenting as in Taipei.

After another long and dark trip back to the rest stop we fell asleep fast. The trip had felt like ours alone for such a long time, it unsettled me to bump up against people again, to see such ugly, in-your-face (albeit sometimes fun) commercialism. How much better it is to share a beach with nothing but a spotlight, rafts, fishnets and even a four-wheeler. We’d heard about a festival in Kenting where lots of foreigners from Taipei and elsewhere had gathered but we decided to stay clear of that.



Day 5 (Wednesday)--





Day 6 (Thursday)--





Day 7 (Friday)--Home!

Impressions of Buddhism, Neurosis, and Eating Yogurt With a Spoon

The weather’s been perfect lately--cool enough to require a sweater or my perfect new jacket but warm enough to jog in a t-shirt. The past few mornings we woke up to rain, which is something I don’t mind, especially when I know there’s a fine red umbrella hanging on the door that I haven’t lost yet. I drink half a French press of coffee in the morning now. Max became sick just after drinking coffee a few weeks ago so he hasn’t had a stomach for it. He drinks tea for the time being so I grind half as many beans and boil half as much water. The coffee gets me to school and my love for fifteen little people gets me through the morning even if we have to read in unison like robots....Even if Bena, the new girl, is crying again or Erica’s hitting pitches that rattle my brain. The rain clears by the time I venture outside for my afternoon break. On Tuesday the clouds covered the mountains behind Tienmu and on Wednesday they turned purple like cold lips. I went to the Riverside Park near school a few times this week. It is a different park than the one near home, with well-tended gardens and paths lined with trees old enough to co-create canopies. I like their exposed roots, teaming and tangled like piles of worms. The same long white fish fly out of the water in this river and blue herons land where it’s shallow. I saw a man with a sweatshirt that said, “Cornell Dad” on his proud round belly. He was so happy to say hello. Another female runner gave me a look equivalent to a fist-pump. There is something very special about our riverside park but I think I’ll spend time in this one for a while.

So many Taiwanese like to say hello to foreigners. Alyson, Kiah’s good friend, was sweet to let me borrow a bike for the rest of the time I’m here. I get more hellos while riding the bike than I do when I walk places. I guess people become bold knowing we won’t hold eye contact for more than a few seconds. I feel very free riding the bike around. I can’t help but sing children’s songs “Do you know the Chinese Zodiac Signs? Yes! I do! Well what are they?” or the Carol King song that never seems to leave my head, “So far away, doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” Other people talk to me when I’m trying to read or write at coffee shops or at picnic tables outside of breakfast places. These interactions are usually awkward, “We can be friends?” sometimes, sketchy, “I know very much about both The West and The Orient. I love classical music, do you? Please can I have your email and phone number?”

Once I talked with a woman for an hour and a half about Buddhism. She gave me a little jade rabbit to hang from my cell phone. I couldn’t manage to string it through the little hole so she did for me. That was on Christmas. She drew pictures and wrote English and Chinese words all over a piece of scrap paper while we talked about reincarnation and the Bible, which she loves to read, and why she goes to Catholic services but ducks out before the group meetings. She told me that certain questions preoccupy certain souls and that the experience of embodiment is a way for a soul to come in contact with those questions. When she reads the Bible she finds things to hold on to and sometimes when she goes to a church service a handful of words hit her just right and stir up her sense of purpose. Other words pass in and out of her like smoke, or don’t even enter her at all because her soul rejects them so strongly. She rejects the certainty of the people in the little group meetings, for example, and the “all or nothing” they say that their son of God requires, the impossibility that other God’s or ideas might help relieve suffering. “Me too!” I say. “You read the Bible?” she asks. When I say “no, I don’t," she tells me, “you should.” And she’s right, I probably should. She gave me her phone number and asked me to call her if I would like to sit with her at the edge of her favorite river.

From what I gathered in that conversation as well as talks with Max and Sam, who are studying Buddhism and Daoism, there is no concept of absolute truth in Buddhism. After meditation every Sunday, they sit and listen to their peers ask the teacher questions about anything from poop to burglary to pleasure to karma. He doesn’t claim to give the right answers, he only promises to tell people what he thinks and to share what has helped relief him of some suffering in his own life. He often contradicts himself within a single sentence, gives many different answers to one straight forward question or a simple answer to one that's packed full. He encourages people to listen and take with them what they will, what speaks to their particular preoccupations. There is no moral code in Buddhism, no single way, no fear of contradiction, no demand. There are only suggestions, ideas. Their teacher, in the same vein as the Buddha, encourages his students to practice discipline only in so far as it helps them relieve themselves of unnecessary suffering and helps them recognize what little they actually require to live loving, fulfilling lives. (From all the things I’ve heard, the stuff I share with anyone reading this blog is the stuff that has stuck with me and the stuff I will keep and return to so long as it helps. This is not a comprehensive, or necessarily accurate description of Buddhism, only my impression of other people's impressions.)

I don’t believe that I have ever truly suffered, but I have been pained, saddened, hateful, and a host of other negative things. I set bombs to my insecurities and fears and they blow up in my head, splatter smut on its walls and distort the way I look at the world. I have a wonderful life full of love, security, power, and opportunity, and yet still I set off these bombs. I’m not angry with myself about this. I am not perfect. Everyone falls victim to these mental spirals, and, from what I hear, no one Max and Sam studies with would dismiss me for my superficial and self-induced aches or call them insignificant. No one would judge me for taking pleasure in material things. I think that their teacher would be happy to see me enjoying myself, but he might ask why I take pleasure in a morning glory muffin from Wild Oats Bakery in Brunswick Maine (let’s just say, because I could really go for one right now), and whether or not I felt attached to it or felt that I really needed it to be content. I want to enjoy those kinds of things, not depend on them or live for them.

Max and I have had another flu since the last one I wrote about. I haven’t been able to depend on my body these past few months. I’m trying to appreciate my health now and to keep in mind that I’ve been healthy throughout my life. Max listened to something about how much a false idea of permanence impacts our existence. When we get sick we feel like we’re always sick. It’s hard to remember what it feels like to be healthy and hard to remind ourselves that we will be healthy again. And then if it’s not one thing it’s another. Our bodies are hardly perfect machines, or a machine at all really. They never promise to be. I’m practicing letting my mind take me out of these things. Not to ignore them, but to get along with them and to pay respect to all that’s working. It’s so easy to run around trying to catch the things that are wrong. I trap them in a jar and call people over to come look. I don’t trap them long. I see something else in the corner of my eye and unscrew the lid, free the old thing and race to catch the new one. They’re all so fleeting, these preoccupations. When I can, I just want to watch them fly by.

And so…

Bye-bye guilt for not writing in the damn blog for a while (I haven’t felt like it), bye-bye guilt for eating the muffin, bye-bye timeline, bye-bye mistake, bye-bye headache, jealousy, unproductive judgment, disgust with self, pressure, feigned confidence, so much pressure! Self-inflicted! I can be quite hard on myself. The sad truth is that I’ve been quite devoted, at least in the last year or two, to a shady idea that good comes from self-criticism and self-improvement (Oh New England, you made a Little Wom[a]n out of me!) Think: There are so many things wrong with the way I exist! The privilege I experience! And so I ought to do so much with what I have. I must set goals and accomplish them. I must be responsible. I must not offend. I must think through. Out of fear that I will do the wrong thing, the ignorant thing, offer the wrong interpretation, or offer no interpretation when one is called for… aiyah! This double checking has become part of my identity, and I’m not sure how I feel about it or what to do. It’s certainly a post-grad preoccupation of mine, which this blog is a testament to. I like to remember that I wasn’t always this way. I used to live with less trepidation. I was unprepared to look out at the world, and, of course, I still am in so many ways, but I offered my love to strangers a lot more easily. Feeling, rather painfully, my unpreparedness, I learned to look in more because that seemed like the best, or at least the more possible, way to be a good citizen of the world. But I’m less and less sure. My co-worker called me a “typical writer,” and, to clarify, “rather neurotic.” Immediately following his comment, my interior dialogue went something like this, Shit. What makes him think that? Am I always talking about myself? Am I really so self-involved? Do I make a lot out of a little? Am I negative and awful to be around? Am I just a conditional? A human conditional? A giant “but”? I write a blog! Ah! He’s so right! We’re all pretty self-involved, and I heard a good argument about why I am particularly so. We forget to notice the difference between things that happen and things that happen to us. He apologized later, “I’m sorry, I can be blunt,” which made me feel worse at the time. But all of this brought me to consider that lately I look in more than I look out.

I’ve believed many different things, lived many different ways, harbored many opposing thoughts, and through all of this I’ve been Sophie. I like to remember that.

This poem is for Alex,

Am I the way my hair smells
at the end of this muggy day
(and every muggy day of my life)
or the things I thought
just before that thought,
which I can’t even remember now?
Certainly I am more those things
than what I say I think is beautiful today,
or what I think is good.
One summer I felt very lonely.
I sat down in a diner
with a cousin I don’t often see
in a city we both happened to live in.
“It’s okay,” she said,
“I know the way you eat yogurt with a spoon.”
That is enough, I felt,
to house different versions
of all the good people
I have loved.
To be the idea of me in her memory.

I must tell you that part of me liked being called a “typical writer.” It made me feel authentic, like a “kind of person,” made for some special sort of work.

I believe (today) that what we do becomes a part of who we are and the goals we set for ourselves, whether we accomplish them or not, drop us off at different vantage points that are useful to look in or out from. But we are not what we do; our meaning is not so static as that. We are the composition of all we’ve done and all that we’ll do in our lifetimes (and who knows? perhaps for lifetimes and lifetimes after this…) We are constantly in the making and never made.

He has a point about writers, doesn’t he? Isn’t it true that that's what writer’s do--make a lot out of a little? Find big things behind little things? Or find the small, contradicting parts of big things. Shatter concepts into a million pieces. Shatter love and hate, hunger, pity and power. Pick up a moment, feeling, gesture, and put a human reflection in it? Ask someone else to see his own reflection in the same slice of glass. Do we connect with other people because we see our own face in the same glass someone else saw her face in? Or do we connect because we see her face, and it looks hurt. I have no idea. I’d like to think it’s the latter. But how well do we really see people? How long must we travel through ourselves before we get to something like compassion?

In the introduction to my college writing thesis I wrote about the stretching that happens in fiction-making. It feels good to scrounge around in my life, hold up old costumes, lost and new-found convictions, the stuff that pinned my core, and then take someone else’s measurements, remake these experiences of self on them. Sometimes, even if just for a second, I get behind that person’s eyes and I feel as close to myself, and, simultaneously, as far away from myself as I’ve ever been.

And so it’s for this good reason, and other’s too, that I want to keep up with this writing even as I put to bed most of what I’ve written so far in Taiwan. In fact, I’ve written very little lately and I choose to be okay with that. I choose to be a part of all kinds of good happening all around me.

You might remember that I felt myself leaning back into life when I first got here, “This feeling reminds me of making risotto, and of scenes in Haruki Murikami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when the protagonist, a pensive man, walked around the empty ally behind his row house in search of his wife's cat. Physically, it feels like the overly anxious parts of me sit back in a rocker with a drink, letting the five senses do all the heavy lifting (living). These old traits are just sort of watching the new world pass by fast and hot and bright and crowded and overwhelmingly kind, helpful. It's a general sense of reserve that appeals to me now (and might make me lonely for home later). I don't feel pressure to "make more" of the minute/I'm not pressuring myself to "make more" of the minute (to clarify: for me, this sense of duty too often derives from negative, artificial things). I'm letting each minute be itself. It's not so much a resigned to fate attitude as a resigned to time one, or a refreshing lack of control. "We have nothing to gain. We have nothing to lose," Max tells me.” The funny thing is, after several months now, that sounds about right again.

I think I’ll write more soon, but before that I'll look out. I'll take a scooter trip around the island of Taiwan, listen to firecrackers and good tidings, get a little smelly and wet, take pictures and live some "it could only happen in Taiwan" stories to share with you all when I return to Xiamen Je.

On a totally unrelated note, I just saw a woman feeding french fries to her pet pig.