Bundaegi

Balancing Frogs

2011-03-08T23:13:00.003+08:00

Since I seem unable to update this blog with any sort of frequency, I've decided I'm just going to switch over to balancingfrogs.blogspot.com, where I've been posting quick write-ups of books and TED.com talks and the like.

Cultural Difference: Political Cartooning

2011-02-09T12:44:00.001+08:00

When I went to Kaohsiung last summer, I saw cartoon avatar pictures of Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chu everywhere I went.

I assumed it was all politicking for the upcoming mayoral elections (which Chen won easily). But I returned to Kaohsiung this month, over Chinese New Year, and Chen's avatars were if anything even more ubiquitous.

These posters are all over Kaohsiung. To celebrate the Year of the Rabbit, Chen appears to be wearing a rabbit head as a hat.

Portraying people as cartoon avatars is more common in East Asia than in the West, and it's not uncommon to see little cartoon figures of other prominent politicians on official city merchandise elsewhere in Taiwan. But I haven't seen any politician portrayed in cartoon form quite as much as Chen.

You can buy Chen merchandise in Formosa Boulevard MRT.

I'm not offended by any of this, or think it is improper. But I do think it illustrates a cultural difference between East and West. This would never fly in the United States. Sure, there are lots of souvenir shops in Washington DC where you can buy Barack Obama bobblehead dolls. But that's just the market filling a demand; it's not as if the White House is actively producing and promoting them.

Chen Chu's official title is Mayor. But Greater Kaohsiung includes a huge hinterland and is not part of any larger administrative unit, so Chen's position is really equivalent to a state governor in the United States. I'm trying to imagine the reaction if American state governments started distributing official signs, leaflets and brochures with adorable cartoon depictions of Andrew Cuomo or Rick Perry or Chris Christie or Deval Patrick.

I'm guessing the reactions would include quite a bit of mockery.

We're on Offbeat Bride!

2011-02-09T11:56:00.002+08:00

Our wedding has been featured on Offbeat Bride! With a lovely write-up by my wife Jenna, who was quite active in the OB community before the wedding (and after).

I read the Offbeat Brides book on the plane ride home for the wedding. It's awesome and fantastic to see us on the site.

紐約時報

2010-12-04T16:16:00.002+08:00

So now that we're seeing iPad ads all over, my question is this.

What's up with the iPads in local advertisements showing the New York Times? I understand that reading American newspapers is a big selling point back in the United States, but this is Taiwan. Why not localize a bit?

The Dust Has Cleared

2010-12-01T15:22:00.002+08:00

So what actually happened in those Taiwan municipal elections?

BEFORE THE ELECTION, I believed Su Tseng-chang had a real shot of knocking off Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin, and in any event the race would be close.

WRONG. Hau demolished Su by 12 percentage points. There are rumors that Su's unexpectedly large loss has ended any realistic shot he may have at winning the DPP presidential nomination in 2012, though I think it's a bit too early to tell.

BEFORE THE ELECTION, I thought the KMT would achieve a better performance in Sinbei than in Taipei. I thought Tsai Ing-wen could only hope to win election if she rode a nationwide DPP wave.

MOSTLY WRONG. Tsai lost, but she made it close, winning a greater percentage of the vote than Su.

BEFORE THE ELECTION, I thought the Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung mayoral races would not even be close, with the KMT winning easily in Taichung and the DPP taking the other two.

PARTLY WRONG. Tainan and Kaohsiung voted pretty much the way everyone expected them to, but Taichung mayor Jason Hu got a real scare on Election Day when his opponent, Su Jia-chyuan, came very close to unseating him. Now Su's getting a lot of praise in the DPP and people are talking about him as a real 2012 presidential contender.

The day before the election, people told me they expected something surprising to happen on Election Eve. Sure enough, that evening a prominent KMT politician (not a candidate for anything, but a famous face), Sean Lien, was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt in Yonghe, not far as the crow flies from our apartment. Lots of famous and non-famous people have theorized that the KMT got a good deal of sympathy vote as a result, which may well have denied Tsai Ing-wen and Su Jia-chyuan victories in their respective cities.

As a result, of course, we're already hearing the conspiracy theories.

The sad thing is, unsuccessful attempts to assassinate politicians the day before elections, causing people to argue over whether it skewed the results, is something of a tradition in Taiwan. Hopefully it won't happen in 2012.

Taiwan Elections 2010

2010-11-24T10:27:00.015+08:00

Has it really been 2 months and I've neglected to update this blog with our trips to Honduras and Guatemala? Wow, it really has.

Well, that's going to have to wait, because I have Taiwan Election 2010 Pictures!

Also see Jenna's election coverage here.

Elections are Saturday, November 27 for the mayorships of Taiwan's five biggest municipalities, as well as a host of lesser offices. Taipei is now absolutely covered with signs for various candidates, and the streets are full of campaign workers distributing flyers to passers-by as if to say, "Here, you throw this away".

Little cartoon avatars of the candidate are pretty common, as you can see with Popeye here. If it's common in Taipei it seems to be even more common in Kaohsiung, which is full of cute little Chen Chu cartoons.

In Kaohsiung, Tainan, and Taichung the mayoral races are not expected to be especially close. DPP candidates are generally expected to win election in Kaohsiung and Tainan, and the KMT mayor is expected to be re-elected in Taichung.

That leaves Taipei and Sinbei, the latter of which is not, properly speaking, a "city", but rather the suburbs of Taipei packaged together and newly incorporated to form the new largest municipality in Taiwan.

The incumbent mayor of Taipei is Hau Long-bin, seen here in improbable clothing on the side of a Taipei City bus (if I'm reading the Chinese correctly, it's about Hau's tireless efforts to prevent flooding).

Here's Hau with a local City Council candidate. It's common on election posters for local, lesser-known candidates to pose with a much more prominent member of the same party.

Hau's opponent is Su Tseng-chang of the DPP. It's universally believed that Su's real goal is to be elected president (he unsuccessfully campaigned for the DPP's presidential nomination in 2008), and many go so far as to say he entered the Taipei mayoral race expecting to lose, hoping the publicity and campaign organization would give him a stronger platform from which to challenge Ma in 2012.

If that's so, it looks likely to backfire for him. A year ago, nobody thought Hau's numbers would be as weak as they are now. Su looks very likely to actually topple Hau, which will put him in the position of either having to scuttle his 2012 ambitions or going back on his promise to serve out his term if elected. (I'm not certain, but I believe he'd be legally obligated to resign as mayor if he ran for president.)

Local candidate Zhou Ni-an's truck there has lots of political imagery. That's not only Su Tseng-chang in the right background, but former president Lee Teng-hui on the left. He's the former KMT president who has since turned his back on his former party and actively campaigns against it every time election season rolls around. On the right there's a pun, which is pretty common on election posters; it says something like "Wishing you well," which sounds like Zhou's name.

I don't live in the not-yet-existing Sinbei City, but as it comprises most of Taipei's suburbs, plenty of Taipei city buses whose routes are partly in Sinbei are festooned with Sinbei campaign advertising.

On the left is Sinbei mayoral candidate Chu Li-luan; on the right is a local candidate for, I believe, city councilor. They're trying so hard to convince us that they're cool, with their "MiB" getup.

Chu, universally referred to in the English-language media by his Anglo name Eric, is considered the KMT young handsome rising star right now. If you asked Taiwanese people to predict the likely KMT presidential nominee in 2016, you'd hear Chu's name more than any other.

Tsai Ing-wen is the chairwoman of the DPP and Chu's opponent for mayor of Sinbei. She's also generally thought to be planning to challenge Ma in the 2012 election, which means the DPP will be in an interesting position if Tsai and Su both win their respective elections.

I'll probably make another election-themed post in a couple of days once we know more of the fate of Mr. Hau, Mr. Su, Mr. Chu, and Ms. Tsai.

Granada & Masaya

2010-09-29T07:43:00.003+08:00

Sorry, no pictures yet because this computer has no working USB port (and three non-working ones!)

Ever-popular with foreign tourists and with good reason, Granada is a city where you can take pictures of the beautiful architecture almost without effort. Casco Viejo in Panama City was being restored to its former glory when we were there, but in Granada the process has been completed.

Tourism is clearly a huge moneymaker in Granada, with backpacker hostels and tour companies all over the place, as well as many touts and independent vendors clearly targeting the tourist market. But this is not to say Granada is in any sense not "the real Nicaragua". There are bustling markets catering primarily to locals, and all over the place one sees political banners and graffiti pertaining to next year´s Presidential election.

Granada´s got a reputation as a historic center of right-wing politics (nemesis of lefty Leon) but the political signs and slogans we´ve seen have been overwhelmingly pro-Sandanista. Same in Ometepe, come to think of it; maybe the Sandanistas are just more prone to decorate walls and buildings?

We spent a day and a half exploring the city, taking pictures of its old buildings (which I hope to have on the blog soon). We saw several churches, and heard much on the history of the city, much more about William Walker than the Contras/Sandanistas. Walker was an American warlord (he´s usually called a "filibuster" or "adventurer", but "warlord" sure seems like the best term from our perspective) who tried to conquer all of Central America in the 1850s with Granada as his capital before he burned much of the city to the ground.

The next day was a day trip to Masaya. Lonely Planet describes Masaya as having a touristy handicrafts market which is a good place to shop for local handicrafts, and a local market where all the, well, locals shop. We got off the bus in the pouring rain (Tropical Storm Matthew´s advance scouts) and made for the local market, which turned out to be HUGE, partially covered, and in parts very touristy. We bought umbrellas (at which point the rain abated) and sat down for lunch at a very non-pretentious counter. I was amused that, while we both ordered pollo asado, what we got was chicken cooked in very different ways; she got warm roast chicken, while I got room temperature fried chicken, possibly from the day before.

With the rain stopped, the two of us walked across town to the touristy market. It turned out to be very touristy indeed; the only people we saw who appeared to be locals were working there, and the stalls mostly all sold the same sorts of merchandise, much of it rather generic Nicaraguan souvenirs (including tacky cups shaped like women´s breasts featuring Nicaraguan slogans, which were being sold by vendors across the market). But it wasn´t all bad, and we bought a table runner, and we relaxed for coffee and tres leches in the cafe. (The waiter initially said they didn´t have tres leches; then he reconsidered and said they did. After a wait, we received two servings of tres leches, in cheap plastic cups. We think he ran out to the neighborhood panaderia to procure them for us. They were pretty good, at any rate.)

Then we went over to check out the baby spider monkey that someone had brought to the cafe. He took quite a liking to Jenna. She wouldn´t have been able to pry him off her neck without his keepers´assistance.

Ometepe

2010-09-26T08:50:00.009+08:00

Ometepe is rural. It`s rural enough that on the island`s main highway it`s common to see pigs crossing to get to their preferred foraging spots. Buses have to honk so that horses (roaming freely) will get out of their way. Traffic is regularly brought to a standstill because some cowboy is taking too long to get his herd of cattle across the road.

Ometepe is an island where cars that aren`t 4-wheel-drive will have their movement severely curtailed, and for many sorts of journey the easiest and most practical mode of travel may be on horseback.

A pole painted by the local Sandinistas, and some dogs. Political posters, murals and graffiti was everywhere we went in Nicaragua, and it was almost entirely pro-Sandinista.

Ometepe`s located on Lake Nicaragua, an inland body of water so vast that it could pass for an ocean depending on where you`re looking out from. A lake so big it`s got sharks, though not as many as there used to be.

We went for a hike halfway up Maderas, the shorter of the two volcanoes. Although not an inherently difficult path, our hike was made more tortuous by the fact that the trail was so muddy and slippery. (I`m not convinced that there are times in the wet season when the trail is not muddy and slippery.)

But we saw many beautiful insects - including several huge owl butterflies that I had little hope of taking decent pictures of - and a couple of howler monkeys. The views from Maderas´halfway point were spectacular.

The taller of the two volcanoes, Conception, from Maderas. This picture does not do justice to the view.

Liberia

2010-09-26T08:45:00.003+08:00

After our flight from Osa to San Juan - in the smallest airplane I have ever flown in - we took a bus up to Liberia. Liberia is a handsome little city in northwestern Costa Rica, an hour and a half from the Nicaraguan border. We only spent one night there on our way north, but we liked it a lot. The area around the central square reminded me of popular images of old-timey American small towns. There was even a brass band giving a free concert in the evening.

Outside of the city center, though, Liberia`s got its share of chain stores, including the first Cinnabon we`ve seen in Central America. Or outside of the United States.

Osa

2010-09-24T08:30:00.008+08:00

Costa Rica is the most touristy country in Central America. Seeking to avoid the crowded tourist spots and the associated pickpockets and shady individuals, we made immediately for the Peninsula de Osa, sparsely populated and home to a huge variety of animal species.

We stayed at the Iguana Lodge near Puerto Jimenez, home to friendly staff and several cats and dogs.

That`s Spike on the left. The day after we arrived Spike decided we were his humans, and for the rest of our time there he followed us around, even napping in our room and sitting by our feet as we ate. When any of the much larger dogs at Iguana Lodge tried to nose in on our affection, he would get angry and drive them off. The exception was the cat, whom Spike was clearly wary of.

Sometimes a group of squirrel monkeys passes through the lodge, fascinating to watch and maddenly difficult to photograph. I suspect a similar gang of macaques or baboons or other Old World monkeys passing through would make the humans lock their doors for fear that the monkeys would leave a trail of stolen food and modest destruction in their wake. But squirrel monkeys are tiny and harmless - their name is apt, as they look like squirrels with monkey forepaws and heads. They aren't the least bit intimidating.

Our first morning we went kayaking, which Jenna hadn´t done in years and I had never done before. Sharing a two-person kayak, our guide Adriana took us up a river through a mangrove swamp. We saw baby crocodiles and capuchin monkeys, and got a physical upper-body workout of the sort I don´t often receive.

On our second morning, we went on a hike, accompanied by an excellent naturalist guide, Sidnar. With his help we spotted all 4 species of monkey native to Osa: the small squirrel and capuchin monkeys, and the large spider and howler monkeys, the latter of which (as their name implies) are more commonly heard than seen. We also saw some beautiful macaws and parrots with Sidnar´s help. Sidnar has an excellent eye for these things. He saw a distant lump on a tree, one that Jenna and I would just walk past without really looking, and he set up his telescope and invited us to look through it. And it turned out the lump was a sloth, sleeping with his limbs wrapped around the treetrunk.

I didn`t take many pictures in Osa, but Jenna`s got some great wildlife pictures here.

Boquete

2010-09-23T07:11:00.007+08:00

Boquete is a small town in the western Panamanian highlands, an hour´s drive north of David. It´s a relatively wealthy town due to the coffee plantations and the large number of rich retirees setting up estates. There are many long- and short-term foreign residents. Habla Ya! is a well-known Spanish language school in town and on our second day Jenna and I took a 2-hour refresher course to improve our basic linguistic ability.

Local coffee producer Cafe Ruiz let us start off our day with a coffee tasting, in which we were encouraged to pay attention to the tastes and smells of their coffee. (I had a cold so I´m not sure how many fine distinctions I was able to make.) Then we went on a tour of the plantation itself.

Young Geisha coffee plants. They are going to be mighty expensive one day.

Coffee beans. When they turn red they´re ripe for picking.

What you get when you break open a a ripe berry.

Bean washing and drying facility at the plantation.

The interior of the roasting plant back in Boquete.

They´re proud of their coffee at Cafe Ruiz. Panama is the only Central American country where coffee is grown by totally independent growers, as opposed to places where growers are forced to belong to and sell through a cooperative.

On our second day we went on a zipline tour. (All of these outdoor activities are scheduled for the morning. That´s because you can usually count on it raining in the afternoon.) It looked intimidating enough at first, as our guides talked us through the safety protocols, to be followed exactly lest disaster ensue! But one of the guides had his six-year-old son accompanying us so we figured it couldn´t be that bad. It was much more fun and less intimidating once we were actually doing it.

I had one bad habit I had to overcome. I consistently broke too soon, forcing me to haul myself the final short distance to the platform with my hands. Subconsciously I figured, better brake too soon than too late. My subconscious didn´t care about the automatic brake and safety precautions that would have kept me from slamming into the tree at full speed.

Panama City

2010-09-12T06:55:00.008+08:00

We began the Panama portion of our trip with 2 full days in Panama City, based in the neighborhood of Casco Viejo. Casco Viejo is the old city -- but not the very old city, which was sacked and burned by pirates in 1671. Afterwards the city leaders decided to rebuild in a more easily defendable spot, so they picked this peninsula which juts into Panama Bay.

When Panama became independent, Panama City was still limited to the Casco Viejo area. As the city grew, Casco Viejo went into decline, becoming a neglected slum. Recently the government began a concerted effort to improve the neighborhood.

Now, as you walk around the neighborhood, there are decaying buildings everywhere, and streets and sidewalks that are full of holes. But there is reconstruction work going on too. Several old buildings were in the process of being repaired when we were there, and much of Casco Viejo is beautiful now.

Plaza de la Independencia in Casco Viejo. Top picture is of the National Cathedral. The third picture is looking towards the glitzy new section of Panama, one of whose towers is visible.

That´s the President´s house in Casco Viejo on the left. This is as close as we could get.

Looking towards glitzy modern Panama City.

Our second day we went to the Canal. The Panama Canal´s visior´s center at Miraflores is very touristy, so of course we went there. What other obvious place is there to pick up a Panama Canal shot glass? We then checked out the museum on the history, ecology and workings of the Canal. It´s a very well-done, modern exhibit, with everything bilingual in English and Spanish.

Then we went up to the observation deck where, with the hot sun beating down on us, we watched as a huge container ship passed through the locks on its way to the Pacific.

The ship enters the locks.

The water level has been made equal.

And the ship goes on through.

Kaohsiung and Kenting

2010-07-17T12:22:00.014+08:00

This past weekend was my latest jaunt around southern Taiwan, including days spent in Kaohsiung (where I'd been before) and Kenting (where I'd never been).

On Friday afternoon Emily and I took the HSR down to Kaohsiung and quickly located Kaohsiung 202, a neat little backpackery hostel near the Love River. Kaohsiung 202 was great, the first backpacker's hostel I've stayed at in Taiwan. Our room, although extremely basic, was also clean and extremely cheap. The shared bathrooms were sufficiently clean. And there was free Internet. The hostel is marketed entirely to foreigners, and the women who run it didn't seem Taiwanese (we think they were Filipina).

Although it's a bit of a walk from the MRT, the hostel is centrally located. We headed to the Kaohsiung municipal film archive, just a short walk away, which has excellent exhibits on the history of Taiwanese moviemaking with an emphasis on southern Taiwan. We got dinner at Liuhe Night Market - often reviled as excessively touristy, but you can count on it for a fine meal - and returned to the Love River for drinking Taiwan Beer at a riverside cafe.

There's the view from the roof of the hotel. The Love River is visible beyond the parking lot.

The Love River used to be known as a dirty polluted mess. Now that it's cleaned up and the riverside area is developed, it's a center of Kaohsiung civic pride.

There's an election coming up in November, and like Taipei, Kaohsiung is covered with political posters. Beyond the obvious political differences with northern Taiwan, the other thing I noticed was that almost all the politicians running for office here have little South Park-esque cartoon avatars of themselves in their ads. Chen Chu, the mayor of Kaohsiung and easily the most visible political figure in all of southern Taiwan, is the most obvious example, but even the old male KMT candidates for office have their cartoon avatars.

Chen Chu's cartoon self spreading the word about a municipal hotline. Chen's adorable avatar is seen on all manner of information billboards and signage that have nothing to do with politics or the upcoming election.

On Saturday we met up with Emily's former housemate Robin, a Kaohsiung native, and went off exploring the British Consulate and Cijin areas. The old British Consulate is now a museum and a cafe (Jenna and I visited the cafe when we were there in 2008); at the moment the consulate's home to an exhibit on the Beatles and the city of Liverpool, and how Liverpool compares to Kaohsiung. I assumed they were sister cities, but Wikipedia says I was mistaken. So why Liverpool then? I don't know.

Flags and visitors at the very touristy British Consulate.

Cijin is an island in the harbor best approached by ferry. We'd had substantial Japanese noodles for lunch so we were not yet in a mood to appreciate Cijin's seafood offerings. Instead, we took a look at the historic lighthouse (closed) and the ruined fort.

The fort, and Kaohsiung beyond it. The fire in that last picture looked pretty serious, but I never found out what it was from.

That evening Jenna arrived via HSR after working all day, and we rented a car and headed south. (We headed south eventually. Thank to our unfamiliarity with the city's road network, it took us longer than it should have for us to be definitely going in the right direction.)

We stopped for dinner at Donggang, a coastal city south of Kaohsiung that's become quite wealthy as a center of bluefin tuna fishing. Jenna and I visited Donggang on two consecutive weekends last year to see the King Boat festival, which climaxed with the burning of a huge boat on the beach in the early hours of the morning. Central Donggang has several well-known seafood restaurants, but if you want the best food in town you do what we did: go to the harbor and eat at one of the outdoor restaurants there. We got there after ten in the evening, and there were still several places open and doing good business. We didn't have tuna, but we had oysters and crab legs and clams and non-tuna varieties of fish and it was all quite excellent.

We reached Kenting, a town of bars and restaurants designed to separate tourists from their money, after one in the morning. Driving right through it, we located a campground off the road south of Kenting. We paid, set up our tents, and realized our rented car had suffered a flat tire for some reason.

We fixed it in the morning, after a very hot and muggy night (the guy who'd set up a large fan to blow through his tent had the right idea). The car came with a spare tire, tools to change it, but no jack. The guy who ran the campground had a jack. Emily, being the most mechanically competent among us, was able to change the tire. Problem solved. We washed up (the shower facilities were extremely basic, but I was amazed they had hot water) and went off to explore the southernmost parts of the island of Taiwan.

The big stone marker at Taiwan's southernmost point.

The seaside at Kenting.

It was enough to make me regret not bringing snorkeling gear. I'd assumed there wouldn't be enough time.

Emily with coconut. They're available everywhere in Kenting.

Later on we turned inland, driving through Kenting National Park.

To tell the truth I think Jenna took these pictures; her camera was unavailable so she used mine.

Hengchun is one of the largest, if not the largest, town in the Kenting area. The oldest part was lies within the well-preserved old city walls.

That's the old North Gate, as the barely-visible Chinese characters say. Jenna's pictures.

Emily atop an old tank by the North Gate. There's nothing to say you can't climb up on it, and after Emily got off some kids got on. Again, Jenna's picture.

On the way back we stopped in Donggang again, this time at a decent restaurant near Donglong temple. Then we hustled back to Kaohsiung before the deadline passed before returning the car -- it was a relief when we saw giant billboards with photos (not cartoons) of Chen Chu, meaning that we were getting close to our goal. We got back to the HSR station with some time to spare, and they didn't charge us for the flat tire (good thing, too; we would have protested if they had). Hooray!

Capital flows

2010-04-12T09:40:00.003+08:00

From the Taipei Times a while back: Gifts for ghosts changing from cash to flash goods.

It seems that fake paper money is no longer good enough for the dead of Taiwan, where relatives traditionally burn make-believe cash to help ease the passage of their deceased loved ones through the byways of the netherworld.

Instead, many people now opt to provide ancestral ghosts with more elaborate paper gifts — models of everything from Ferraris to iPhones and even villas.

This article is a wonderful source of food for thought. I like the straightforward statement that the afterlife is a place where "buying opportunities have never been convincingly documented".

There's also the bit about burning paper replicas of guns for dead gangster relatives, so that they may continue their lifestyles as ghosts.

I must admit I'm very curious: if a gangster ghost uses lethal force against a rival gangster ghost... what happens, exactly?

I'd like to read more socioeconomic studies of what goes on in the afterlife. A while back, PodCastle ran Maureen McHugh's story "Ancestor Money", which was a good start.

Down the East Coast

2010-04-11T13:27:00.009+08:00

Monday, April 5 was a holiday - Tomb Sweeping Day, the day that the Taiwanese traditionally travel to their ancestors' graves to honor them. What it meant for us was a 3-day weekend. Jenna and Emily and I rented a Toyota Camry and drove down and up the East Coast.

I'm not a confident driver in big cities and I've never driven so much as a motorbike in Taiwan. Also, neither I nor Jenna have an international driving license. So it was Emily who took on all of the driving duties, for which I am thankful.

We set off for Hualien on Saturday, driving along the narrow North Cross-Island Highway, through Fusing and Baling, eating a delicious lunch at a very modest restaurant in a very modest town. We stopped frequently to take pictures, hitting Suao as dusk was approaching and Hualien as night was falling.

Sunday morning, we drove down the coast on Highway 11. We stopped at Cow Mountain Beach, a lovely little beach (where swimming is not permitted) with very, very hot sand that made us regret our decision to leave our shoes and walk down barefoot.

We stopped at Shihtiping, a section of rocky coast popular with tourists (a Chinese tour group was leaving as we were arriving). I was most interested in checking out the many tide pools, particularly the contrast between the ones that were green and disgusting, and the ones with clear water, brimming with fish and crabs and other life.

We stopped at a seafood restaurant in one of the small coastal towns, where we had a good meal, watched over by the restaurant's very fat dog, Mimi.

At Highway 64, just north of the Tropic of Cancer, we turned inland towards the East Rift Valley. Highway 11 continues past interesting and beautiful areas south of the Tropic of Cancer, but Jenna and I had already visited Basiandong and Sansiantai on a previous trip.

We turned south on Highway 9, stopping at the Tropic of Cancer Monument and twin ancient Saoba Megaliths. Rough Guide claims that local legend says the megaliths are the remains of incestuous twins who were turned to stone. None of the ample bilingual signage around the megaliths actually makes reference to this story, though.

I liked the East Rift Valley quite a bit. It is very different from urban Taiwan. Its humid, tropical ruralness reminded me of the Philippines or Sumatra. We stopped to eat at Cifadahan Cafe, an Ami restaurant in Mataian that Lonely Planet recommended. Many of the cafe's specialties were out of season, but the salad made from local raw vegetables was excellent.

And that was it for Sunday, as we returned to Hualien that night. The following morning we packed up and left Hualien, heading to Taroko National Park. We'd all been there before, but not with our own transportation.

The weather did not really cooperate; rain came and went, and we took pictures of beautiful scenery partially obscured by fog. That said, we had a good time, and to make it a proper road trip we bought some unhealthy snack food (Pringles!) in a cafe at Taroko.

We made it back to Taipei that evening, after dealing with traffic both in Luodong (where traffic was allowed on the highway very slowly) and at the toll booths for the Xueshan Tunnel, but once we were in the tunnel traffic moved smoothly.

Jenna documented the trip here and here.

Our Chinese New Year's Trip

2010-02-23T20:32:00.012+08:00

Our plan for Lunar New Year had been to go hiking and camping in the mountains of central Taiwan. We would enjoy some spectacular views and get some much-needed exercise in. And most importantly, we would get ourselves out of Taipei City during the week-long break when Taipei empties out and the city becomes a dull, boring place.

The plan once we realized the weather would be rotten was to spend the night in Taichung, then head up through Puli into the Cingjing Farm area. Cingjing's got some beautiful scenery, and we found a campground where we could pitch our tents. Then it would be a bus ride to Lishan, a little town near the Central Cross-Island Highway with beautiful views across the valleys of Taiwan's central mountain range.

As it happened, the weather turned really sour. Cingjing Farm's views were obscured by fog, and the rain was near-incessant. Good news #1: our tent was waterproof. (Joseph and Emily's tent was somewhat less than waterproof, we heard.) Good news #2: Cingjing Farm contains not only a Starbucks (good for passing a couple of hours when the rain is nonstop outside), but also several decent places for food, particularly a non-pretentious place where we got excellent mutton hotpot.

This is more or less what I picture the English countryside as looking like in parts, but it's a sheep-filled meadow near Cingjing, draped in fog.

So we spent much of the time in the campsite lodge playing cards. On the bright side, my first real sleeping-in-a-tent experience was one with nonstop rain, so my next one will almost certainly be pleasant by comparison.

We nixed the idea of traveling on to Lishan when we called ahead and confirmed that the weather wasn't terribly different from the weather in Cingjing. In addition, the bus wasn't running because of snow on the route; we had the option of getting a ride from someone who drove to Lishan every day anyway, but in the end we decided to go back to Puli, where at least the fog wouldn't be as bad. In a way it's too bad; I've never seen snow in Taiwan, and this would have been my chance.

Puli is a small city down in the Taiwanese lowlands, with a couple of interesting sights. The four of us got rooms at a hostel and explored the town. Puli's sights include the Shaohsing wine brewery, which includes a museum and a sizable market where one can browse several wine-based products, including candies and soap. The signature alcohol itself is a bit strange-tasting if you're not used to savory beverages, but several varieties of wine and liquor are available.

The next morning we started out at the Kuanhsing paper factory, where we took a guided tour showing us the art of making paper by hand. Of course, there is a sizable gift shop; there's also an area (popular with schoolkids) where visitors can put designs onto handmade paper.

It's kind of fun for people who haven't tried arts and crafts since elementary school.

Near the paper museum/shop we found some vendors selling fresh honey, with their bees right on the premises.

I'd never been so close to such swarms of bees, but I felt remarkably safe. The bees didn't care about human interlopers at all.

For whatever reason, they also had some cute little bunny rabbits on the premises, one month old, which we were assured were being raised as pets, not meat.

Puli also has a lacquerware museum and shop, where you can buy high-quality lacquer cups, bowls, and chopsticks.

When we were finished with Puli, we hired a taxi (rather than a bus, because of our heavy packs) to take us to the town of Caotun, an otherwise unremarkable town, not even mentioned in Rough Guide, that we visited for its Tzude Temple, as described here and here.

Apparently the temple is based on a dream that the builder had. As the result shows, it's incredibly ostentatious and looks nothing like any other temple in Taiwan.

There's a garden of little religious statuettes behind the temple.

Overall, our last day of travel and the decent weather we had on that day improved our spirits considerably. Read Jenna's account of the trip and the excellent pictures she took here.

Nikko 1

2009-12-26T08:29:00.013+08:00

As a stopover on the way back to the States for Christmas, we stopped in Japan for the weekend. It was my second substantial visit to Japan and the Tokyo area, so we took the train up to Nikko for an overnight stay.

You can't tell in that picture but there was snow on the ground. There was snow on the ground! Today I'm in Maine, there's snow everywhere and it's nothing special, but I was very happy to get to Nikko last weekend and have snow on the ground there after a Taiwanese December. We stowed our luggage at the train station and got day bus passes to head to the temple and shrine area.

That last picture shows the bus (foreground) that rolled backwards while the driver was attempting to put chains on its tires, causing it to smash into our bus (background, just barely visible) thus forcing all us passengers to get off and mill about outside. No one was hurt, and we just walked the rest of our way to the temple complex.

Our first day was at the Tosho-gu shrine, where one half of Tokugawa Ieyasu is enshrined.

Toshu-gu in the snow.

The snow made the ground slippery, Jenna had to be careful because of her busted ankle (she'd torn a ligament a few days earlier), and I enjoyed the feeling of moisture soaking through my not-entirely-waterproof shoes. But the snow was beautiful.

Dinner that night was excellent yakitori - my first real Japanese-style yakitori - and then a train ride to the rural bit of Nikko where our hotel was located. Our train let us off in a middle-of-nowhere station with no employees, as rural an area as I've ever seen in Japan. You could see stars. I spotted Orion for the first time in weeks, perhaps months. Fortunately the hotel was across the street from the train station. We were shown to our cabin, a tasteful Japanese house with paper screens and fancy electronics, including a small TV built into the wall, an iPod, and fast wireless Internet.

The following morning, we set out to explore this semi-rural area of Nikko.

Looks oddly like parts of the eastern United States, in terms of population density and the mountains in the background.

We visited a well-known pickle store where we all stocked up on high-quality Japanese pickles, and we went to a tempura&noodle restaurant for some good tempura and noodles.

This friendly cat lives at the hotel and decided Jenna's backpack would be a comfortable place to sit for a couple of minutes.

After that, it was back to the temples for another day of sightseeing - to be continued!

Xiao Wulai

2009-09-22T17:36:00.007+08:00

This Sunday six of us went out to Xiao Wulai. Xiao Wulai is another well-known bit of Taiwan's natural beauty; in the vicinity of Daxi and Fuxing, it's a waterfall and forest park that gets a fair number of day-tripping hikers.

Rural Taiwan, near the falls.

The valleys near Fuxing village.

And this is the waterfall proper. You can't get to that pavilion on the right; the way's been blocked by park authorities. Same for a multi-story pavilion out of the camera frame that's presumably been deemed unsafe. But it's quite a nice view, don't you think?

My pictures are few in number and unprocessed. Jenna took many more pictures and did some processing to make them look nice, her pics and commentary can be found here.

Tainan Day

2009-09-22T16:35:00.007+08:00

Two Sundays ago we went down to Tainan for the day. Jenna got had a seminar scheduled for Monday in Tainan, so work paid for her to go down. I had the day free, so we went down together and spent the day wandering around central Tainan before I took the high-speed train back in the evening.

I like Tainan. It's quite a sizable city and so it would probably be an interesting place to live long-term. (Pity the public transport isn't better.) And yet there's a huge amount of historic Tainan that's been preserved, although much of it can be hidden behind new development. This was my fourth trip to Tainan and there's always something new to discover.

The Confucius Temple. You don't have to pay unless you want to visit the inner part of the temple; roaming the grounds is free and makes for a fine public park for Tainan.

Phoenix and dragon, outside the Confucius Temple.

Nanmen, the old South Gate and one of the few remaining bits of the old city wall.

The city view from atop Nanmen.

The Wufei Temple, in commemoration of the five concubines of King Ning Jin, who killed themselves when their king was defeated and overthrown in 1683.

After a day of wandering around in the hot, humid September air and snacking when we felt like it, we ended up in the Chikan Towers neighborhood, where they were giving a benefit concert to help Typhoon Morakot victims. From there, we took a taxi to the high-speed rail station, located inconveniently far from the city center (we couldn't be bothered with the bus) and I headed back to Taipei. Jenna stayed in Tainan for another day, working for decent money.

Hong Kong and Macau

2009-06-05T11:30:00.007+08:00

We just had the Dragon Boat holiday here in Taiwan. To take advantage, we spent four nights in Hong Kong, just to explore the city in more depth than we'd ever been able to before. It was Jenna's fourth trip to HK, my second, and for the first time we had good weather and plenty of time.

On Thursday, we disembarked at the airport having already filled out our health questionnaires to make sure we did not have H1N1 and hadn't come into contact with it. These questionnaires were collected by personnel at the airport who gave them more scrutiny than our arrival cards got.

We stayed at the Wesley Hotel in Wan Chai. The staff at the hotel reception desk measured our temperatures with little electronic devices. We passed.

Central and inexpensive but with very few facilities, virtually nonexistent service and bare, stuffy rooms.

-- Lonely Planet

Now, I suppose that's true, but what we cared about mostly was the "central and inexpensive" part. Granted, our hotel room was tiny, but that's what you get when you stay in the densest part of Hong Kong Island and you don't want to pay extravagantly for your room. What amused me most was, while practically every other cable TV-equipped hotel room I've stayed at in Asia has provided either CNN International or BBC News (or both), our choices for English-language TV news were CCTV (the Chinese government mouthpiece) or FOX News. The same FOX News that you get in the States.

Once settled in at the hotel, our first priority was to get the heck off Hong Kong Island and over onto the Kowloon side. We took the MTR to Central, where we spent a decent amount of time wandering around like clueless tourists looking for the Star Ferry terminal. (This was particularly pathetic considering that we'd both been to the terminal on previous Hong Kong visits.)

At ground level, Central resembles a hideously overgrown Rosslyn, Virginia, and has about as much charm. It's got some of the best-known skyscrapers in East Asia, but these are best appreciated at a distance.

We finally found the Star Ferry terminal and traveled across the harbor to Kowloon. We wandered along the promenade for a while, and took in the views of the Hong Kong Island skyline.

(My camera is not all that great at nighttime pictures, as you can see.)

Then we headed to the Temple St. market for food. We filled up on some excellent seafood and looked through the oddities of the night market before taking the MTR back to Wan Chai.

On Day 2, we'd originally planned to go hiking on either Lantau or Lamma Island. Cool, drizzly weather scuttled that idea, so instead we explored some of the neighborhoods on the north side of HK Island. We ate dim sum for lunch in a shopping center in Causeway Bay - I'd never eaten dim sum in HK before, and since it's the style of food most associated with the city I figured I'd better try eating it in its hometown.

Once we had our fill of Causeway Bay, we took the MTR all the way to the northwest part of the island and Sheung Wan.

I'm not sure exactly what it means, but: many streets in Sheung Wan made me feel like I was in Chinatown in a Western city. I think it was all the Chinese medicinal goods out and on sale, like giant mushrooms and dried lizards.

A lovely little park off of Hollywood Rd. in Sheung Wan. Note the apartment blocks rising in the background.

Stone statues outside the Man Mo temple in Sheung Wan.

Eventually we met up with some friends who live in HK for dinner in Central, followed by relaxation at a bar where THE MUSIC IS SO LOUD YOU CAN'T HEAR THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU. I'm sure that appeals to some people, but I'm not one of them. Fortunately we were able to leave for a more relatively quiet alternative soon after.

On Saturday, we went to Lantau Island. We'd planned to take the ferry to Tung Chung to maximize our sightseeing enjoyment, but when we determined that would require a horribly circuitous route, we took the MTR there instead.

From the ultramodern densely populated new town of Tung Chung, you can catch a cable car up the mountain to Ngong Ping.

The cable car was lots of fun. Every bit the equal of the currently-nonfunctioning Maokong Gondola in Taipei, the views from the cable car are quite impressive (except when it's the smog-shrouded airport you're looking at).

At the top, you can walk through a touristy strip of stops and then you reach the stairs to the Tian Tan Buddha.

The Tian Tan Buddha is relatively new as Buddhas go - completed in 1993 - but it's quite well-known and a major tourist attraction.

We descended by cable car and took a bus to Mui Wo, a port town on Lantau, and boarded a ferry for Cheung Chau, a small island off of Lantau's coast.

The town on Cheung Chau, more than any other place in Hong Kong, reminded me of Taiwan. I can be more specific. It reminded me of the back streets of cities in southern Taiwan. I felt like I was wandering through an old section of Tainan or Kaohsiung. Except the language was different. And there were more Westeners about than I would expect. And there were people in little village greens playing croquet.

A sign in a little store in the Cheung Chau back alleys.

We ate dinner - seafood, of course - at a harborfront restuarant (despite an intriguing name and a mention in Lonely Planet, we gave Morocco Indian Food a pass) and took the ferry directly back to Central, giving us some stunning glimpses of the nighttime skyline along the way.

On Sunday: Macau.

Neither of us had been there, and a ferry from HK is relatively cheap and gets you there in under 90 minutes. For the purpose of traveling it's like crossing a national border, so we each collected a total of 4 new passport stamps in one day (and had to fill out 2 H1N1 flu questionnaires each).

Macau is best known for gambling, which neither of us is particularly interested in. I probably don't have enough self-control for gambling, and wouldn't know when to stop. With disastrous results. So we steered clear of the casinos and headed for historical touristy Macau.

You can still see some Portuguese, although I think maybe I heard people speaking it only once.

The most important old tourist sight is, of course, the ruins of St. Paul's. There is a nonstop crowd of tourists with cameras in the plaza in front.

The old town is beautiful. It feels like how I imagine an old city in southern Europe probably feels to wander through (not that I'd know). Of course, there's plenty of new development along roads that get a lot of tourists, and depending on where you point your camera, you might get this gigantic monstrosity towering above the old-timey cityscape.

But the food is wonderful, including the ubiquitous little almond cookies sold in a thousand little shops. Also, the egg tarts are the best in the world. And I'm comparing them to the ones in Hong Kong.

Macau may be small (however big you think Macau is, it's smaller) but I think I could probably enjoy another visit there. We never left the old city to explore the regions further south. Lonely Planet implies the best food in all of Macau is to be found there.

India 7: Mumbai

2009-03-14T14:12:00.013+08:00

We finished our stay in Kerala and boarded a train for our 26-hour ride to Mumbai. The Indian trains we rode were pleasant enough, despite the presence of bugs and rats, and we had enough reading material on us that the time passed pretty quickly.

These are pictures I took of train platforms in Kerala.

It was my last night on an Indian train. I went to bed in northern Kerala and slept through Karnataka and Goa. I woke up in Maharashtra. The language written on signs outside the train was different, and the landscape had changed from Kerala's wet tropics to arid scenery with distant plateaus and rock formations.

As our train approached the city of Mumbai, I saw something out the train window that I hadn't seen yet in my two and a half weeks in India: slums.

Oh, I'd never lost sight of the fact that India was a developing country. In my time traveling in Karnataka and Kerala, infrastructure had not been that great and Internet connections were spotty. Run-down, decaying buildings had been numerous. And despite inflation, price levels in India are still quite low - which is a sign that most Indians, by global standards, still make little money.

But I'd never felt like I was surrounded by dire poverty, certainly not the sort of poverty that I'd read about and had prepared myself mentally for. I never felt like a rich man tresspassing in the land of the poor. There were plenty of signs of affluence - satellite dishes, ubiquitous cell phones. In large cities there had been beggars - but they had been individual cases. I hadn't been asked for money nonstop.

Approaching Mumbai, I saw my first real poverty. I saw residents picking through the garbage lying by the railroad tracks, in front of the shantytown where they lived. And Mumbai is the financial and business center of India, home to the country's richest and trendiest people.

It reminded me of the first time I flew into Manila, and from the airplane I could see a neighborhood full of huge, opulent homes located literally right next to a depressing slum.

We arrived at the train station, hired a taxi to take us to our hotel (surprisingly, he charged less than Rough Guide had predicted), and got settled. For Jenna's description of check-in at the Hotel New Bengal, see here (the "city hotel").

Mumbai is huge and confusing. Even if you stay in the city center and you have a map. It's full of interesting stuff to see, do, and eat. But - particularly if you look like a foreigner with money to burn and you hang out downtown - you have to adopt an attitude of not trusting anybody. It's not just a matter of being approached by touts who want to set you up at their brother's restaurant or offer you a guided tour of Colaba. That sort of thing is common enough in South Asia and can be easily brushed aside if you've adopted the right mindset.

But in Mumbai, for the first time, I was approached by people who mimic the way Indians strike up conversations with foreigners when they're being genuinely friendly. And then these people ask for money. We had two girls come up to us in Colaba who did a good job imitating the way Indians will start talking to foreigners when they want to be friendly or practice speaking English. And they said, when we seemed on guard, that "We don't want to ask for money". And then they asked that we buy them lunch in a nearby restaurant.

Aggressive selling is nothing new in India, and both Hampi and Cochin have many, many people who make good livelihoods seperating tourists from their money. And frankly, I figure that's OK. But those tourist-centric businesspeople and touts in Hampi and Cochin seemed to be following a code of honor that was routinely being broken in Mumbai. They might be enticing foreign tourists into their art shop to try to sell them Chinese imports at ten times their actual value, but they weren't fundamentally pretending the transaction was something other than what it was. In Mumbai, I felt like I was being trained to be automatically distrustful of every stranger on the street. (As it turned out, it was good training for Egypt.)

We only had one day in Mumbai, so after seeing the Colaba sights (generally meaning the buildings that terrorists targeted last November) we took a ferry to Elephanta Island, where Hindu temples were carved into caves hundreds of years ago.

The island is very touristy and full of various India kitsch vendors, but still seems a friendlier place than the Colaba streets.

Elephanta Island is full of dogs and monkeys. I saw one monkey steal an orange soda right out of one tourist's hand, then drink its contents on the spot in front of the tourist.

Here's a dog begging for food from a monkey. I was highly amused. I just don't see a monkey having the same interspecies compassion as a human.

After a few minutes the dog gave up and wandered off. So a different dog started begging.

(Here's a thought: What if dogs see humans and monkeys as merely two different varieties of the same basic type of creature?)

After returning from the island, we settled down in a restaurant for something I hadn't eaten yet in India: north Indian food.

Most generic Indian restaurants outside of India serve north Indian food. Tandoori and naan and rich creamy curries are, to me, what epitomizes north Indian restaurant food. That sort of cooking is available in restaurants throughout the South, but it's not the greatest examples of the cuisine you'll ever find. Why eat subpar Northern food when excellent Southern food is available for far less money?

But we were in Mumbai, and Mumbai is in South India in much the same sense Baltimore is in the southern United States: it sorta is, but not really. So we went to a place in Colaba that had a comprehensive menu, and I got my first and so far only north Indian food in India.

It was a mutton curry and a vegetable curry with naan, and... it tasted pretty much like Indian curries taste in restaurants in other countries. Except the mutton was still on the bone. (I've heard that most mutton in India is actually goat meat, but I can't tell the difference when it's cooked in a spicy curry.)

The iconic view of Mumbai. You may remember seeing this scene
on the news last November under far less peaceful circumstances.

And that was it for downtown Mumbai. We traveled by taxi to the edge of Mumbai to meet and chat with a friend of Jenna's; then it was off to the airport for our flight to Egypt. At one point we drove through an affluent suburb of Mumbai that seemingly was in a whole different universe from the slums I'd seen from the train window the previous day.

India 6: Cochin

2009-02-18T23:19:00.014+08:00

From Calicut, we took yet another too-early-morning train down the Malabar coast to Cochin, tourist capital of Kerala.

Fort Cochin is the old city It's a very walkable area full of old European buildings. The chaos of urban India is minimized . The whole place is extremely touristy and packed with Westerners; most businesses here cater to foreign tourists.

Across the harbor lies Ernakulam, the true modern heart of the city. Ernakulam is far more Indian than Fort Cochin (which at times seems almost a foreigners' sanctuary).

Beautiful old church in Fort Cochin. A visit inside reveals the diversity of European influences Cochin has received; the church was built by the Portuguese, but the inscriptions on many graves are in Dutch, and of course control of Cochin eventually passed to the British.

The Jain temple, and scenes from the daily pigeon feeding. Jains believe it's sinful to harm any living thing (this is why their religion does not permit them to become farmers) and helping animals is a way to accumulate merit. In Mumbai there's a Jain animal sanctuary that we didn't get to, but our guide book makes it sound almost like a petting zoo, with very well-cared-for animals.

I'm almost ashamed to say that barely a week later, in Cairo, I tried pigeon meat for the first time. The Jains would not have approved. (But they also would have disapproved of the fish I ate in Cochin, and of the mutton I ate in Mumbai.)

Cochin is near the geographical heart of Kathakali dance, and it is extremely easy for tourists to find local performances. A proper Kathakali performance is an all-night affair; most newbies perfer to see abridged performances that tend to run about 90 minutes. I saw one such performance at Northern Virginia Community College in the States a few years ago, and I saw my second in Fort Cochin.

Before the performance, the actors spend an hour applying their intricate makeup in full view of the audience. Then we had a local expert give us a short talk on the ways and customs of kathakali, and had one of the actors demonstrate the subtle facial expressions and sign language used. The actors do not speak out loud - they communicate through sign language while guys off to the side sing their lines.

I didn't take any still pictures of the performance because of the ban on flash photography (which many of my fellow audience members brazenly ignored), but I made a minute-long video:, which I would upload but apparently uploading a 100-megabyte video on blogger takes approximately forever.

Another attraction of the Cochin area is the substantial backwaters. Peaceful yet touristy, motorboats and rowboats ply the lakes and canals.

We signed up for a two-part tour. In the morning, we took a motorboat around a vast lake, at one point stopping to visit a factory where toddy is made from palm coconuts. (Although we had the option of buying some juice, there was no aggressive selling - this was a legit and on-the-level tour.)

We got a decent thali lunch on the motorboat, then switched to hand-rowed boats for the afternoon, when we traveled through rural canals and saw rope-making and coconut harvesting.

On our last evening in Cochin we went to the Shiva temple in Ernakulam to witness some temple festivities.

There were crowds, music, and elephant processionals. If we'd wanted to stay into the evening we could have seen a full performance of kathakali, but neither of us really felt up to it.

The next day we departed on our 26-hour train ride to Mumbai...

India 5: Calicut aka Kozhikode

2009-02-17T22:30:00.012+08:00

From Wayanad, we took the bus to Calicut, which is more properly spelled Kozhikode. You have the rules of Malayalam romanization to thank for that - I understand the zh is pronounced somewhat like an English r, for example.

On our way there our bus passed a demonstration of some kind in a Keralan city:

I still don't know what that was all about, but massive demonstrations are nothing unusual in Kerala. The state is heavily politicized. Demographically, Kerala is much more Christian than India at large. Kerala is also much more Muslim than India at large. And Kerala has a long tradition of far left-wing politics, including outright Communism.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Che, Mao - all their faces are common sights on political posters in Kerala. The hammer & sickle logo is stenciled on walls and sidewalks in the cities.

One time I saw a political poster from a bus window that appeared to show Saddam Hussein (as he looked at his trial, after he was overthrown). At first I was highly confused, but then I convinced myself that it wasn't Saddam at all, but rather just a local politician who happened to resemble Saddam.

A couple of days later I read in a local paper that some Communist posters in Kerala really had appropriated Saddam's image, using the logic that because he opposed the U.S., he was a friend of the Communists. (This is, of course, silly. Saddam was not at all supportive of the Communist Party in Iraq, and during the later years of the Cold War he was cozier with the U.S. than he was with the Soviets.) So that really was Saddam's picture I saw; at least plenty of Indians were just as puzzled by his presence as I was.

Calicut turned out to be a pleasant little city that I wish we'd scheduled more time for.

We explored the old Muslim neighborhood, which contains several nice old mosques. As a non-Muslim woman, Jenna wasn't permitted to enter these mosques and I didn't particularly feel like leaving her behind, so we just admired them from the outside.

This extended family invited us into their sprawling home for a chat and some Tang.

The large market in central Calicut, which sells all kinds of goods, particularly textiles and other clothing.

As I've said, Calicut is one city I feel we could have scheduled more time for, although most of my regrets are food-related. Calicut's got close economic and cultural ties with the Gulf states and apparently there is a tasty fusion-type cuisine you can get here. Calicut's also known for its locally made halwa, which is one of many Indian sweets I never got around to trying in India.

India 4: Kannur and Wayanad

2009-02-17T07:51:00.008+08:00

We had great fun waking up at two in the morning in Udupi to catch our three o'clock train to Kannur. It was even greater fun when we arrived at the train station only to find out that the train had been delayed to four o'clock. Then five o'clock.

We boarded the train shortly after 5, took a nap, and arrived at Kannur's train station at around 10 to meet the guy who'd been dispatched from the homestay to meet us. He took us to Costa Malabari, an excellent beachfront homestay a short drive outside of Kannur that we strongly recommend.

The beach is wonderful, guests are given huge portions of Keralan food, and the owner is knowledgeable about the local religious dance form known as theyyam.

Theyyam is an all-night affair, consisting of a heavily made-up dancer (distinct from kathakali dance, but still rather reminiscent of it) who gets possessed by spirits and dances himself into a frenzy. Our host kept himself informed on the local theyyam scene, and let us know that we'd be able to see one local theyyam performance reach its apex if we took a rickshaw to the place just before dawn.

So we woke up early, a rickshaw was summoned, and we traveled to a temple where a sizable crowd had already gathered. Amid drums, a dancer jumped about and got up on stilts. Another dancer in awe-inspiring makeup had torches - real, flaming torches - stuck in his chestpiece, and he rushed about, bringing his torches alarmingly close to the spectators, who cheerfully reached out their hands to feel the flames.

And then the sun was up. All in all, a worthwhile experience.

That day we left the Malabar coast for Wayanad, a highland inland area of Kerala.

I snapped a couple of pictures from our bus. This is what urban Kerala looks like, everyone.

In Wayanad we stayed at Varnam Homestay, another homestay I highly recommend. Friendly management, good food, and a friendly dog.

His name is Jimmy and he is very very very very very happy when guests are friendly to him. And at night he helpfully barks when wild boars are passing through.

From Varnam we went on a morning tour of Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary. The sanctuary's main attraction is its elephants. We saw three - one on the way to the sanctuary, and two within it. I did not get a good picture of any of them (you ever try to get close to a wild elephant? You better be able to run fast) but I did get some decent monkey shots.

These monkeys are langurs - a different species from the macaques who are so common in Indian towns and villages. Other wildlife in the sanctuary include peacocks, deer, and tigers - we didn't see any of the last, but our guide pointed out footprints.

After our successful little safari outing, we wandered through the rural fields near our homestay.

A little group of village children on their way home from school stopped on a path to try out their English on us. These are elementary-school children who live in a farming village in a developing country, far away from any major city. And do you know what I noticed, and remembered?

At least one of them had a cell phone. Maybe they all did.

India 3: Udupi & Mangalore

2009-02-15T22:05:00.006+08:00

From Hampi, we took another sleeper train back to Bangalore, then transferred to a long-distance bus that took us to Mangalore. The bus was the most comfortable that we ever took in India (good thing, too, as we were on it for a very long time) and we stopped twice at roadside food joints that served remarkably good vada, dosa, and coffee. In Mangalore we transferred to a rather less luxurious bus to travel up the coast to Udupi.

We found bus terminals in India to be surprisingly confusing and difficult. There's astonishingly little English signage for a country where it's the national language (and there wasn't much Hindi, either - how exactly do Indians from other parts of the country cope?) and, particularly at Bangalore, it was never quite clear where we were suppposed to be waiting. Asking locals for help, even ones in official-looking uniforms, yielded confusing and contradictory responses. We always ended up on the right bus in the end, but only after much worry and confusion. When we caught a bus from Cairo to Aswan in Egypt, the terminal was a model of clarity by comparison.

In Udupi, we set ourselves up at the first hotel we saw after getting off the bus. That's the view from our window above.

Udupi is a very pleasant little city. It's best known for its temple, which is internationally famous; we saw a number of foreign-looking worshippers on our tour. It's also well-known for the local cuisine; the masala dosa is said to have been invented by local inkeepers to feed hungry pilgrims visiting the temple.

We arrived in time to see a temple festival, when a decked-out ceremonial chariot was pushed and pulled around the ring road that circles the temple. There were fireworks and drums, and the best explanation we heard was that the festival was held to honor a generous local donor.

After a full day in Udupi we took a day trip back down to Mangalore to give the city a more thorough investigation.

This is Milagres Church, which is said to date from 1680, although frankly its facade doesn't look nearly that old. I don't know if that means it's extremely well-maintained, or if it's been recently redone.

The chapel at St. Aloysius College. The interior is decorated with beautiful 19th-century religious painting. I believe the Portuguese are to thank for the heavy Catholic presence along this section of the west coast.

There's quite a mix of cultures in this part of India that I wish I'd been more cognizant of when I was there. The Udupi-Mangalore area has its own language, Tulu, which despite being closely related to Kannada is still quite distinct. There is a distinct local form of spirit worship called Bhuta Kola, which I didn't know anything about until after I'd left the region.

And in more modern cultural-clash news, a major domestic scandal broke in Mangalore the day before we explored the city. A local gang of fundamentalist Hindu thugs heard there was nude dancing and other immoral behavior going on in a bar, so they comandeered the place and physically roughed up several women drinking there. In the following days the local media was full of outrage at the incident, with many Indians decrying the rise of "Talibanization" in the country.

Right-wing Hindu groups are nothing new in India (they're quite active in Mumbai politics) but physical intimidation of innocent people is obviously not the way to generate good publicity.

India 2: Hampi

2009-02-15T05:04:00.009+08:00

Our overnight train from Bangalore took us to Hampi, where we spent the next couple of days.

Five hundred years ago, Vijayanagar was a major power in South Asia. The city ruled most of southern India and became the center of Hindu civilization after the bulk of northern India became dominated by Islam. In 1565, Vijayanagar was defeated and sacked by enemy troops. The city was abandoned, and every wood and mud building was left to rot.

What remains are the ruins of stone temples, strewn over several square kilometers of rocky plain. The nearby village of Hampi caters to the many tourists who visit. (Seriously - Hampi's economy seems to be entirely tourism-based.)

Although Hampi consists mostly of guesthouses and shops catering to tourists, it also contains Virupaksha Temple, which is of some interest.

Those are cattle in front of the temple entrance. My first authentic Indian wandering cattle.

A macaque hanging out at the temple. In the late afternoon, monkeys become very active in Hampi, foraging for food and comically falling out of trees.

That's the temple elephant. If you put a rupee in her trunk, she blesses you by thwunking you on the head. I gave her a banana. She gulped it down and then began sniffing my bag (which had more bananas). I quickly made distance between her and me before she could investigate further.

Once you leave the town of Hampi proper, you find yourself in an arid, rocky landscape full of temples and rocky ruins.

You cannot see everything there is to see in one day. You can spend several days wandering the area to take it all in.

On our last day in Hampi, we crossed the Tungabhadra River by coracle to see the Hanuman Temple on the north bank. The temple is located on top of a large hill; you have to climb about 500 steps to reach the top. Once you reach the summit, you find some spectacular views to share with the handful of other backpackers who also made the climb.

Afterwards we re-crossed the river by coracle near the town of Anegundi. The two of us shared the tiny coracle with three men and their motorbikes. It did not appear to be a terribly safe situation at first but we (somehow!) crossed the river without sinking.

We crossed just adjacent to a bridge, under construction, that was to span the river (and possibly put the coracle operators out of business!).

Later that day, as we were preparing to leave the Hampi area, we heard of a bridge collapse in the area. We figured it probably wasn't the unfinished bridge we saw (the time frame seemed too restricted), but this story in The Hindu seems to confirm that it was, indeed, that same bridge. It must have happened minutes after we left the scene.

We were never in danger; we would not have been hurt even if we'd witnessed the collapse. But we were so close to it.

India 1: Bangalore

2009-02-14T08:25:00.004+08:00

On January 18, we flew Tiger Air from Singapore to Bangalore. This was my first-ever trip to India, and I excitedly waited for all of my preconceptions to be either shattered or confirmed.

We arrived at Bangalore's spiffy new airport late at night, went through immigration and security (the first time I'd ever had to go through security after a flight) and soon ourselves in the van of a guy who offered to take us to MG road downtown for 1,200 rupees. Which is about twice what the guy we asked at the airport said it should have cost. Jenna (an old India hand) objected, we removed our luggage from the van, and walked away. The guy didn't even try to haggle with us. Amazing.

We took a cab with a meter (the fare came to around 600 rupees) and arrived at the hotel sometime after midnight. All eating establishments in the area were closed, so we lived with our hunger until the following morning, when I had my Official First Authentic Meal in India in our hotel restaurant. I recall it was idli and masala dosa, and it was delicious.

For a fairly well-known city, Bangalore isn't terribly high on anyone's list of tourist destinations. MG road, where our hotel is located, and Cubbon Park form the focal point of the central city, which is where Jenna and I spent the bulk of the day wandering about on various errands. I'd briefly been introduced to a few other large cities in developing countries (Cebu, Philippines and Padang, Indonesia) so I was not completely put off by the glorious mess of central Bangalore's traffic. I saw neither cattle nor monkeys yet, but the streets were full of rickshaws and motorbikes.

This is MG Road. That's an elevated rail line being built above the road. Good thing, too - one thing Bangalore could use is more mass transit.

That evening we met Jenna's friend Hemant at Pecos, a bar near MG Road that served the following range of alcoholic drinks, in full:

- Kingfisher by the bottle
- Kingfisher on tap

Pecos also serves an impressive range of food, including a surprisingly large number of beef dishes.

Hemant took us to a nearby restaurant that serves Hyderabad-style biryani dishes. I wasn't terribly hungry when I entered the restaurant - I'd been snacking all day - and I was worried I'd end up picking at my food. I need not have worried. I ended up gobbling mutton biryani so good I spent the next few days wondering when I'd get to go to Hyderabad so I could have more of it. (And I never order the biryani when I'm at an Indian restaurant outside of India.)

We left Bangalore that evening on a sleeper train for Hampi...

Back to Singapore

2009-01-18T19:42:00.003+08:00

I'm at a free Internet kiosk at Changi Airport in Singapore. No pictures yet.

Today we spent a beautiful day exploring new parts of Singapore. I know it's cool to bash Singapore. Maybe if I lived here for a year, I might grow to dislike it too.

But I'm sorry - I like Singapore.

I like the conveniences of having a wealthy, modern, highly Westernized city sitting right squat at the center of Southeast Asia.

I like the array of cheap and remarkably authentic Asian food. I doubt you'll find a better selection of absolutely authentic by-Indians-for-Indians Indian food outside of India. Or perhaps the UK.

I even kind of like the modern architecture, even if many of the residential areas I've seen bear a certain resemblance to housing developments in suburban Florida.

Today we took the cable car up Mt. Faber - fun, though a much shorter ride than you get (or got, I suppose) at the Maokong Gondola in Taipei. Views from the top of Mt. Faber are quite nice, and we were there on a beautiful if hazy day.

After that we decided to head to the National Botanic Gardens, despite the fact that they are not located close to an MRT station. We braved Singapore's public bus system for the first time, and then found that the gardens were located a long (but pleasant) walk from the main road. But the botanic gardens themselves are very nice once you get there, and the orchid garden is worth the $5 you must pay to enter, especially if you like orchids. The gardens themselves are free, and this Sunday they were full of people.

Now, on to Bangalore...

Southern Taiwan Trip

2009-01-08T11:32:00.020+08:00

During the four-day New Years weekend given to us by the government, we made a full counter-clockwise circumnavigation of Taiwan by train, stopping for 2 nights in Tainan and 2 nights in Taitung before returning to Taipei.

I brought my new camera: a Nikon Coolpix S210. I still like my Canon and it still works well, but on our upcoming trip to India I figured it would be a good idea to bring something a little less bulky. Any photographic oddities or blurriness is probably due to the fact that I was still playing around a bit with it.

This trip was actually our Plan B. Plan A had been to take advantage of the holiday weekend by making our way across southern Taiwan via the Southern Cross-Island Highway, which connects Tainan and Taitung and reportedly features some of the best scenery on the island. Unfortunately, we apparently weren't the only ones in Taiwan with that idea. Every local hotel listed in our guidebook was booked. In theory it might have been possible to do the highway in one long day, as the raw distances involved are not that great. But it's a winding mountain road. And bus service does not exist over the entire highway - there's a bus-less section in the middle where we would have had to hitchhike or arrange our own transportation. In the end we decided to save the Cross-Island Highway for a later date.

So on the morning of January 1 we set out for Tainan by HSR. Jenna and I had each been to Tainan twice before. Emily had been once before, and it was Becca's first time.

After resting at the hotel, we explored the Five Canals area of Tainan. None of us had been there before. The canals no longer exist, but the neighborhood is full of old architecture, narrow alleys, and of course temples.

Back when the canals still existed - and Tainan was the capital and major metropolis of Taiwan - high officials from the Qing Dynasty would arrive in Tainan by boat. They would make their way through the now-nonexistent system of canals and dock by the Official Reception Gate, built in 1739:

Next to the gate were a couple of old stelae that some kids were bouncing balls off of. The stelae had probably been through worse.

I can't remember exactly what the above temple is now (it might be the Wind God temple, right behind the reception gate above) but it is exactly the kind of thing you can stumble upon just by wandering around central Tainan.

The remarkable ceiling of one temple.

Chihkan Towers. The latter picture is a sculpture commemorating the surrender of local Dutch forces in 1661.

Miscellaneous central Tainan pictures.

On Day Two we went to Anping, various out-of-town day trip plans having been considered and then discarded because of the lack of convenient transportation.

This is the Old Julius Mannich Merchant House, which now houses a cafe that is very proud of its beer selection and some exhibits on German culture, including portraits and short biographies of German cultural luminaries such as Goethe, Wagner and Beethoven.

After an obligatory visit to the touristy market at Anping, we explored the harbor area. There is a very attractive park by the harbor, and we stopped there for a time while we greeted each of the roughly seven hundred pet dogs who were enjoying the park with their owners. It was really quite an amazing sight.

Statue at Tainan's harborside park. Those are kites visible on the left side of the picture.

That evening Emily returned to Taipei (she had a class to teach Saturday morning, unfortunately) and the rest of us departed Tainan the next morning. We traveled by train to Kaohsiung, where we were to transfer to a Taitung-bound train. We had two hours free in Kaohsiung, enough time to take a taxi down to the Love River area:

... but unfortunately, midday turned out not to be a great time to visit, as very little was open. We were able to get lunch after exploring a bit and finding a decent neighborhood with restaurants, and then it was back to the train station for the journey to Taitung.

The Kaohsiung-Taitung train gave me a look at a new part of Taiwan for me - a very different climate than the forested hills of northern Taiwan. Palm trees were everywhere, and there were places where the train took us through forests of palm trees growing in neat, orderly rows. Was this a natural occurence, or was I seeing a palm tree farm?

Taitung may well be the first small East Asian city I've ever been to with a train station that's not located in or near the city center. Taitung Station is actually located several kilometers away and is absolutely not walkable from downtown. I felt like I was back in North America.

We took a taxi to our hotel and then set out in search of food. We stopped for food at a variety of little places, acheiving the feat of eating in two places written up in Rough Guide for what was essentially one meal. We also established that when Rough Guide recommends you visit Sihwei Night Market on a Sunday, that's because there is literally nothing there if you go on a Saturday. I'm amazed that a Taiwanese city can only sustain a night market one night a week. (To be fair, for all I know there might be another night market somewhere else in Taitung that is open every night, but wasn't deemed special enough for Rough Guide.)

Taitung has sort of a transportation nexus downtown, next to the now-defunct Old Taitung Railway Station. Taitung's chief attraction is its natural scenery (much like Hualien to the north, the other major city on the east coast), so first thing Sunday morning we caught a bus north, to Sansiantai.

Sansiantai, which literally means "Three Immortals Platform", is a series of rocky islands linked to the mainland by a footbridge. The area is renowned for its natural beauty and gets lots of domestic tourists (and we saw more Westerners at Sansiantai than the whole time we were in Taitung city). Note the solitary dog resting in the picture.

Views from the bridge in both directions. Note the stairs.

Sansiantai island proper had a tasteful boardwalk for people to walk on, and a dozen or so fishermen were on the far side of the island.

From Sansiantai we took a bus north to Basiangong, where a series of Buddhist grottoes have been set into caves in a cliff overlooking the ocean.

We did not see any other tourists, foreign or domestic, at Basiangong, but there was a meditation group and a couple of locals who took no notice of us. There were also some large dogs, who generally took no notice of us except for the one who followed us for a time.

Basiangong pictures. Overall it was peaceful, though the grottoes themselves were unremarkable for anyone who has seen lots of Taiwanese Buddhist imagery. On the way down we saw a monkey foraging in a tree.

The views from Basiangong.

On our way back to Taitung we stopped in Chenggong for an excellent seafood dinner. Later that night, in Taitung, we stopped by Shihwei Night Market, it being Sunday night. The market was a bit of a disappointment; most of the food available was of the heavily deep-fried variety. We might have just gotten there too late for good stuff, as a lot of vendors were already packing up to go by the time we arrived. So it came to pass that we left Taitung without once trying local Aboriginal food.

But we didn't leave without getting a few custard apples. They're available in Taipei, in both regular and "pineapple" varieties, but in Taitung it's the local signature fruit and we came home with three big ones. They're the "pineapple" kind, which I prefer - the flesh-to-seed ratio is higher and they're easier to eat. At tourist shops in Taitung train station we even got custard apple mochi and custard apple ice cream. The ice cream was excellent, and remarkably cheap - if only I could find it in Taipei.

Further pictures and commentary on our trip can be found on Jenna's blog here and here.

Sanyi, Miaoli County

2008-12-22T16:29:00.013+08:00

Weekend before last I traveled to Sanyi, Miaoli County. Sanyi's got two big things going for it.

First, it's a well-known center of wood carving, and it has been since Japanese days. People come here from all over Taiwan to shop for wood sculptures. Small wooden sculptures can be had relatively cheaply, but the many wood carving shops in town also stock huge, impressive works of art that go for serious sums of money. (The priciest I found was a huge wooden landscape with representations of a thundering herd of horses and peasants at work; it was up for sale for 8,600,000NT, or about US$250,000.)

Sanyi's other great draw is Hakka culture. Miaoli County is northern Taiwan's great Hakka center, and many local restaurants proudly advertise their Hakka cuisine. There are Hakka restaurants in Taipei, but down in Hakka country you can get the full range of dishes.

This is the local wood carving museum. The art gallery is well worth a visit, with plenty of modern Taiwanese wooden sculpture. The gift shop was interesting as well, with not only books and models of the museum's artwork but also locally made preserves for use in cooking. Though why they sold a model kit of the Cutty Sark is beyond me.

Afterwards we went to Shengsing, a nearby village with a historic train station and a cluster of touristy Hakka restaurants. Like the old train stations on the Pingxi Branch Line, Shengsing station has been preserved as a tourist attraction and is popular with train aficionados. Unlike the Pingxi Line stations, Shengsing is no longer in active use - trains no longer service the line.

The traditional menu at the place we stopped at. If you have limited ability in reading Chinese characters, hand-painted rather than printed characters just makes it harder.

The food we got (although the GIANT BLOB of rice gluten and taro is not visible).

Lei cha is said to be a traditional Hakka farmers' drink. The most recent Lonely Planet expresses some doubts about that, but still recommends travelers try the stuff. It's made from pounded nuts and grains. Restaurants encourage out-of-towners to make the tea themselves in true DIY fashion; we got a giant mortar & pestle and pounded the ingredients until they had been reduced to powder.
Here's the end product. I can imagine it tasting very good on a cold winter's evening in a mountain agricultural village.

Then we set off from the train station and hiked along the abandoned railroad for a few kilometers.`

We saw this interesting idea: give a Hakka language lesson to anyone who stops to park here!

And then we got to another local tourist attraction: the remains of an aquaduct that was destroyed in an earthquake in the 1930s.

As with most Taiwanese - or East Asian - tourist attractions, there was a whole tourist infrastructure nearby so that people who come to snap pictures can buy sausages on sticks.

Jenna also documented our trip and she posted about it here with photos.

India and Egypt

2008-12-08T16:37:00.004+08:00

I got my Indian visa today. We're going there for about two and a half weeks in January and February. We fly into Bangalore and fly out of Mumbai.

People ask us if we're wary about going to India after the Mumbai attacks. Of course we are. But I'm not hugely afraid of terrorists. I figure that security in Mumbai will, if anything, be increased by the time we arrive in the city. Right now there is a lot of public outrage at the perceived incompetence of the police and the poor state of their equipment. The Mumbai police system won't be reformed by the time we visit the city in early February, but the police will be vigilant.

And before we visit Mumbai, we will spend most of our time in the states of Karnataka and Kerala. Domestic Indian violence has largely bypassed those two states. (This summer there was a series of bomb blasts in Bangalore that killed two people and injured 20, but that was atypical.)

As I said, I'm not hugely afraid of terrorists. What I am worried about is the possibility of the Mumbai attacks adversely affecting Indo-Pakistani relations to the point where a war seems possible by the time we depart. Unfortunately, that seems a very real possibility right now (not a war per se, but the threat of one) and it's our biggest potential worry as our trip approaches.

After India, we're flying on to Egypt, another country with a spotty record of safety for tourists. But since the 1997 Luxor attacks the government has been vigilant, and although there has been violence targeting tourists since then it's been aimed at well-heeled tourists who can afford top-line accommodations - in other words, not us.

Christmas tree - and a cat

2008-11-29T21:12:00.003+08:00

We've put up our Christmas tree! It was a gift from a coworker which we got in time for last Christmas. We've decked it out with lights and some ornaments from IKEA, and it fits very well on top of our unused desk.

The problem is that we're afraid the whole thing may come tumbling down, due to our roommate we didn't have last year:

His name is Zhaocai (or Zhaozhao) and, quite frankly, I don't trust him. As most young cats do, he gets into these moods when he gets these energy surges and runs madly from room to room. Fortunately, we have a decent-sized apartment, so I'm not worried. I've seen happy cats who've had far less space than Zhaozhao to run around in.

But that is one precarious tree. And if it topples, it's going to bring the electrical lights and the surge protector the lights are plugged into down with it.

This is going to be interesting.

Pasta'ai

2008-11-19T18:50:00.016+08:00

I guess I could be forgiven for not giving much thought to Taiwan's Aboriginal population. Here in Taipei, overt signs of Aboriginal culture are pretty sparse, apart from Aborigine-made goods in touristy gift shops and a market in Wanhua that sells Aboriginal food. A sizable proportion of Taiwan's population has some Aboriginal heritage, but only a tiny minority actually self-identify as Aborigines. (Rather like Native Americans in North America.)

Aboriginal cultures - plural, as there are several tribes - are not Chinese. It's not even descended from Chinese culture. The Aboriginal languages (of which there are several) are not related to Chinese; they're much closer to Tagalog and Indonesian and other Southeast Asian and Polynesian languages.

The Saisiyat are an aboriginal group of central Taiwan, and every two years they have a festival called the Pasta'ai. Full information on the legends behind the Pasta'ai can be found here. The Pasta'ai was held this past weekend, and we were determined to attend.

We traveled by bus from Taipei to the town of Jhudong, southeast of Hsinchu. (On a map Jhudong is an unimpressive little dot; when we got there we found a fairly sizable community with big chain stores and a decent market and everything.) We met up with the couple whose homestay we were staying at, and they gave us a lift to the town of Wufeng, where the Pasta'ai is held.

This is the sort of view you can expect to see around Wufeng.

First order of business was paying the (small) entry fee, then having Saisiyat elders tie a big blade of grass around my upper arm. And another around my camera strap, to protect from evil. Some people got it tied around their head; it seemed to be the Saisiyat elder's decision where exactly to tie it. (Both of my blades of grass loosened and fell off long before the evening was over, but no one else thought anything of it, so I didn't either.)

The big gathering place before nightfall. That covered area is where food and drinks are going to be sold in a few hours; it's also where tired dancers will rest.

The same area after our Saisiyat dinner of fish soup and fried tofu.

(From this point on some of the pictures were taken by Jenna using my camera, not me.)

The first of the Saisiyat dancers come out.

Dancing continued on like this for the rest of the evening. The smaller group of dancers created percussion effects by swinging tambourine-like straps they had hanging from their backs.

Most of the sizable audience passed the time by chatting and socializing. There were many spectators with some Aboriginal heritage, but there were also many non-Aboriginal Taiwanese people. And there were more Westerners concentrated in one place than I have ever seen before in Taiwan so far out of Taipei.

I hate to ruin some people's romantic notions of the beauty and mystery of ancient traditional ceremonies, but most of the attendees spent the evening (a) eating such foods as fried chicken and barbecue sausages, and (b) drinking excessively. Millet wine is considered a specialty of Aborigines, and several home-brewed varieties were available; they ran the gamut from good to vile. (Taiwan Beer was also available, for anyone who didn't want millet wine.)

An old man sat by me who had clearly had too much to drink. He kept trying to make conversation with me, although his speech was so incomprehensible that Jenna and I honestly had trouble figuring out what language he was speaking (the fact that there were five or six languages he plausibly could have been speaking didn't help.) He also tried to pull me up to dance with him.

Eventually the old man got up and ran drunkenly towards the dancers. He was forcibly led away by security. I suspect he may have ended up in one of those places set aside for tired dancers; they were probably also intended as places for people to sleep off their drunkenness.

More pictures of the Pasta'ai.

People selling Saisiyat clothing at the Pasta'ai.

Shortly after midnight, the dancing was opened up to all, Saisiyat and non-Saisiyat. Hordes of people descended from the stands to link arms and dance clumsily. We participated for a few minutes before giving up. Our hosts were clearly tired, and so were we. We walked for about twenty minutes from the Pasta'ai site to our hosts' van, which we rode in for another half hour or so through twisting mountain roads. Our hosts, fortunately, had not drunk any alcohol.

Our hosts were an older Aboriginal couple, though they aren't Saisiyat (we think they're Atayal). They speak Atayal (or something) to each other and are not native speakers of Mandarin, though they speak it fluently. They operate a very nice homestay near Wufeng, and they also sell Aboriginal souvenirs like clothing.

The view from the homestay.

Various homestay animals. The puppies are all skinny but seem to eat a lot; they're all apparently from the same litter despite looking very different. The cats are better fed; the black and white cat doesn't like people much but the orange kitten is very friendly and affectionate.

Jenna posted more pictures and commentary of the same trip over here.

English and Tagalog and Cebuano

2008-10-17T17:36:00.005+08:00

While in the Philippines, I noticed language. Particularly the use of different languages.

Owing to nearly fifty years of American rule, the English language is ensconced in the Philippines. English is the language of higher education and government. There is also the Filipino language, also called Tagalog, which is what most Filipinos from the northern part of the country speak as their native language. In Cebu and the Camotes, most people are native speakers of Cebuano, which is distinct from Filipino/Tagalog but the two languages are closely related. I never figured out how to tell the difference between written Tagalog and written Cebuano.

The Philippines is one of those places where everyone with education is expected to be functionally bilingual. It's not the first country I've been to where that's true. In Sumatra practically everybody speaks fluent Indonesian even though the local language in the area we visited is Minangkabau. But Minangkabau and Indonesian are quite similar languages (though being able to speak one doesn't mean you'll be able to understand the other). In Taiwan, most people have at least a good knowledge of both Mandarin and Taiwanese (but not everyone is fluent in both), but again those languages are fairly closely related.

In the Philippines, a huge amount of the local TV that we saw assumes the viewer is perfectly able to understand both Tagalog and English, two languages which are utterly unlike one another. We even saw a TV drama with conversations where one character speaks English and one Tagalog. Local Tagalog (or Cebuano; I wasn't sure which) newspapers have stories in which certain expressions, or even whole headlines, are entirely in English. On the boat back to Cebu I sat behind a woman who was reading a romance novel; although mostly in Tagalog (or Cebuano) there was so much English that some pages seemed to be over 50% English.

The Wikipedia articles on Englog and Taglish are illuminating.

In one restaurant in Cebu City, on the radio station they had on, every advertisement was in English. And in every advertisement they spoke American English without even a hint of a Filipino accent.

But although nearly every person we encountered in Cebu City spoke good English, once we left the city we began to encounter communication problems. I can safely say that not every resident of rural Philippines is a fluent English speaker. Yet most official-looking roadsigns we saw were only in English. I'm still wrestling with whether that seems elitist or not. Everyone who went to school learned some English, and many people can probably read English better than they can speak it, so maybe not.

Philippines

2008-10-14T11:24:00.011+08:00

I'm back from my trip with Jenna to Cebu and the Camotes Islands in the Philippines.

We flew into Manila on Wednesday evening, from where we transferred to a plane to Cebu. We didn't have enough time to leave the airport and explore the city, but I had a good view of Manila as our plane landed at the airport. It's an absolutely enormous city - truly huge and sprawling. Just before the plane touched down it flew over a very affluent-looking residential neighborhood full of attractive single-family homes, right next to a decrepit-looking slum full of shacks. Even from the airplane it was a very striking contrast.

At the airport in Manila we went to a Jollibee. Jollibee is an ubiquitous fast-food chain in the Philippines. Jenna got hooked on them on her previous visit to the country, and insisted that I try it. I guess my Jolibee hamburger was my first authentic taste of Filipino food in the country.

We landed at Mactan-Cebu International Airport that evening. The airport is located almost directly adjacent to the beach where Ferdinand Magellan was killed in 1521. The spot where he died is something of a tourist attraction now, but we never got there.

One surprising thing about the Philippines is security. There seemed to be much more security for our domestic Manila-Cebu flight than our Taipei-Manila flight. On our return trip, we had to go through a baggage check in Mactan-Cebu Airport just to get to the check-in counter. In our hotel in Cebu, the gentlemanly middle-aged man who made us tea and tried to get our cable TV working wore a very visible gun and holster. This would have been unimaginable in Taiwan.

The next morning we took a bus to the town of Danau, to catch a boat to the Camotes. Danau is principally known to tourists for the St. Thomas de Villanueva Church, built in 1755 and restored in 1981.

More Danao pictures, from the vicinity of the church and boat terminal:
19th National Statistics Month.
Don't Text While Crossing the Street.

While waiting to board the boat to Consuelo, Pacijan Island, we observed a couple of very unhappy and uncooperative pigs which had apparently just come in on a previous boat being forced onto vehicles bound for elsewhere on Cebu Island. We were kind of wondering whether we would end up sharing a boat with a big unhappy pig, but although we heard some vaguely pig-like sounds on our return boat to Cebu, we never actually saw one.

Jenna's picture of a large angry pig on the pier at Danao (our boat to Consuelo is visible behind him):

After boarding the wooden boat - and waiting for about an hour as passengers and cargo continued to slowly accumulate - we left for the Camotes. The Camotes consists of three main islands: Pacijan and Poro, which are connected by a narrow land bridge, and Ponson, which is more distant. We never reached Ponson, but Pacijan and Poro Islands were more than enough to keep us occupied.

We were met at the dock in Consuelo by a van driver from Mangodlong Rock Resort, a beachfront hotel just a short ways south.

We spent most of the rest of the day at the hotel.

The next day, Friday, we traveled up the west coast of Pacijan Island. We hired motorbike drivers to drive us around the islands (once, long ago, I was terrified of riding on the back of a motorbike; Sumatra forced that fear out of me) and they took us to where we could hire a small boat to Tulang Island. Tulang's a small island off Pacijan's north coast, and we tried snorkeling off its beach. (Rather disappointing, except for the cool neon-colored sea urchins.)

There is a small village on Tulang Island - imagine a Westerner's mental image of a rural tropical island village, and you've got a pretty accurate picture. I don't think Western visitors are completely unknown on Tulang island, but we attracted quite a few kids practicing their limited English on us.

Some of Jenna's pictures of Tulang:

An old lady who chatted with us on Tulang Island insisted we accept a gift of a large fruit we didn't recognize.

We eventually found out that it's called a breadfruit, and it should be eaten cooked. We had absolutely no idea how to prepare it, so that evening we asked the kitchen at our hotel to cook it for us. It was served to us stewed and sweetened; it tasted vaguely like sweet potato. We liked it.

Jenna's picture of a road in the Camotes:

That day we ate lunch as the sole customers at a restaurant at Lake Danao, where we made sure to order vegetables as a change of pace from the food we'd been eating, which was mostly meat and rice. Then we went to Buho Rock on Poro Island for more snorkeling. The snorkeling was rather better at Buho Rock than Tulang Island - we actually saw fish, not just sea urchins and garbage.

On Saturday, we started out by trying the snorkeling at the hotel. It was surprisingly good - despite some heavy boat traffic, we saw a decent variety of fish, and a very surprising amount of live coral.

In a way, I think my very first snorkeling experience in the Penghu Islands in Taiwan spoiled me. There wasn't much live coral, but I saw a greater variety of aquatic animal life in Penghu than anywhere else I've snorkeled - puffer fish, colonies of squid, and a pair of cuttlefish who patrolled the rocky shallows. (Looking back, I think we got very lucky with those cuttlefish. Scuba divers encounter cuttlefish frequently in deeper water, but I don't think they often venture into shallow water.) Now every time I go snorkeling I expect to see a similar variety of swimming creatures.

For lunch on Saturday our motorbike drivers took us to San Francisco, the biggest town in the Camotes. San Francisco is the only part of the Camotes where I saw a chain store (Julie's Bakery, a common chain in the country), although we went to a small locally-owned place where where an unused karaoke machine sat in the corner and a couple of cats came by begging. (Both of these are extremely common sights in the Philippines.)

Then to Altavista View, a lookout point on Poro Island.

Looking west, that's Poro Island in the foreground and Pacijan Island in the background. The land bridge that connects them is to the left, out of sight in this picture. Lake Danao is at the left, and Tulang Island is the small island of the coast of Pacijan on the right. Cebu Island can be seen on the horizon.

Our next stop was Bukilat Cave, also on Poro.

Light was provided by holes in the cave ceiling; we never fully established whether there were safety measures in place aboveground to keep people from falling in.

Our final Poro Island stop was Panganuron Falls, a waterfall which proved rather difficult for our drivers (who seemed unfamiliar overall with Poro Island) to find. With no signs to guide us, we had to ask for directions a few times, and finally ended up on a hiking trail that led us to the very top of the waterfall.

The question is whether there was a more clearly marked trail that would have taken us to the bottom of the waterfall, presumably more photogenic. I'll probably never find out.

This ended our exploration of the Camotes. On Sunday morning we went snorkeling again at the hotel, then got driven to Poro Town for a boat direct back to Cebu City. Once again we boarded the boat, only to wait as passengers and cargo trickled on board. (And the boat was already full of passengers when we boarded!)

Upon arriving back in Cebu, we took a taxi to the same hotel we'd stayed at before. Then we walked over to the nearby Ayala Center to get our fill of Filipino mall culture.

Filipino mall culture is very different from what you'd find in Korea or Taiwan, or probably anywhere else in Asia. In Korea or Taiwan you'll find Korean or Taiwanese versions of American shopping malls. But I can't call shopping malls in urban Philippines a Filipino version of an American model - rather, I feel like they ARE American shopping malls, that happen to be located in the Philippines. Smaller shopping centers in Cebu look just like American strip malls. It all comes from the Philippines being massively influenced by American culture right when it was modernizing. They all looked to the American model, rather than European or Japanese models.

So in the Ayala Center we found Western mall design, Western food, and a surprisingly large number of Westerners. Presumably for Cebu-area expats, the best way to spend a Sunday afternoon is to hang out at the mall. It was even linguistically familiar - in Danao and the Camotes we'd run into some communication problems, but once in Cebu I found that most locals spoke good English. Often to each other.

Off to Cebu soon

2008-10-07T19:21:00.003+08:00

Tomorrow we leave for the Philippines.

Our plan is to make use of the October 10 holiday in Taiwan to fly down to Cebu. We spend Wednesday night in Cebu, then the next morning go by ferry to the Camotes Islands, where we stay until Sunday. Then we return to Cebu and fly back to Taiwan on Monday morning.

Pictures shall be posted here afterwards.

Absentee Ballot Mailed!

2008-10-07T18:46:00.007+08:00

I mailed off my absentee ballot today. Thanks to Maine's odd electoral laws, each Congressional district has a separate vote in the Electoral College, with the remaining two votes going to the candidate who won the state overall. (Nebraska is the only other state that does this.) There's speculation that McCain could make a serious effort to contest Maine's 2nd District, where I'm registered to vote. I suspect Obama is going to carry both Maine districts by several percentage points. No part of Maine has gone Republican since 1988, and I can't believe this will be the year the GOP takes it back.

There is also the Senate race, where incumbent Republican Susan Collins is probably going to win, unless something catastrophic happens to her campaign before Election Day. And in the 2nd District, Democratic Congressman Mike Michaud is probably going to be reelected by a wide margin. (GOP challenger John Frary's website is a very entertaining effort by a man who is probably fated to lose. Be sure to play the Liberty Bell March if you visit the site.)

Still, I've voted every two years since 1998, and the fact that none of the major races is particularly close this year in Maine is not going to dampen my enthusiasm.

Feasting at the Table

2008-09-21T09:59:00.001+08:00

"Feasting at the Table of Taipei", Matt Gross' excellent New York Times article lauding the variety and quality of food in Taipei, correctly identifies Taiwan as a hugely underrated travel destination.

Gross has done me the service of picking out a whole bunch of restaurants that I really must try soon. I'm already familiar with Kiki, although their fare is more Szechuan-style than Taiwanese. But decent Taiwanese food is available at every night market.

Saturday Night during Sinlaku

2008-09-17T20:25:00.005+08:00

Typhoon Sinlaku was never all that scary here in Taipei. Here are some pictures I took on Saturday evening. I was standing in the open area across from our apartment on the 6th floor.

Despite the visible raindrops on the lens in two of the pictures, it wasn't even raining all that hard. (I took the pics during one of the lulls.)

Typhoon Sinlaku

2008-09-13T20:52:00.003+08:00

That's Typhoon Sinlaku two days ago, when it was much further out to sea.

Now it's right off of Taiwan's northeastern coast, and is about to move directly over northern Taiwan v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. That means we're going to get torrential rain for the next 24 hours at least.

We're in southern Taipei City, and it's just before 9pm on Saturday September 13. We've been getting heavy rain all day long with a couple of lulls. We live on the top floor of a 6-story building. We've always had a problem with leaks in our kitchen; for the past few hours we've grown accustomed to having puddles on our kitchen floor. I can mop up the puddles, and I have some short-term success, but then the water inexorably spreads again. Like it's reproducing itself.

Still, as much of an inconvenience as Typhoon Sinlaku is, I imagine we're a lot better off than people in southeastern Texas right now.

The August 30 Rally

2008-09-11T19:12:00.006+08:00

On August 30 - 100 days since Ma Ying-jeou assumed office as President of Taiwan - several thousand people, if not several hundred thousand people, rallied in downtown Taipei. The rally was organized by the DPP and other "green" political parties, and we saw many expressions of Taiwanese nationalism, support for Taiwan's bid to join the United Nations, and concern over the Taiwanese economy.

Although it wasn't an official anti-Ma protest, there were many anti-Ma signs. The general attitude of the crowd was that Ma is too close to China and has not done enough to help the Taiwanese economy.

The people at the rally were very friendly and the whole event was very peaceful.

For more pictures and commentary of the August 30 rally, there's Michael Turton's blog.

Two more bits of English:

Kaohsiung III

2008-08-05T12:21:00.009+08:00

Next we went to the old British consulate for coffee and snacks. The consulate - which hasn't actually served its purpose as a British consulate for over a hundred years - has been turned into a touristy museum and gift shop. (There's another former British consulate in Danshui which is almost identical in terms of architecture and tourist-iness.)

Some views from the consulate cafe.

More architecture and views.

After the consulate, we headed up to Lotus Lake in Zuoying, not far from the high-speed rail station.

Lotus Lake, which is not a terribly attractive lake (it was half dried up when we were there - hopefully the typhoon the next day replenished its water supply), is nevertheless surrounded by cool stuff, with Buddhist and traditional Chinese religious themes.

Here the objective is to enter through the dragon's mouth and exit through the tiger's mouth. (Despite the ominous clouds and weather forecast, the weather was actually still quite pleasant.)

The area around Lotus Lake.

The weather was still holding up, so we went back downtown for dinner at Liouhe Night Market. Liouhe is not all that big as night markets go (a fraction of the size of Shilin or Jingmei in Taipei) but the food was quite good.

Afterwards we went to the bar atop the 85 Sky Tower, the tallest building in Kaohsiung and (according to Wikipedia) still the 16th tallest building in the world. The bar wasn't the nicest ever but the view was pretty neat, and despite our expectations it still wasn't raining when we left at midnight.

We returned to the hotel late Sunday night to the news that Taipei City had officially canceled all work and school the next day. Our train tickets were for 9am Monday.

We woke up to find the typhoon had finally arrived, as a single look outside our window made quite clear. The high speed rail had shut down for the duration of the storm. We weren't going anywhere.

We were in a hotel with an all-you-can-eat complimentary breakfast buffet, HDTV in the rooms and free Internet access. There were worse situations we could have been in.

We only left the hotel once that day, to take a taxi to the HSR station to refund our tickets and buy new tickets for the following morning. Apart from that we stayed indoors, reading and watching TV, as the typhoon drenched Kaohsiung outside. We had to pay for another night at the hotel, but given the discount we were getting we didn't mind.

Tuesday morning we returned safely to Taipei. We somehow managed not to get directly rained on once all weekend, which was kind of a neat trick.

Kaohsiung II

2008-08-05T09:52:00.006+08:00

The Love River through downtown Kaohsiung used to be infamously polluted. Kaohsiung has cleaned itself up impressively in recent years, and the Love River is now the pleasant product of an urban renewal project. There are restaurants and open-air bars along the riverside.

As we ended Saturday, the typhoon continued to approach Taiwan but the weather still held up impressively.

On Sunday morning we partook of a complimentary hotel breakfast and then took a taxi to Shoushan, a mountain close to the city center known for its wildlife.

Macaques are most active around sunrise and sunset, but even though we came too late in the morning for prime monkey viewing there were still quite a few around. Unlike Tienmu Old Trail in Taipei, there were no signs posted telling visitors to be cautious around the macaques, but we kept our distance anyway. (Rough Guide says there's been a problem in the past with humans feeding the monkeys, and we didn't want them to think we were bringers of food.)

The ocean, seen from Shoushan.

Kaohsiung-style road repair work. To prevent anyone from hitting the pothole, just stick an overturned office chair in it.

Kaohsiung I

2008-08-04T20:38:00.014+08:00

I went to Kaohsiung with Jenna weekend before last - the weekend right before Typhoon Fung-wong hit Taiwan. Neither of us had really been there, so we decided to finally buy high-speed rail tickets and spend a weekend there. We paid close attention to the typhoon's approach, but finally decided to take a chance on the weather and make the trip that weekend.

Rather than try to reserve a hotel room from Taipei, we decided to look for a room when we got to Kaohsiung. We ended up spending an hour or so at the travel information desk at Kaohsiung's HSR station - apparently there was some kind of "shopping festival" in town and most of the inexpensive-yet-decent hotels in the city center were booked. We finally found a decent hotel that was a bit distant from downtown but at least it was (sort of) walkable from the subway...

...and it turned out to be surprisingly nice. Horribly tacky lobby but the rooms were really nice (with HDTV) and the complimentary breakfast buffet was as good as you'd find in a good Western hotel. Everything in the hotel looked brand new. It wasn't remotely full and we got our room at a substantial discount. Our theory is that it was constructed in anticipation of the 2009 World Games.

Northern Kaohsiung struck me as somewhat Singaporean in its wide streets and architecture. (Central Kaohsiung would be pure Taiwan.) Typhoon Fung-wong is two days away in this picture.

We took the subway to central Kaohsiung. Kaohsiung's MRT system is brand new, opened just a few months ago. There's only one operational line so far, the Red Line, which runs north-south. The Orange Line is scheduled to begin service later in August, running east-west - we saw a couple of Orange Line station entrances while taking taxis around the city and they genuinely looked ready to open soon.

The Red Line is clean, shiny and new. Unfortunately, trains that Saturday were running 9 minutes apart - I can't ever remember waiting that long for a train on the Danshui or Bannan lines in Taipei, even on a weekend. When the train did come it was crowded, and just got more crowded as it approached downtown Kaohsiung.

We exited at Sanduo Shopping District and I took a couple of pictures.

From there we took a taxi to the harbor, where we caught a cheap ferry to Cijin, a historic part of the city located on an island.

Harbor pictures:

Cijin's got a lot of interesting old-style architecture; it's also quite touristy.

We ate a seafood dinner on a street loaded with seafood restaurants. I'm not usually a big fan of seafood but I appreciate it when it's done well. Saturday's meal was excellent.

Maybe it's just my imagination, but the temple roofs in Kaohsiung and southern Taiwan seem more elaborate than those in Taipei. I like it.

Temple art in Cijin.

We found this fascinating facade after dark in Cijin and have no idea what it is. This is about the best picture I managed to take of it.

Dutiful Son Mountain

2008-06-07T11:44:00.006+08:00

The Pingxi Branch Line winds through some very nice hiking areas. Despite fog and a bit of rain, we attempted Dutiful Son Mountain, which is not hugely high but contains a lot of stone steps.

Those are the kind of stone steps I'm talking about.

Jenna looks at the foggy scenery.

Joseph on a rock trail. Note the ropes being held by metal poles. They are fortunately strong.

The path to the summit.

And the foggy view from the summit.

Pingxi

2008-06-06T23:13:00.004+08:00

We spent last Sunday in Pingxi, a town in Taipei County famous for three things:

1) It is on the Pingxi Branch Line, a picturesque old railway line.
2) It is located in what was once the center of coal mining in Northern Taiwan. There's even a Coal Mining Museum in town.
3) Every year, during the Lantern Festival, people light and release hundreds of sky lanterns. I've never been to Pingxi on the Lantern Festival, but I saw a couple of sky lanterns get launched. Maybe it's what people do on weekends when tourists come to town.

Last year we traveled to Jingtong, a village within Pingxi Township. Pingxi proper is just a few kilometers distant.

Baoan Temple Firewalking

2008-04-29T12:09:00.008+08:00

Following are scenes from Baoan Temple on April 20. The Baosheng Culture Festival continued for several days both before and after, but we went on the 20th to see the firewalkers.

The place was full of spectators an hour before anything interesting happened. I was surprised by the number of Westerners with cameras in attendance.
Musicians.
Some statues that are slated to be carried over the hot coals.

Eventually they opened the gates and the crowd pressed in.

I tried to become adept at the art of taking pictures while holding the camera above my head.

Guys holding baskets of sand dumped their load on the hot coals, and the men carrying gods began to trudge across.

No clear views of any person actually walking on the hot coals and sand, but I got off some cool smoky shots.
Afterwards, this individual gave us little cookies in return for donations.

Nazi Motorbike

2008-04-08T20:05:00.000+08:00

So I passed a parked motorbike today with a Nazi flag sticker on it. Pity I didn't have my camera - I would have loved to have taken a picture.

Living in Korea and Taiwan has successfully disassociated the swastika symbol from Nazism in my mind. Here it's a symbol of Buddhism and it has no negative connotations.

That said, the sticker on that motorbike was quite definitely the Nazi tricolor. I suspect there was no evil intention on the motorbike owner. Hitler never became the great cultural villain in East Asia that he is in the West; people here know who he is, of course, but Nazism and its associated symbolism doesn't spark the same visceral reaction that it does in Europe and North America. I think the owner of the motorbike just saw the sticker (I'd love to know where he/she saw it!) and figured, "Cool. Buddhist."

I hope.

Lishan

2008-04-07T09:24:00.008+08:00

Take a look at a map of Taiwan and you'll see that most of the populated areas are along the coast - the interior is barely populated. The interior is where Jenna and I went this weekend. Lishan lies on the Central Cross-Island Highway - a highway that several hundred war veterans died to create in the 1950s - and is well-known for its locally grown fruit and sweeping views.

A couple of pictures I took in Lishan and at a nearby model farm popular for its scenic views:
I'm not sure what is being grown here, but it looks neat.
Lishan, from above.

Something that amazes me about Lishan is the utter lack of any name-brand convenience store. No 7-11, Family Mart or OK Mart. Just a bunch of local all-purpose general stores. Very strange for Taiwan, where the chains can be found everywhere and even Penghu has a Starbucks.
A depressing abandoned church.
Clothesline in front, mountains in back.

Election Returns

2008-03-22T23:25:00.000+08:00

"The American won. The American's going to be our next President."

- Guy at flower shop in Jingmei Night Market this evening

Election Tomorrow

2008-03-21T21:22:00.001+08:00

Some pictures I took this evening in central Taipei:Crowds at the KMT rally. The Foreign Ministry is the big building behind them. There were huge TVs set up for people who couldn't see the speakers; when I showed up VP candidate Vincent Siew (I think) was speaking.Traffic was blocked off at the intersection.Lots of people with flags.And lots of people with plastic chairs and noisemakers and Ma Ying-jeou bobbleheads dolls.Just a short walk away, a vigil for Tibet was being held.The recent troubles in Tibet might just have a major impact on the Taiwanese election, driving a significant number of voters towards the DPP, which favors a much tougher stance against China. Both Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT and Frank Hsieh of the DPP have condemned China's actions, with Ma threatening to pull Taiwan's athletes from the Olympics if Beijing doesn't treat Tibet better. Still, the KMT is perceived as the party closer to China, so bad news coming out of China is going to help the DPP.

I'll be rooting for Frank Hsieh and the DPP tomorrow (as I suspect a majority of foreigners here will), although I'm not terribly optimistic about his chances. The race has apparently narrowed considerably though, and who knows how much China will inadvertently influence the results...

Keelung

2008-02-26T11:21:00.022+08:00

I don't know why it took me so long to visit Keelung. It's a whole city to explore, less than an hour away by train. It's got decent seaside views, and reputedly some of the best food in the country.
Our plan was to: a) climb a hill to see the Guanyin statue that watches over the city, and having thus worked up an appetite, b) visit the night market, quite possibly the most famous in all of Taiwan, for dinner.
Some kids were shooting off fireworks in a little park on the way up and this dog was going absolutely crazy. He'd circle around after the kids lit the fuse, and then bark like mad after it went off. Seemed like a dangerous game to us. Of course, he could have run and hid if he'd really wanted to.
During the seventh lunar month, this is where the Keelung Ghost Festival is based. During the rest of the year, it's home to a modest little museum with Ghost Festival-related displays.
Lots of potential hilarity for Westerners who don't realize what the swastika means in Asia.
When we got to the Guanyin statue, we found what can only be described as a whole Buddhist theme park. There was cotton candy and other snacks. There was a souvenir shop. There were little motorized cars that kids could drive around in. Those portholes in Guanyin's back are for you to look out of. Apparently you can climb all the way up to Guanyin's head. It was closed by the time we got there.
We could ring the big bell for a 50NT donation.
Views of the city from the top of the hill.
Sunset.

We went to the night market, where we had: a) meat on a stick with a crunchy, delicious batter covering (mine was supposedly beef, but I have my doubts), b) some very good vegetable rolls, and c) creamed crabs. Not bad. And then Taipei was just a quick train ride back.

Singapore

2008-02-18T10:39:00.023+08:00

Just before catching our plane to Sumatra, we spent a day exploring Singapore for the first time.

The only place I've ever been where everything official is written in four languages.

Those bicycle rickshaws seem tailor-made for tourists who want a picturesque trip and have money to spend.

Little India.

The Cheapest Store in Singapore has several locations in Little India - some of them less than a block apart from each other.

The waterfront at night.

Views from the window of our hotel near Ferrer Park.

This black and orange bird is everywhere in Singapore.

I'd love to return to Singapore for a more extended visit. It's a country where relatively inexpensive food from a wide swath of Asia can be had - Chinese, Southeast Asian, and North and South Indian. (It's practically impossible to find South Indian food in Taipei, which made the plethora of cheap Tamil food in Singapore heaven for us.) It's a country where most people speak some English and many people speak perfect English, but Jenna was still able to find opportunities to speak Mandarin to locals. It's a country where I might grow disenchanted with the government if I had to live there long-term, but it's an orderly country that entirely avoids the chaos that is most of Southeast Asia. It's a country that seems like a totally different planet from Sumatra.

Ten Days in Sumatra

2008-02-14T11:36:00.065+08:00

I returned to Taiwan yesterday with Jenna after ten days exploring Sumatra. We did not by any means see much of the huge island - we never went beyond West Sumatra and Jambi provinces. But we could have spent a month exploring that area. It was an experience for me. It was my first visit to a developing country (five days I spent in Beijing in 2003 doesn't count as being in a "developing country"). It was my first visit to a Muslim country. It was also my first trip south of the equator, for what it's worth.

We flew into Padang on Saturday the 2nd. Padang is a noisy city of almost a million people. We didn't do much sightseeing in the city; in fact, we used it exclusively as a travel hub and as a place to get essential services. I did not take many pictures of Padang, which is described by Lonely Planet thusly:

Padang is typical of Sumatra's modern landscape: a sprawling noisy place circumnavigated by tripped-out opelet blasting squeaks-and-beeps techno music. Padang might have once been a showpiece, but the economic depression that has followed the 1997 currency crash means that the city's infrastructure gets used but never renewed. Capital, more so than capability, feeds the modern machine.

Opelets are the most common form of urban mass transit in Sumatra: minivans outfitted to cram in the passengers, blasting loud music and with routes that we had a hard time figuring out.
On our bedside table in the hotel in Padang there was a Koran - the local equivalent of a Gideon Bible in the United States, I suppose. Entirely in Arabic, not Indonesian. None of the other hotels we stayed at in Sumatra had one.

The day after we flew into Padang, we boarded a van to the city of Bukittinggi. Intercity transportation in Indonesia is an experience. Sumatra does not have a good train system (I'm still not clear on whether or not passenger train service exists between Padang and Bukittinggi; if it does exist it's neither reliable nor recommended), so most intercity transport is by van or bus. After boarding the Bukittinggi-bound van, we waited for some time as the driver tried to get more passengers aboard. We eventually departed Padang with more passengers on the van than I would have thought possible. As with all intercity transport in Sumatra, we picked up and dropped off passengers continually en route.

The road to Bukittinggi went through farmland before climbing upwards into the mountains. With the exception of central Padang and Bukittinggi, we did not see any populated places in Sumatra where people did not live in close contact with farm animals. Chickens have the free run of rural (and suburban) Sumatra, and we often saw goats tied up (or walking free), grazing by the roadside. Buffalo are a very common sight. Once the van entered the mountains surrounding Bukittinggi, we saw many monkeys sitting by the road. They seemed unafraid of humans, and may have expected to be fed.

All of the Indonesian flags we passed on the road appeared to be flying at half-staff; I can only suspect this was due to Suharto's passing the week before. Before our trip, as updates on Suharto's deteriorating condition made the world press every day, I wondered what reaction we would see in Indonesia if he died while we were there. As it happened, the flags at half-staff were the only acknowledgments of the death we noticed.
Bukittinggi is an attractive small city. We saw several other Western tourists during our two night stay there, although Western tourism in West Sumatra used to be far more than it is now. Bukittinggi appeared much more prosperous than I expected; at least when it came to external appearances, the area seemed as developed as rural Taiwan. Satellite dishes were extremely common (although the TV in our hotel room only got three channels) and there were many attractive-looking single-family homes (although there also seemed to be many families living in shacks, especially outside of the city).

That last picture shows a modern building with a traditional-style roof - a common sight in West Sumatra.
This is all that's left of an old Dutch fort on a hilltop - but the area is ideal for good views of the city.

On another hilltop (connected by footbridge to the hilltop with the fort) there is a museum and a zoo. Our Lonely Planet (our chief source of information throughout the trip) describes the zoo as "just depressing". There was a bear pacing back and forth unhappily in a bare concrete enclosure, and two elephants in a space that seemed two small for them. There was also a tiger inhabiting a fairly big space, and a couple of orangutans.
Gibbons are said to be fairly common in Sumatra, but these two in the zoo are the only two that we saw.
We're no experts on peacock behavior, but it looked like this male peacock was putting on a big feathery display to try and impress the female peacock, who completely ignored him as she ate her meal. We both found it amusing.
This museum, built in the traditional style, had the expected displays of traditional arts and crafts. It also had a display of stuffed calves with two heads or six legs, each one with a description of exactly when and where it was born. There was also a large display of paper currency from around the world.

On Monday we traveled by bus and ojek to the Harau Valley, a popular place for hiking, although we didn't stay there long. When I say we traveled by "ojek", I mean we were driven there on the back of motorcycles, which is just about the most basic form of taxi service I've ever taken, or can imagine. I was terrified when I first rode on the back of someone's motorbike in Taiwan; I was nervous about it at first in Sumatra, but eventually I just found it fun.

Bus travel in Sumatra is an experience. I'm not a huge person by Western standards, but I found buses to be cramped. There's not much legroom, and the seats are just plain designed for a smaller body frame. Bus drivers are reluctant to leave the terminal until the buses are crammed with passengers. Before the bus leaves, vendors stop by selling fruit and snacks. Then a musician comes on board and sings a song. Once it was a guy with a guitar who serenaded us; another time it was a little girl who sang something that sounded like devotional music, shaking a tambourine. Tips are expected, but just 1,000 rupiah (about ten cents in US currency) is sufficient.

There are no "official" ticket sellers, but rather while the bus is on the road someone will ask for money from the passengers. (At one point it was a boy who appeared to be about nine years old; afterwards he hung out in the back of the bus smoking a cigarette.) People are constantly getting on and off, and often carry considerable baggage. On one ride there was a terrified chicken crouching by my feet. On another ride a woman with a bag of live ducks sat near us.

Needless to say, there are no non-smoking buses.

Our destination after Bukittinggi was the Kerinci Valley to the south; in particular we wanted to get to Kersik Tua, a small town ideally located for hiking and sightseeing. First, we traveled by bus to the city of Solok. (The bus terminal at Solok contains what is officially the filthiest public restroom I have ever been in.) Our intention at Solok was to catch a bus to Sungaipenuh, the biggest city in the Kerinci Valley; the bus would go through Kersik Tua and we would be let off there. A man put us on a bus that (he assured us) would get us in the direction of Sungaipenuh, although we would have to transfer at a town along the way. After Jenna boarded, the man charged me 60,000 rupiah for each of us. Jenna, who has much more experience than me in haggling, is convinced he ripped me off. She's probably right, especially as the bus the man put us on turned out not to be the best one for our situation.

We took the bus to a small town were we were advised to transfer to another bus - one that was not bound for Sungaipenuh but rather a town called Padangaro. (I don't remember if we noticed this discrepancy; if we did we thought nothing of it, given the general chaos of Sumatran transportation and our failure to understand it. For all we knew Padangaro might be the terminus the bus would stop in after passing through Sungaipenuh.)

As it happened, the bus did not go to Sungaipenuh at all, and when we reached Padangaro the driver tried to put us on a van to Kersik Tua that would have cost us 300,000 rupiah. At this point Jenna and I both strongly suspected we'd fallen into a scam designed for clueless Western tourists. (With later reflection we decided that the guy who put us on the wrong bus at Solok was probably the only real jerk involved; everyone else just assumed we knew what we were doing.)

When it became apparent we didn't want to take the pricey van to Kersik Tua, they put us up in a hotel in Padangaro for the night. The hotel initially made me worry about a scam again. It was improbably large, new and impeccably clean, considering it was a hotel in a small village far away from any large city. But we figured it was probably intended for domestic tourists and for locals to hold special events, and we did not get badly overcharged. And they were friendly.

The following morning we got on a travel van to Kersik Tua.
Mt. Kerinci, the highest peak in Sumatra, towers over the area. Climbing it would have meant camping out overnight, and neither of us particularly felt up to it.
The town is on the edge of a vast tea plantation.

It's a lovely town to just wander around. Kids greet foreigners with "Hello Tourist!!", and want to have their picture taken. I wasn't sure if Kersik Tua is another place that used to have a great deal of foreign tourism, but the only Westerners we saw there a trio of Czechs we ran into twice, a Westerner who lived in the homestay down the street, and a German guy intent on climbing Mt. Kerinci who arrived at our homestay the night before we left.

Every night we stayed in Kersik Tua, we were serenaded by the sound of motorbikes roaring by without mufflers on the road directly outside. And I'm happy to say I got used to it very quickly.
One of the best parts of traveling to a new country is trying the food. The most common local food in West Sumatra is Padang-style, which consists of a variety of curries and other dishes eaten with rice. I liked everything, but it consisted of nothing that was wholly unfamiliar to me (except that I was supposed to eat everything with my right hand, which I adapted to quickly). In a cafe in Kersik Tua, however, I was intrigued by "roti bakar", which with my limited linguistic knowledge I interpreted as "roast bread" or "fried bread". It turned out to be buttered toast, with sweetened condensed milk and chocolate sprinkles poured over it.

Here's the menu of the cafe in Kersik Tua:That's right - the top half has a picture of Mt. Kerinci as a background, while the bottom half is dominated by Tigger, Winnie the Pooh, and Piglet.

Another bit of fascinating local cuisine - one that I knew about beforehand due to Lonely Planet - is the avocado smoothie. Locals consider the avocado to be just another fruit, and juice stands sell avocado smoothies as one of their most popular flavors. They usually include chocolate syrup. They are - and I'm being serious here - quite good.

Our first big excursion in Kersik Tua was to a local waterfall, which we traveled to by ojek. (By this time I had lost all fear of ojek travel.) While there we met a local guide (I've forgotten his name at the moment - must consult with Jenna) who offered his help and the use of his van. Travel by local guide is common in Sumatra, and he spoke good English and seemed pretty honest.

The next day we went hiking around Danau Gunung Tujuh. The Indonesian name means "Seven Mountain Lake", which is a pretty apt description - we had to hike up and down one of those mountains to reach the lake.There were a couple of monkeys, but we didn't see much else in the way of wildlife. Whatever is living in the forest probably knows to steer clear of humans. Sumatra still has wild elephants, tigers, and rhinos - but only a very few of each.
Jenna with our guide at the top of the mountain.

One reminder that we were in a developing country was that the infrastructure was not quite up to Taiwanese standards. Every place we spent the night outside of Padang and Bukittinggi experienced repeated power outages in the evening. And when we tried to call a hotel on an offshore island where we wanted to stay for the final few days, we found that apparently phone service in Kersik Tua was down. (Theoretically we could have asked a local if we could borrow their cell phone, but we weren't sure about the local etiquette.)

So on our second full day in Kerinci, our guide took us to Sungaipenuh so we could try to call this hotel, as well as make use of other urban amenities such as a post office. We tried several calls to this possibly mythical hotel from a Sungaipenuh wartel (full-service telecommunications provider), but no luck. Nobody answered the ringing phone. We even did an Internet search at the same wartel, only to confirm that we had the correct phone number.
On the same day, our guide took us to Lake Kerinci.

The countryside.
Farmland outside Kersik Tua.

Finally we left Kersik Tua to take a direct bus back to Padang. We stayed in the same hotel we'd checked into for our first night in Sumatra, and the front desk unsuccessfully tried to find our supposedly upscale coastal hotel for us. It turned out that they did not have a registered number. Since they're in Lonely Planet and a Google search turns up a bunch of hits, our best guess is that at some point they simply went out of business.

So instead the next day we went to a beach-front hotel on Bungus Beach, south of the city. It was written up in Lonely Planet (except for our unplanned night in Padangaro, every place we stayed at was written up in Lonely Planet) and once again we were the only foreigners there, until a Dutch couple and an Australian couple showed up the day we left. Echoing much of what we had heard about Western tourism in Sumatra, the guy who ran the place said business had been quite good in the 1990s, before drying up about ten years ago.
Bungus Beach is lined with fishermen's houses - and cheap hotels for tourists. The waters are not great for snorkeling - they're too murky for much to be visible, and all the human activity has frightened away most sea life - but on our last full day in the country we got taken on a boat ride to two island beaches where the snorkeling is fantastic.

My only previous snorkeling trip had been in Penghu in Taiwan, and I'd seen a great deal of interesting fish, and also non-fish animals such as squid, cuttlefish, and sea cucumbers. No cuttlefish this time, but there was tons of brightly colored living coral just off the beaches. All sorts of fish were numerous, and there were huge colonies of very large sea urchins on the floor beneath us.

On our last day in Sumatra we explored Bungus Beach some more.
That last day there was a group of kids on the beach playing - a bit too roughly, we thought - with a little monkey on a leash. We felt bad for the monkey, but noted that: a) he had ample opportunities to bite the kids in self-defense, but didn't, b) he had many chances to escape, but didn't, and c) it seemed like whenever he felt threatened he'd jump onto the leg of the kid holding the leash, where he seemed to feel protected. So we think he enjoyed the whole experience.

The hotel owner's sister drove us directly back to the airport for 200,000 rupiah - thus insuring we wouldn't have to transfer in central Padang with our luggage, something we had not been looking forward to. We got to the airport quite early - and Minangkabau International Airport is not exactly the most exciting place to wait for a departure.

We were greeted with massive amounts of culture shock on our arrival in Singapore's Changi Airport. We entered a world where everything is clean and looks brand-new, where everything is well-marked and makes sense, and where, in the taxi ride to our hotel, we drove on well-maintained roads and even the paint job looked newly done. It was a massive shock to our systems.

But I certainly wouldn't mind returning to Indonesia when I get the chance.

Back In Two Weeks

2008-01-31T00:54:00.000+08:00

Sorry about the really light posting in the last couple of months. I won't be posting anything in the next two weeks either - we're headed to Sumatra for a break over Chinese New Year. I'll post lots of pictures upon our return!

Things About Taiwan

2008-01-10T18:43:00.000+08:00

I'm trying to think of aspects of life in Taiwan that are unique to this country. Taiwan is of course similar in many ways to other countries in East Asia, but I think every nation has its unique points.

1. On days that are sufficiently auspicious, I'll walk down the street and pass tables set up in front of businesses, with various bits of food laid out as offerings to the gods. Sticks of incense are usually burned as well. There will be a metal container with a fire going; this is for the burning of spirit money and other important bits of paper (I've never been able to ascertain what, exactly). This is part of Chinese culture that the PRC has put an end to in mainland China. (I think much of the same things are done in other substantial Chinese communities around the world, but traditions probably continue the strongest in Taiwan.)

2. Lottery numbers are printed on receipts here; apparently there are several drawings each day, with prizes of various amounts awarded. On the one hand this means cashiers always expect you to want a receipt, no matter how small the purchase; this can be a bit annoying as you collect lots of small slips of paper. On the other hand, many businesses have collection boxes where you can donate receipts. I've never actually checked to see if I won anything.

3. Taiwan's the first country I've lived in to have its own calendar. Years are counted from the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the formation of the Republic of China in 1911. (It is not unlike Japan officially counting the years from the beginning of the current emperor's reign.) The year 97 just began - the years change at the same time as in the Western calendar. Most official documents in Taiwan use the ROC Calendar, although I also see Western years widely used.

Cute Pet Photos

2008-01-06T23:32:00.000+08:00

The Taipei Pets Expo was this weekend, around Shin Kong Mitsukoshi in Xinyi.It was a place for people to bring their pets - mostly dogs.Though there were a few cats making the rounds too.And some utterly miscellaneous pets, such as this flying squirrel.These two huskies, identical except for the color of their leashes, were engaged in an epic play-battle.Jenna and I volunteered for Animals Taiwan, a no-kill shelter which works to find homes for stray animals. This is Mitsubishi, who is very small, meowed nervously for the first few hours she was in her cage, and got adopted before the day was over.Look at that donation box on Judy's chassis. I seriously think she made several times as much per hour as I do at my job.This is Precious (left) and Bingo (right). One or the other was usually on a leash in front of our booth, greeting passers-by and other dogs.

More pictures:

Happy New Year

2008-01-01T15:16:00.000+08:00

The Taipei New Year's fireworks display is set off from Taipei 101.These pictures were taken at five minutes to midnight at the intersection of Jilong and Xinyi Roads, Taipei.

And the fireworks go off:

Tianmu Old Trail

2008-01-01T13:05:00.000+08:00

On New Year's Eve, Jenna and I hiked Tianmu Old Trail. We never left Taipei city limits, but in the hilly north of the city we climbed to where we could get a beautiful vantage point of downtown Taipei.The views are good, but an even better draw for me was the wildlife.This spider is the size of my palm and getting the camera to focus on it took a few minutes of effort. There was also a large brown bird that I never got a really decent picture of.For me, the biggest attraction was the monkeys. Seeing monkeys on this trail is by no means a sure thing - they're most active around dawn and dusk, and although they're not terrified of humans they are a bit cautious - but we got lucky this time.These macaques can grow pretty large, and can defend themselves with teeth and claws. So it's a good idea not to make them feel threatened. We were cautioned not to make eye contact with the macaques - they see it as a challenge. We did our best to observe them, though - there seemed to be whole families that were active, and we watched them feeding, fighting (not too seriously, it looked like) and just moving around up in the trees.This one just sat himself down by the path for several minutes. A couple of locals walked past him, each one obviously looking straight ahead, ignoring him. Presumably there have been enough cases of monkey attack on this path before that the locals know how to stay safe.Apart from the monkeys, it was a very nice hike.This huge pig was tied up outside a closed restaurant that will presumably open for the peak hiking season. There were a couple of chickens wandering around loose as well.The macaque-less parts of the trail are very nice and peaceful.

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall

2007-12-09T10:22:00.000+08:00

I went to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall on Saturday at around noon. On Friday, workers had removed the Chinese characters glorifying Chiang Kai-shek from the massive arch in front of the hall, amid both protests and cheers.

This is part of the government's massive effort to de-Chiangify Taiwan - the main international airport, which was Chiang Kai-shek International Airport when I first came to Taiwan, has already been renamed Taoyuan International Airport. The subway station still bears Chiang's name. (It's been confirmed that the station's name will not be changed, says the Taipei Times.)This is what the scene looked like at around noon on Saturday. The three points of interest: (1) CKS Memorial Hall is completely sealed off with barbed wire, (2) the grand archway is completely devoid of any lettering, and (3) there are no large crowds. That last one really surprised me.Lots of news crews, though.Overall, I was surprised at the general peacefulness and the lack of crowds. I'd expected more protests.

I returned with Jenna at around 3:00, when workers were beginning to put the new lettering up on the archway - and things were getting more interesting.

Here's the scene when we came back. The guys on the crane are putting the first of the new letters up. There's a much bigger crowd. Still not many protesters - most of the people seemed more cheerful and/or curious than anything.The work begins.Despite a few people who were upset (mostly pro-KMT folk who didn't want to see the name changed), it was a very safe and peaceful crowd, as evidenced by all the little dogs.And the guy with the parrot.The crowds grew as the work progressed. There was much cheering after the first letter was firmly placed on the archway.One person brought red wine and distributed it in plastic cups.The work is half done.A popular sentiment among the Green (anti-KMT) supporters.The whole scene was very peaceful. Even among the protesting KMT contingent, few people became unruly, though there was one middle-aged woman wielding a Taiwan/ROC flag and shouting what I think were pro-KMT slogans, and one or two people seeking a verbal confrontation with the police officers. I was very surprised at the lack of organization among the pro-KMT people - I really expected more of an organized protest.

We did not stay to see the work completed, but the full scoop on the day's events and a picture of the completed work can be seen at the Taipei Times website.