adventures in bali
Happy Labor Day, everyone, even those of you stuck in countries that suspiciously moved Labor Day to a different month.
I decided to go on another adventure today. I headed out on a share bike up my well-worn route that takes me across the Tamsui River, along the dyke to the mouth of the Erchong floodway, onto the boardwalk by the mangroves, then up to Bali.
To most readers, i guess Bali brings to mind the tourist destination in Indonesia, but in Chinese 八里 bā lǐ means Eight Mile, and here it refers to a sleepy suburb of Taipei near the mouth of the Tamsui River. They're building a bridge right across the mouth of the river that will let people travel from Tamsui (a popular seaside tourist destination with a metro connection) to Bali, and i imagine that will change the vibe a bit. Well, even more, i suppose. The Port of Taipei only got built there in the 1990s and surely changed the character of the place. There are lots of wide, new roads there with empty buildings that will probably fill after the port expands and the bridge arrives. The place is primed for growth.
The main tourist corner of Bali is clustered around the 碼頭 mǎ tóu (dock) where ferries ship hordes of visitors back and forth from Tamsui. The area is packed with market stalls selling all the usual 小吃 xiǎo chī (snacks) you can find pretty much anywhere in Taiwan, including on the 老街 lǎo jiē (old street) back in fucking Tamsui. To me it seems like local vendors would be shooting themselves in the foot by selling the same shit you can get everywhere else, because why then would people bother to take the ferry to your market? But i guess Taiwanese are no different to Americans who travel halfway across the country then eat at the same damn chain restaurant they have at home.
I remember reading a blog by an expat who explained that trends in the night markets move very quickly here, so if one stall introduces a new or unique dish that does well on social media, within a few weeks there will be copycat stalls all over Taiwan. But i suspect - if that's true - that it's homogenizing the whole experience, because then vendors who would otherwise sell actually unique local food end up selling whatever the most mainstream, middle class Taipei residents get hyped about on YouTube. Oh well, gotta make money i suppose.
Just like last time, i biked quickly past the matou and tried to find some eats in town, where the fishermen and harbor workers might go to eat.
Of course, they just eat the same old same old as well. Let's be real, when you live in a place, or you travel a lot in a place, sooner or later you are going to have tried most of what there is to try. And then you will go back to your old favorites. So then it just becomes about who did them better. Maybe that's why people travel to different markets and get the same damn sausage on a stick that they did before? Maybe it's better!
So, what did i get? Well here is a picture from my ride to Bali a couple weeks ago, where i toevallig saw a guy on a trike with a big vat of 豆花 dòu huā - "bean flower" aka tofu pudding. It's something i consider to be a classic Taiwanese snack. They have it in China too, but in Guangdong at least it's often served hot, like black sesame soup. In Taiwan it more often feels like a healthy version of icecream. Well, until they put the toppings. Normally i just have peanuts, but this guy put peanuts, sugar syrup and boba. Sweet, cool and refreshing.
Today the guy was not there, alas, so i just ducked into a noodle shop and got 麻醬麵 má jiàng miàn (sesame sauce noodles) and some dry tofu. It didn't taste great and the photo didn't come out either, so instead here is a picture of the 潤餅 rùn bǐng (lumpia) i got a couple weeks back. Like the lumpia i got in Tamsui last year, this was some kind of Taiwanese version which is more like a burrito than a spring roll. It is freakin' awesome. This one was the vege option with cilantro, bean sprouts, curried cabbage, julienne carrots, dry tofu and cayenne pepper. Quite different flavors from usual Taiwanese food and a nice change.
The reason i went back to Bali after i just went there a couple weeks ago, is because last time i was there, i noticed a trail head for a hike that went up the nearby ridge. But because share bikes in Taiwan sadly need to be returned to the dock, and there was no dock nearby, i resolved to go back to it later. That's what i did today. Although leaving the bike in central Bali meant that i had a few kilometers walk to the trail head, not to mention several more kilometers on the other end to get back into civilization. (Where civilization is defined as being a place that has share bike docks.)
But i'm getting ahead of myself. Today was a rare sunny day in Taipei. It rains here so fucking often i almost forget what sun feels like. It was not just a sunny day, there was also hardly any smog, which meant the colors of everything were so much richer than the usual tones of grayish green. Here is a picture of some of the smallhold farms that run along the flood plain, fronted by mangroves, on the river side of the west bank dyke.
Apparently on the other side of the river from here is another flood-prone rural area where local residents have fought back against any kind of dense urban development. Seeing how squatters and low-income residents got pushed out up in Tamsui area since last time visited Taiwan 5+ years ago, i guess they are fighting a losing battle, but who knows? I would like to go visit that area sometime, in case it does disappear.
Leaving my bike in Bali, i started the walk up to the trail head. Because there is a bunch of construction going on - partially for the bridge, partially for the port - there are several paths that appear on maps that are (temporarily?) blocked or gated off. The good thing about traveling on foot, instead of on a bike, is that you are much more free to explore places that are supposedly closed, because if you do sneak through a technically-open gate and end up in a dead-end, you can often jump a fence and get back to where you were supposed to be. To get to one of those mystery paths, i had to walk a long stretch of connecting pathway that nobody rides on because it doesn't really lead anywhere right now.
But i fucking love these spaces. These little bike paths that follow the elevated freeway, but also are inconvenient to access for motorcylists in a hurry who would rather take the main road... The places where no tourists come because it doesn't lead anywhere in particular. Where no spandex-clad sport cyclists make it to because it's too far away from their high-class apartment blocks. So you just sit there, on your own, with nobody around, going nowhere. I love it so much. Best places in the world are like this.
Popping out the end of path there is a technically-only-open-to-commercial-fishermen fishing port, which if you sneak inside and clamber across some riprap, you will find the locals who realized this was a great spot to fish. Some day maybe the Port of Taipei will shut it down...
I hope not. I love having shabby back roads and secret places where people go to fish. I only eat vegan at home and don't even like to kill bugs, so i probably would never get into fishing... but i do feel some kind of connection with the people who head out to these weird in-between spaces, places not really owned or policed by anyone, and then just sit there in the sun all day, watching the sea. I get it. I feel like i fit in better in spots like these than paddling along sandy beaches with the families and kids.
Which i did do, after this. I hiked a bit further along, and probably could've snuck all the way along the coast to the port entrance (last time i biked as far into the port as i could get before being blocked by a barrier at the guardhouse), but i decided to cut back onto the road-beneath-the-road, sheepishly walking past a snoozing guard who had to sit out front of an empty lot on Labor Day. It was only a short hike from there to the tiny beach i discovered on the previous trip. I ate some fresh cut pineapple i had bought in town (i had previously eaten fresh cut watermelon on the riprap), then climbed down to the beach to splash some water on my face and arms.
And then it was under the freeway to the mountain side and the trail head.
You know you're in Asia when you walk into the jungle to go on a hike, and there is just a ton stairs going directly up the hill.
As i climbed, i thought how it'd been a while since i did one of these Chinese-style hikes, just bitterly forcing my body up an endless flight of stairs, covered in sweat, birds singing, insects chirping, bamboo creaking... I miss it. I should do this more often. One of the reasons i haven't done it in Taiwan - even though i know there are plenty of mountains around Taipei - is i am scared to accidentally end up on a popular trail and have to put up with millions of people, which is kind of what i try to get away from on my weekends.
The trail wasn't all that long. Maybe a kilometer or two, although going up a hill it always feels longer.
At the top i asked some directions because my phone's battery had almost run out. (Annoyingly, i deliberately plugged it in overnight so i'd have a full charge, but the cable was loose, so i spent the day on battery saver mode, avoiding checking the map or taking too many photos, as the charge dropped from 20% to 2%.)
After a short walk past some movie studios i found myself at a strange village called 太平嶺 Tài píng lǐng which seemed to not have any shops in it at all. I must have missed the main street because i can't imagine a village would not even have a place to get a drink, but then i thought about some other villages i've visited in Taiwan and... maybe there really was nothing. Something very different about traveling in Taiwan versus China is that in China there is always, everywhere, a tiny kiosk or storefront selling smokes, snacks and drinks. You can confidently walk or bike into the middle of nowhere, and feel fairly certain that you will still be able to buy some supplies along the way. Hell, you can be halfway up a mountain, and there's a guy with a blanket laid out selling jerky and tangerines and sweet tea. But Taiwan is more like the US or Canada in the sense that sometimes you end up at a village, desperate for water, and there's just nothing there except some houses, some farms, a warehouse and a factory. Perhaps that's an indication of a wealthier country, where nobody is poor enough to bother selling a 25 kuai bottle of ice tea to the one damn idiot who walks past your house that day.
Anyway, i was hot and thirsty and there was nowhere to get something to drink, and what should i see next but a fucking golf course. Goddamn rich people and their golf courses, plonking them down in the middle of nature, pootling around in their comfortable little EVs, drinking fine wine and eating steak. Meanwhile the plebs walk along the road on the other side of the wall, in bare feet, going up hill, both ways, dying of thirst.
Well, it wasn't quite that bad. And in reality i was the only pleb walking along the road, because the actual local people all own motorcycles so they can zoom over the mountain in 30 seconds.
Eventually i made it to a residential suburb in Linkou District where the last tiny percent of my phone led me to a bike dock. I jumped on my bike and passed a huge Buddhist temple that might go on my list to visit at some point in the future. Out front were a bunch of street food sellers doing 滷味 lǔ wèi, which is the most Taiwanese of Taiwanese foods in my opinion. Just a pot of bubbling herbs and spices with various bits of offal, eggs and bean curd floating in it. You make your order and get a plastic bag that smells of fivespice and joy. Because it was in front of a temple there were several vegetarian stalls so i got some dry tofu with a generous splash of chili sauce and cilantro. It's actually one of the spiciest things i have eaten in Taiwan, so whoever that vendor was, i hope i will see her again. Her luwei was on fucking point.
I didn't actually eat it at the temple, because i was on a mission to get back to somewhere i knew where it was before my phone died. That turned out to happen much faster than expected, because Linkou was up on the hill that i had just climbed. After finding the secret road down (there are several cul-de-sacs that just lead to more factories), i zoomed all the way back in record time. Well, it would have been even more record time if i had had a bike with decent brakes, but the bike i had picked up had brakes barely worth a damn, so i wavered between careening out of control and trying to keep the thing rolling as slow as possible, to avoid certain disaster if i needed to make a sudden stop. Still, it was a rush.
At the bottom of the hill it was just some zigging and zagging underneath more freeways and then i popped out in the Erchong floodway, which (when there aren't any floods) is a greenspace that runs a straight line back to the river and the bridge home. I ate my tofu under a bridge, with uncharacteristically few karaoke singers and saxophonists.
It was a good day.
When i first set out this morning i was thinking about writing an entry on what makes these things an adventure to me. Like, sometimes you can go on a hike, or go on a bike ride, but they're not adventures. So what does make it an adventure? I had some thoughts on that, but this entry has gotten too long so i will follow up on that later...
I decided to go on another adventure today. I headed out on a share bike up my well-worn route that takes me across the Tamsui River, along the dyke to the mouth of the Erchong floodway, onto the boardwalk by the mangroves, then up to Bali.
To most readers, i guess Bali brings to mind the tourist destination in Indonesia, but in Chinese 八里 bā lǐ means Eight Mile, and here it refers to a sleepy suburb of Taipei near the mouth of the Tamsui River. They're building a bridge right across the mouth of the river that will let people travel from Tamsui (a popular seaside tourist destination with a metro connection) to Bali, and i imagine that will change the vibe a bit. Well, even more, i suppose. The Port of Taipei only got built there in the 1990s and surely changed the character of the place. There are lots of wide, new roads there with empty buildings that will probably fill after the port expands and the bridge arrives. The place is primed for growth.
The main tourist corner of Bali is clustered around the 碼頭 mǎ tóu (dock) where ferries ship hordes of visitors back and forth from Tamsui. The area is packed with market stalls selling all the usual 小吃 xiǎo chī (snacks) you can find pretty much anywhere in Taiwan, including on the 老街 lǎo jiē (old street) back in fucking Tamsui. To me it seems like local vendors would be shooting themselves in the foot by selling the same shit you can get everywhere else, because why then would people bother to take the ferry to your market? But i guess Taiwanese are no different to Americans who travel halfway across the country then eat at the same damn chain restaurant they have at home.
I remember reading a blog by an expat who explained that trends in the night markets move very quickly here, so if one stall introduces a new or unique dish that does well on social media, within a few weeks there will be copycat stalls all over Taiwan. But i suspect - if that's true - that it's homogenizing the whole experience, because then vendors who would otherwise sell actually unique local food end up selling whatever the most mainstream, middle class Taipei residents get hyped about on YouTube. Oh well, gotta make money i suppose.
Just like last time, i biked quickly past the matou and tried to find some eats in town, where the fishermen and harbor workers might go to eat.
Of course, they just eat the same old same old as well. Let's be real, when you live in a place, or you travel a lot in a place, sooner or later you are going to have tried most of what there is to try. And then you will go back to your old favorites. So then it just becomes about who did them better. Maybe that's why people travel to different markets and get the same damn sausage on a stick that they did before? Maybe it's better!
So, what did i get? Well here is a picture from my ride to Bali a couple weeks ago, where i toevallig saw a guy on a trike with a big vat of 豆花 dòu huā - "bean flower" aka tofu pudding. It's something i consider to be a classic Taiwanese snack. They have it in China too, but in Guangdong at least it's often served hot, like black sesame soup. In Taiwan it more often feels like a healthy version of icecream. Well, until they put the toppings. Normally i just have peanuts, but this guy put peanuts, sugar syrup and boba. Sweet, cool and refreshing.
Today the guy was not there, alas, so i just ducked into a noodle shop and got 麻醬麵 má jiàng miàn (sesame sauce noodles) and some dry tofu. It didn't taste great and the photo didn't come out either, so instead here is a picture of the 潤餅 rùn bǐng (lumpia) i got a couple weeks back. Like the lumpia i got in Tamsui last year, this was some kind of Taiwanese version which is more like a burrito than a spring roll. It is freakin' awesome. This one was the vege option with cilantro, bean sprouts, curried cabbage, julienne carrots, dry tofu and cayenne pepper. Quite different flavors from usual Taiwanese food and a nice change.
The reason i went back to Bali after i just went there a couple weeks ago, is because last time i was there, i noticed a trail head for a hike that went up the nearby ridge. But because share bikes in Taiwan sadly need to be returned to the dock, and there was no dock nearby, i resolved to go back to it later. That's what i did today. Although leaving the bike in central Bali meant that i had a few kilometers walk to the trail head, not to mention several more kilometers on the other end to get back into civilization. (Where civilization is defined as being a place that has share bike docks.)
But i'm getting ahead of myself. Today was a rare sunny day in Taipei. It rains here so fucking often i almost forget what sun feels like. It was not just a sunny day, there was also hardly any smog, which meant the colors of everything were so much richer than the usual tones of grayish green. Here is a picture of some of the smallhold farms that run along the flood plain, fronted by mangroves, on the river side of the west bank dyke.
Apparently on the other side of the river from here is another flood-prone rural area where local residents have fought back against any kind of dense urban development. Seeing how squatters and low-income residents got pushed out up in Tamsui area since last time visited Taiwan 5+ years ago, i guess they are fighting a losing battle, but who knows? I would like to go visit that area sometime, in case it does disappear.
Leaving my bike in Bali, i started the walk up to the trail head. Because there is a bunch of construction going on - partially for the bridge, partially for the port - there are several paths that appear on maps that are (temporarily?) blocked or gated off. The good thing about traveling on foot, instead of on a bike, is that you are much more free to explore places that are supposedly closed, because if you do sneak through a technically-open gate and end up in a dead-end, you can often jump a fence and get back to where you were supposed to be. To get to one of those mystery paths, i had to walk a long stretch of connecting pathway that nobody rides on because it doesn't really lead anywhere right now.
But i fucking love these spaces. These little bike paths that follow the elevated freeway, but also are inconvenient to access for motorcylists in a hurry who would rather take the main road... The places where no tourists come because it doesn't lead anywhere in particular. Where no spandex-clad sport cyclists make it to because it's too far away from their high-class apartment blocks. So you just sit there, on your own, with nobody around, going nowhere. I love it so much. Best places in the world are like this.
Popping out the end of path there is a technically-only-open-to-commercial-fishermen fishing port, which if you sneak inside and clamber across some riprap, you will find the locals who realized this was a great spot to fish. Some day maybe the Port of Taipei will shut it down...
I hope not. I love having shabby back roads and secret places where people go to fish. I only eat vegan at home and don't even like to kill bugs, so i probably would never get into fishing... but i do feel some kind of connection with the people who head out to these weird in-between spaces, places not really owned or policed by anyone, and then just sit there in the sun all day, watching the sea. I get it. I feel like i fit in better in spots like these than paddling along sandy beaches with the families and kids.
Which i did do, after this. I hiked a bit further along, and probably could've snuck all the way along the coast to the port entrance (last time i biked as far into the port as i could get before being blocked by a barrier at the guardhouse), but i decided to cut back onto the road-beneath-the-road, sheepishly walking past a snoozing guard who had to sit out front of an empty lot on Labor Day. It was only a short hike from there to the tiny beach i discovered on the previous trip. I ate some fresh cut pineapple i had bought in town (i had previously eaten fresh cut watermelon on the riprap), then climbed down to the beach to splash some water on my face and arms.
And then it was under the freeway to the mountain side and the trail head.
You know you're in Asia when you walk into the jungle to go on a hike, and there is just a ton stairs going directly up the hill.
As i climbed, i thought how it'd been a while since i did one of these Chinese-style hikes, just bitterly forcing my body up an endless flight of stairs, covered in sweat, birds singing, insects chirping, bamboo creaking... I miss it. I should do this more often. One of the reasons i haven't done it in Taiwan - even though i know there are plenty of mountains around Taipei - is i am scared to accidentally end up on a popular trail and have to put up with millions of people, which is kind of what i try to get away from on my weekends.
The trail wasn't all that long. Maybe a kilometer or two, although going up a hill it always feels longer.
At the top i asked some directions because my phone's battery had almost run out. (Annoyingly, i deliberately plugged it in overnight so i'd have a full charge, but the cable was loose, so i spent the day on battery saver mode, avoiding checking the map or taking too many photos, as the charge dropped from 20% to 2%.)
After a short walk past some movie studios i found myself at a strange village called 太平嶺 Tài píng lǐng which seemed to not have any shops in it at all. I must have missed the main street because i can't imagine a village would not even have a place to get a drink, but then i thought about some other villages i've visited in Taiwan and... maybe there really was nothing. Something very different about traveling in Taiwan versus China is that in China there is always, everywhere, a tiny kiosk or storefront selling smokes, snacks and drinks. You can confidently walk or bike into the middle of nowhere, and feel fairly certain that you will still be able to buy some supplies along the way. Hell, you can be halfway up a mountain, and there's a guy with a blanket laid out selling jerky and tangerines and sweet tea. But Taiwan is more like the US or Canada in the sense that sometimes you end up at a village, desperate for water, and there's just nothing there except some houses, some farms, a warehouse and a factory. Perhaps that's an indication of a wealthier country, where nobody is poor enough to bother selling a 25 kuai bottle of ice tea to the one damn idiot who walks past your house that day.
Anyway, i was hot and thirsty and there was nowhere to get something to drink, and what should i see next but a fucking golf course. Goddamn rich people and their golf courses, plonking them down in the middle of nature, pootling around in their comfortable little EVs, drinking fine wine and eating steak. Meanwhile the plebs walk along the road on the other side of the wall, in bare feet, going up hill, both ways, dying of thirst.
Well, it wasn't quite that bad. And in reality i was the only pleb walking along the road, because the actual local people all own motorcycles so they can zoom over the mountain in 30 seconds.
Eventually i made it to a residential suburb in Linkou District where the last tiny percent of my phone led me to a bike dock. I jumped on my bike and passed a huge Buddhist temple that might go on my list to visit at some point in the future. Out front were a bunch of street food sellers doing 滷味 lǔ wèi, which is the most Taiwanese of Taiwanese foods in my opinion. Just a pot of bubbling herbs and spices with various bits of offal, eggs and bean curd floating in it. You make your order and get a plastic bag that smells of fivespice and joy. Because it was in front of a temple there were several vegetarian stalls so i got some dry tofu with a generous splash of chili sauce and cilantro. It's actually one of the spiciest things i have eaten in Taiwan, so whoever that vendor was, i hope i will see her again. Her luwei was on fucking point.
I didn't actually eat it at the temple, because i was on a mission to get back to somewhere i knew where it was before my phone died. That turned out to happen much faster than expected, because Linkou was up on the hill that i had just climbed. After finding the secret road down (there are several cul-de-sacs that just lead to more factories), i zoomed all the way back in record time. Well, it would have been even more record time if i had had a bike with decent brakes, but the bike i had picked up had brakes barely worth a damn, so i wavered between careening out of control and trying to keep the thing rolling as slow as possible, to avoid certain disaster if i needed to make a sudden stop. Still, it was a rush.
At the bottom of the hill it was just some zigging and zagging underneath more freeways and then i popped out in the Erchong floodway, which (when there aren't any floods) is a greenspace that runs a straight line back to the river and the bridge home. I ate my tofu under a bridge, with uncharacteristically few karaoke singers and saxophonists.
It was a good day.
When i first set out this morning i was thinking about writing an entry on what makes these things an adventure to me. Like, sometimes you can go on a hike, or go on a bike ride, but they're not adventures. So what does make it an adventure? I had some thoughts on that, but this entry has gotten too long so i will follow up on that later...