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June 18, 2001
The
Day of the Ant
I awoke at about 5:30, starving. After 30 minutes I could
stand it no more and went in search of food. Taipei has many things going for
it, but stores that open early is not one of them. With few choices, I went to
7-Eleven where I purchased a ham sandwich, bottle of iced tea and a small can
of Pringles potato crisps, all for just NT$75.
I admit that I have a tendency to dismiss the Taiwanese
dollar as a penny. Unless I make conscious effort, I think of a NT$100 bill as
a US$1 - a bad habit, since NT$100 is really $2.94. Nonetheless, $2.21 for
breakfast is quite reasonable. Try getting out of a 7-Eleven in the US with a
sandwich, soda and chips for under $5.00.
Pleased that I had obtained a (hopefully) tasty breakfast
for an economical price, I headed across the street to Ta An Park to find a
shady park bench to eat my breakfast. Ta An Park has many, many trees, but 90%
of them have been strategically placed to insure that no shade falls on a bench
in the morning. (As far as I could tell, they wouldn't cast shade in the
afternoon, either.) Bench after bench sat in the bright morning sun, and the
very few benches that somehow managed to be put in shade were, of course,
heavily packed with people (the sunny ones being totally empty.)
I finally found one that I only had to share with a man's
hat (who was off doing Tai Chi a few feet away) and I sat down to eat and watch
the people. The park was surprisingly busy for so early on a Monday morning.
I had opted for a quiet, western(ish) breakfast today
because in just a few hours we'd be leaving Taipei for 3 days and I knew that
whatever this trip had in store, it would certainly be a chore for me to find
food. Once outside Taipei, your choices of cuisine diminish rapidly to Chinese
only. I had stocked up with instant noodles, cookies, potato chips, pineapple
and cashews just in case, but I wanted to get the day off to a good start.
As I returned to the house, I got to watch school crossing
guards in action.
When I was a crossing guard in school, the prime rule was to
stop kids from running across the intersection. Of course, now we don't let
irresponsible little kids act as crossing guards and instead hire adults to
stop cars and make sure the kids don't run in the intersections.
Apparently, this is much the same in Taiwan, in the old
days, kids got to act as guards, but now they have been replaced with adults -
depriving children yet another opportunity to take responsibility for
something. These adults also have the job of stopping the cars on the busy
streets, but in a twist that I found comical to watch, while stopping the cars,
they also urge the kids to run as quickly as possible across the street. It was
quite fun to watch the guard gesturing wildly, herding the children like a
cattle drive across the prairie.
At 9:00, we headed south by car, reaching the town of Sanyi
around lunchtime. I had little hopes for Sanyi, as I understood it to be a very
small town. Indeed, the tourist map shows three things of interest: the town's
main street, a 7-Eleven and a McDonald's.
Sanyi's primary claim to fame is its woodcarvers. The main
street consists of shop after shop of displays of the woodcarver's art. Many of
the pieces are exceptional, but there was no practical way I could see to ship
a piece of furniture or life-sized statute back to the United States, so we
confined ourselves to just browsing the shops.
Knowing that this was the "last stop" before we really went
into the woods, I decided that I'd best avail myself of the local McDonald's.
The words "last meal for three days" kept playing through my head and I didn't
want to miss it.
Now, McDonald's is far from food I like, but, as I've said
before, it is consistent, it is western food and there are a hell of a lot of
them around. I rely on them (perhaps too much) as my fallback food on my trips
to Taiwan. Nonetheless, I wouldn't knowingly subject another human being to
McDonald's unless they wanted to go there, so after some wrangling, I convinced
everyone else to go eat where ever they wanted and I'd follow the signs on foot
to McDonald's. My confidence bolstered by my recent all-Chinese McDonald's
experience, I was confident I could handle it, even in this little town.
However, this time I ran into a new form of communication
problem: their signs stink. I couldn't find the McDonald's. Going down the main
street, you have two options, you can turn left at the intersection, or you can
go straight through the intersection, the road going up over a hill and bearing
to the left.
The sign for the McDonald's clearly had an arrow indicating
ahead, left. When I turned left at the intersection (apart from nearly being
run down by the truck traffic) there was nothing for a long way. Returning and
trying the straight (but bearing to the left road) yielded similar results, as
the town seemed to disappear.
Defeated and broken, I returned to town and sought out the
family, who were still eating in a Chinese restaurant. Under no circumstances,
however, was I going to let them know I didn't find the McDonald's and further
slow down the trip - I was eager to get to our destination.
(Stubborn? Me? Nah!)
 Sanyi was also wiped out by an earthquake in 1935. Near the town are
the remains of a Japanese period railway bridge that was collapsed during the
quake. We stopped by there on the way out of town to take a few pictures.
As we headed into the hills, we reached the town of Dongshi,
which appeared to be considerably larger than Sanyi. There were a number of
major construction projects going on in town, still rebuilding from the
devastating September 21, 1999 earthquake.
Just a few kilometers away was our destination, the Dongshi
New Forest area. "New forest" apparently refers to it being a reforestation
area, although I really couldn't see it - perhaps the new growth was old enough
to look natural - natural jungle, that is. The area's literature boasts several
convenience stores, restaurants and even a western-style food place. I felt
this was promising, but when we arrived it was to learn they only open the
western food place during weekends. During the week, the place is mostly
deserted.
Chu-Wan and I shared a wooden cabin with her parents, which
was not too bad, but had no air conditioning, just oscillating fans. That was
OK, since it was considerably cooler here than Taipei, but it was still
uncomfortably warm indoors without the fans.
 Chu-Wan and I started to look
around the area, and followed the main New Forest trail for about 45 minutes.
Drops of rain were beginning to fall. We had brought rain gear for the cameras,
and ourselves but we were in prime mudslide area. We had foregone a trip to
Hsitou, the bamboo forest, because the recent earthquakes and heavy monsoon
rains had made the area too dangerous for visiting for a while.
Taiwan's mountains are extremely steep and full of
vegetation. The monsoon rains soak the ground until it becomes dangerously
unstable. Anything such as an earthquake or a strong storm can dislodge huge
rock and mudslides immediately, or the dislodged ground can wait for it to
accumulate more water. My in-laws wanted to err on the side of caution, so we
avoided Hsitou - I have to take their word that it was a particularly dangerous
area. But now Chu-Wan and I were standing on a recent mudslide that had covered
the path and the rain was beginning again. We decided we needed to return to
the cabin, but as we were on a loop trail we weren't sure if we should continue
on or turn back.
A few minutes later two people came from the other direction
and said we were the first people they'd seen in a hour going the other
direction. With that information, we decided that it would not only be quicker
to go back, but that if we continued on, we'd probably be very isolated in case
of a problem.
We barely made it back to the cabin before a strong monsoon
rain hit, which lasted two hours, trapping us inside.
Apparently, large black ants also do not like monsoon rains,
for shortly after the rain started, ants began to appear on the wooden floor.
No sooner would we kill 5 or 6, a dozen more would appear. They never appeared
when you were looking, they were just suddenly there in the middle of our
bedroom floor when you turned around. After an hour, the floor was littered
with dead ants, but we were loosing ground. I was seriously thinking about
sleeping in the car when the rain finally stopped.
Although it was dark, I had to escape the ant mortuary. Our
first stop was the front desk to complain about the ants. They gave us a can of
bug spray and sent us packing. First we nuked the cabin, then we continued on
our walk. Earlier we had seen a sign indicating that there was a nearby meadow
that, at night, during the right season, you could see fireflies. Never having
seen fireflies in the wild, this was something I wanted to do.
Of course, we had no flashlights, and I'm convinced that
using a light would have worked against our chances of seeing fireflies anyway.
The path we took was almost pitch black in places and we had to walk along very
carefully.
 There's something about
Taiwan's "forests" (read: jungles) that are very ominous. These are not the
friendly, inviting woods of back home. Provided that weather isn't working
against you, the forests of home don't fill me with a sense of immediate danger
and dread. Here was different: once off the road, the mountains are too steep,
the vegetation too dense and it is filled with nasty insects and snakes, many
of which are deadly.
All inhabited areas have a the feeling that they were hacked
out of the jungle with a lot of sweat and effort, and once beyond the confines
of this hard-won sanctuary, you'd be in serious trouble.
We were still on a paved road, in sight of buildings and we
could feel the jungle pressing in on us. The cicadas droning, the tree frogs
croaking much too loudly and other noises, not so easily identifiable.
We reached the meadow and almost immediately we both saw a
firefly. If we hadn't both seen it, I would have just thought it was a little
phantom sparkle of light racing across my eye. We saw no more, so we stood in
silence for a few moments.
As we turned to head back to the cabin, we realized that the
trees on the side of the road were alight with thousands of little pinpricks of
light shining through the curtain of night. And as we watched, each tiny light
would fade and a new one would appear elsewhere.
I can only describe that moment as "magical" and I don't
know how long we stood there just watching the show, but eventually the unease
from the surrounding jungle returned and we headed, somewhat reluctantly, back
to the cabin.
The bug spray seemed to have done the job, or perhaps now
that the rain had stopped, the ants had something better to do and there was no
sign of them, save for the dead ones, which we swept into the bathroom and
washed down the drain.
That taken care of, we settled down for the night.
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