Wanhua → Longtan → Zhunan → Dajia
I am wiped out, but i feel like i need to write so it doesn't fade.
Sunday i packed my tank tops and toothbrush into a bag, pondered whether to take laptop or hammock and took the former, then jumped on a bike to head south. After first getting the idea when i lived in Shenzhen, i finally decided to go on a multi-day journey as far as share bikes could take me.
It is the worst time of year to do it. Not only is it the hottest time of year in an especially hot summer, but it's also getting to the edge of rainy (i.e. typhoon) season. Somehow, on that first day, i got both. I headed out in about 37C (100F) temperatures with humidity thick enough to steam my glasses. But when you work full time and only get limited holidays per year, you have to take what you can get.
I headed south along the river to Taoyuan, same route i have cycled a bunch of times before. My plan was to switch bikes at the Yingge/Bade border then follow the greenway down beside the river in Daxi before cutting west to find a good point to cross the border into Hsinchu. I've only cycled down there once before, and i remember it being a peaceful ride. The main city part of Taoyuan is up on a ridge that stretches out to the ocean, but if you drop down the ridge into the valley it's just rice paddies and temples and a charming slice of rural Taiwan just a couple hours ride out of Taipei City.
There's an oldstreet in Daxi, which is a big drawcard for the tour bus tourists, and a couple of "eco parks" that attract more self-drivers, but the little roads in between are just locals on mopeds and sport cyclists in spandex. Oh, and this one guy who was walking on foot with a sign on his backpack saying that he was walking solo around Taiwan. What a boss! If i had been further into my trip i might have stopped to talk to him, since he seemed like a bit of kindred spirit, but i was still at the beginning so i just gave him a thumbs up and yelled 加油 - add oil!
It was around the Daxi oldstreet where i started to get a bit worried about the giant fuck-off rain cloud dead ahead. My phone had been reporting rain for about an hour already, but so far i hadn't seen any, so i figured i'd just keep going. Once the first specks started, i was deep into the little country roads that are just wide enough for a couple of scooters or a kei truck to zoom between the paddies. Ditches on both sides. Not much shade. I started to keep my eyes peeled for shelter. Here is a temple. There is a tree that has a bit of an overhang. Oh, nice! A hut!
I rolled my bike into the hut just as THE FUCKING HEAVENS EXPLODED. Like, this was not a sweet summer storm. The clouds came down so hard i could barely see. It felt like night time as the thunder rolled all around. The hut only had three sides and despite my best efforts, everything still got wet. I stayed for about an hour, and when it eased up a bit i got back on the bike.
These little farm roads in Taiwan are somewhat maze-like. They don't follow a grid pattern but just meander about the place. Usually it doesn't really matter which one you take because eventually they join back up somewhere else, but occasionally you have to backtrack if you didn't check the map before. (Well - let's be real - often you have to backtrack even when the map says there is a through route because there fucking isn't.) It's not a big deal. That's the whole reason why i love to go on vacation with no plans. I don't have to be anywhere. Don't have to do anything, i can do whatever i want.
Well, Sunday i wanted to go right, because i thought that was the way that led back up the ridge to the city. You know, it might have been before the rain. It wasn't now. I should have gone left. Before i knew it, the road went from a puddle to a river. I always wondered how it happened that people would just get washed away and drown during flash floods in Guangdong, well, yeah. This is probably how. It didn't seem like i was going downhill, but then i was pedaling and my feet were going deeper into the water on every down-pedal. And i was not wearing my flip-flops, i was wearing (now sodden) sneakers.
Motherfuck.
So i turned back around and paddled my bicycle out of the river without dying. And then i went left. Which eventually looped back to the right, not underwater. I called over a couple of passing drivers to ask where to go, just like in the good old days before we had phones. (Mine was wrapped up tightly in a plastic bag.) They told me how to get to the village, which unfortunately was all the way back up the ridge, and i was zonked.
By the time i got back up the hill i just wanted to fall into a hotel, but it was about another 30 minutes on top of the hill before i got to a suburb that actually had some affordable places. (There are a bunch of eco/resort type hotels in the countryside that cater to a much higher class person than me.)
And thus ended the first day of my adventure. I had it all. Sweltering heat. Epic rain. A hill that i had no energy to climb. An extremely fortuitous hut. An extremely not-fortuitous wrong turn. Sunburnt body and soaking wet clothes.
It. Was. Awesome.
Which is why Monday i did it all again. I had stayed in the suburb of Longtan but in plotting my route over to Hsinchu i realized i would have to go up to a village called Fugang for the optimal route. After a breakfast from the Longtan market, i cycled to Fugang, jumped off the bike and got a 仙草甘茶 (grass jelly cane tea) for energy. And then i walked across the border to Hsinchu. This was a longer walk than the New Taipei City/Taoyuan switchover - it was around 3km. That doesn't sound like much, but when the sun is beating down and you are already sunburnt, hiking between rice paddies with little to no shelter... it was a lot. I haven't pushed myself through fierce temperatures like this since the hottest and most brutal part of Colombia, and that place really did a number on me.
But, fuck it. No pain no gain.
I found a bike near the Technical University in northern Hsinchu County and decided to head toward the coast to see if i could make it to Zhunan in Miaoli County. Turned out that was a pretty great idea, because there is a 17km greenway right down the Hsinchu coastline, cutting through sand dunes and mangroves with trees providing shelter along a bunch of the trail.
It was another very hot day, and i was sunburnt, and i had walked way too far, but it was a thrill to see the sea and wave to the fishermen and the oldies taking quiet walks. So relaxing. Then i took a closer look at my phone and realized i couldn't take the same bike all the way through to Zhunan, because Miaoli County has a different bike again.
I should explain how public bikes work in Taiwan. There is a company called 微笑單車 ("Smile Bicycle") which is stylized as Übike (the Ü is a smiley), and the English name is Youbike. They started in Taiwan something like 15 years ago as a public/private partnership between Giant Bicycles (one of Taiwan's famous exports) and the Taipei City government. Since that time they have expanded into almost all the major cities of Taiwan, and in some places also the counties that surround the cities. Because they are part of the public transport service, you can just swipe your transit card to rent the bike.
Youbikes are designed for last mile commuting, and for that purpose they are extremely cheap. I pay only 5TWD (about 15 cents American) to ride the 20 minutes or so to work every day, and i expect that's the usual distance for most people. Unlike in China where the dockless sharebikes were also used as utility vehicles by farmers, peasants and factory workers who could stack up a bunch of them in their village for pootling around, in Taiwan they mostly get used by young joyriders outside of the primary urban commute concept. People go up and down greenways and enjoy lazy bike rides in the park with friends. The best thing is that this usage is affordable too - a whole day might cost around 150TWD (5USD). As long as you get it back to a dock you're not going to break the bank.
So why am i switching bikes on the borders? Well it's not because the bikes are geo-locked. At least, i don't think they are. These bikes aren't like Chinese sharebikes which all have GPS in them and the company will immediately send you a text if you take it outside the designated area (and then fine you if you leave it there). These are "dumb bikes" where you slot them back into the machine, swipe your card again, and now you paid. But the company split the system into Youbike and "Youbike 2.0", which has different apps. And the bikes are different too. Notably, the metal thing that they slot into is different. Allegedly Youbike 2.0 is more space-efficient because they can fit the bikes closer together, but the trick is that you can't fit a Youbike into a Youbike 2.0 dock and vice versa. And - entirely coincidentally, of course - each city and county down the west coast of Taiwan is checkerboarded with the opposite bike from their neighboring jurisdiction. That doesn't matter so much for joyriders, since they will just go up and down the greenway in their own city before taking the bus or subway home, but it matters a lot if you are trying to travel across the country on the damn things.
And, although there are a handful of border villages which have docks for bikes on both sides (i luckily found one today), sometimes you gotta hike. I hiked the last 9km from Hsinchu County into Zhunan (Miaoli County) last night.
You guys, i was spent. I got a motel in an outer suburb of Zhunan, quite far from the touristy area downtown, but where i also found a great dinner. (More on food in a future post.)
I've actually been to Zhunan before. The first time i was in Taiwan, i wanted to try to take the train north from Kaohsiung to Taipei and stop in at least one town in every county. I stopped at Zhunan because i wanted to go to a beach and i heard Zhunan has a beach. Ah, those innocent times before i knew that Taiwan doesn't really do beaches. Zhunan is a town with a giant fucking Mazu temple and a bustling fishing port and a tiny strip of dirty mud where the 12 people in the whole of the country who like beaches occasionally go to take a walk.
Well, it's not quite that bad. But beaches in Taiwan don't have facilities because people don't hang out at the beach. There is no showers, no icecream stands, no lifeguards, no umbrellas, no nothing. Just the sand and the water and usually also a bunch of mud because it's all mangrove-y and tropical, and some grizzled fishermen and cooling systems from the nearby factories that's about it.
That's actually a pretty great kind of a beach, to be fair. It's nice that there isn't anyone around.
Anyway, i remember the last time i was in Zhunan i didn't have a card to rent a Youbike (or maybe they didn't have Youbikes back then) so i walked all the way out to the beach (it's miles out of town) and then it rained and it got dark and i walked back. This time i zoomed out there on my bike in the morning, and followed the coastal greenways and seawalls all the way down to Taichung.
The Miaoli coast is pretty great. It's pretty much standard Taiwan west coast. In the water is tons of windmills. There are a few beaches, but not much. Mud and wetlands are a bunch of it, and there is a riprap and a seawall that goes forever. Behind the seawall you have factories and cemeteries and aquaculture and rice paddies and some very poor villages with hardscrabble locals who seem to have nothing save for an extremely elaborate temple (or three).
I got stuck behind one of those villages on a seawall and wasn't sure how to get out without backtracking a long way because all the roads on the map were completely overgrown. Eventually i saw a dude on holiday with his son (i presume) and asked him how he got in. He told me to go through one of the overgrown laneways surrounded by graves and sure enough, i eventually popped out on the main road.
It was great. That's a section i would go back and cycle again. It looks kinda destitute but it has a sort of rugged, industrial scraggliness that appeals to me. If the big cities of Taiwan are cyberpunk, these hollowed out villages along the coast, windmills in the water, smoke stacks on the land, it's kind of a bleak post-industrial future shock and it fucking rules.
Oh, there is so much more i want to write about, the weird aquaculture pools where people go to fish, the guy blasting the same pumping party techno i heard in Laos which i now wonder if it might be Thai music... Thai people in general, and Indonesians, and Filipinos, and Vietnamese - the south-east Asians who BY FAR make up the biggest immigrant groups in the country but you would never know it if you only hung out in Taipei with all the white collar foreigners. The south-east Asian migrants work in factories and farms and fishing boats and get a lower class visa that does not allow them the same rights and privileges as white collar migrant workers. For instance, they can't leave and reenter at will. Taiwan still has an ugly side, and this is part of it. But it's a part i feel is ignored or dismissed in my professional circle, which is my only circle here.
This is something that the trip is solidifying for me. I fucking hate Taipei. I hate Rich Taiwan. Taipei is to Taiwan as Shanghai is to China. Boring food, boring people, boring lifestyles. Both cities are allegedly the cultural heart of their respective countries but you have to dig really deep to find any soul. When i lived in China people all over the country (and over the border in Hong Kong) shat on Shenzhen for just being a town full of migrants who only showed up to earn money and didn't have any culture of their own, but people missed the point. A town full of migrants is a diverse town. It's a place where you really get everything, not just the generic shopping mall food court version of everything.
That's what getting out of Taipei is about. Getting out of the bubble. Getting away from the rich migrants and the rich locals and the rich tourists. Being out here reminds me why Taiwan is place that i felt excited to visit when i was first here.
Of course Taichung is a bit of a break in that. Walking around to find some food tonight i didn't find a local place where the 老闆 proudly show me her home-made chili paste, i got the bored teenagers standing at the same night market stalls selling the same crap you can get anywhere in the country. Even out here in the industrial ass-end of Taichung. Oh well.
Dear lord, this meandered. Anyway. Short version. I cycled from Taipei to Taoyuan to Zhunan to Taichung and it was great. I am also terrifically, appallingly sunburnt. I applied sunblock what i thought was all over but every hour of reapplication, every day i missed another little stripe, and now it just adds up to sunburn everywhere. My body hurts. My shoes are soaked. My shorts need a wash. But i think tomorrow will be the day i finally have to end the ride, because Chunghua County only has two towns with a share bike scheme, and they're not Youbike, so i can't power through. Not that i could anyway because i think Yunlin County has no share bikes whatsoever.
We'll see. I still have time. I don't have anywhere to be. Life is good.
Sunday i packed my tank tops and toothbrush into a bag, pondered whether to take laptop or hammock and took the former, then jumped on a bike to head south. After first getting the idea when i lived in Shenzhen, i finally decided to go on a multi-day journey as far as share bikes could take me.
It is the worst time of year to do it. Not only is it the hottest time of year in an especially hot summer, but it's also getting to the edge of rainy (i.e. typhoon) season. Somehow, on that first day, i got both. I headed out in about 37C (100F) temperatures with humidity thick enough to steam my glasses. But when you work full time and only get limited holidays per year, you have to take what you can get.
I headed south along the river to Taoyuan, same route i have cycled a bunch of times before. My plan was to switch bikes at the Yingge/Bade border then follow the greenway down beside the river in Daxi before cutting west to find a good point to cross the border into Hsinchu. I've only cycled down there once before, and i remember it being a peaceful ride. The main city part of Taoyuan is up on a ridge that stretches out to the ocean, but if you drop down the ridge into the valley it's just rice paddies and temples and a charming slice of rural Taiwan just a couple hours ride out of Taipei City.
There's an oldstreet in Daxi, which is a big drawcard for the tour bus tourists, and a couple of "eco parks" that attract more self-drivers, but the little roads in between are just locals on mopeds and sport cyclists in spandex. Oh, and this one guy who was walking on foot with a sign on his backpack saying that he was walking solo around Taiwan. What a boss! If i had been further into my trip i might have stopped to talk to him, since he seemed like a bit of kindred spirit, but i was still at the beginning so i just gave him a thumbs up and yelled 加油 - add oil!
It was around the Daxi oldstreet where i started to get a bit worried about the giant fuck-off rain cloud dead ahead. My phone had been reporting rain for about an hour already, but so far i hadn't seen any, so i figured i'd just keep going. Once the first specks started, i was deep into the little country roads that are just wide enough for a couple of scooters or a kei truck to zoom between the paddies. Ditches on both sides. Not much shade. I started to keep my eyes peeled for shelter. Here is a temple. There is a tree that has a bit of an overhang. Oh, nice! A hut!
I rolled my bike into the hut just as THE FUCKING HEAVENS EXPLODED. Like, this was not a sweet summer storm. The clouds came down so hard i could barely see. It felt like night time as the thunder rolled all around. The hut only had three sides and despite my best efforts, everything still got wet. I stayed for about an hour, and when it eased up a bit i got back on the bike.
These little farm roads in Taiwan are somewhat maze-like. They don't follow a grid pattern but just meander about the place. Usually it doesn't really matter which one you take because eventually they join back up somewhere else, but occasionally you have to backtrack if you didn't check the map before. (Well - let's be real - often you have to backtrack even when the map says there is a through route because there fucking isn't.) It's not a big deal. That's the whole reason why i love to go on vacation with no plans. I don't have to be anywhere. Don't have to do anything, i can do whatever i want.
Well, Sunday i wanted to go right, because i thought that was the way that led back up the ridge to the city. You know, it might have been before the rain. It wasn't now. I should have gone left. Before i knew it, the road went from a puddle to a river. I always wondered how it happened that people would just get washed away and drown during flash floods in Guangdong, well, yeah. This is probably how. It didn't seem like i was going downhill, but then i was pedaling and my feet were going deeper into the water on every down-pedal. And i was not wearing my flip-flops, i was wearing (now sodden) sneakers.
Motherfuck.
So i turned back around and paddled my bicycle out of the river without dying. And then i went left. Which eventually looped back to the right, not underwater. I called over a couple of passing drivers to ask where to go, just like in the good old days before we had phones. (Mine was wrapped up tightly in a plastic bag.) They told me how to get to the village, which unfortunately was all the way back up the ridge, and i was zonked.
By the time i got back up the hill i just wanted to fall into a hotel, but it was about another 30 minutes on top of the hill before i got to a suburb that actually had some affordable places. (There are a bunch of eco/resort type hotels in the countryside that cater to a much higher class person than me.)
And thus ended the first day of my adventure. I had it all. Sweltering heat. Epic rain. A hill that i had no energy to climb. An extremely fortuitous hut. An extremely not-fortuitous wrong turn. Sunburnt body and soaking wet clothes.
It. Was. Awesome.
Which is why Monday i did it all again. I had stayed in the suburb of Longtan but in plotting my route over to Hsinchu i realized i would have to go up to a village called Fugang for the optimal route. After a breakfast from the Longtan market, i cycled to Fugang, jumped off the bike and got a 仙草甘茶 (grass jelly cane tea) for energy. And then i walked across the border to Hsinchu. This was a longer walk than the New Taipei City/Taoyuan switchover - it was around 3km. That doesn't sound like much, but when the sun is beating down and you are already sunburnt, hiking between rice paddies with little to no shelter... it was a lot. I haven't pushed myself through fierce temperatures like this since the hottest and most brutal part of Colombia, and that place really did a number on me.
But, fuck it. No pain no gain.
I found a bike near the Technical University in northern Hsinchu County and decided to head toward the coast to see if i could make it to Zhunan in Miaoli County. Turned out that was a pretty great idea, because there is a 17km greenway right down the Hsinchu coastline, cutting through sand dunes and mangroves with trees providing shelter along a bunch of the trail.
It was another very hot day, and i was sunburnt, and i had walked way too far, but it was a thrill to see the sea and wave to the fishermen and the oldies taking quiet walks. So relaxing. Then i took a closer look at my phone and realized i couldn't take the same bike all the way through to Zhunan, because Miaoli County has a different bike again.
I should explain how public bikes work in Taiwan. There is a company called 微笑單車 ("Smile Bicycle") which is stylized as Übike (the Ü is a smiley), and the English name is Youbike. They started in Taiwan something like 15 years ago as a public/private partnership between Giant Bicycles (one of Taiwan's famous exports) and the Taipei City government. Since that time they have expanded into almost all the major cities of Taiwan, and in some places also the counties that surround the cities. Because they are part of the public transport service, you can just swipe your transit card to rent the bike.
Youbikes are designed for last mile commuting, and for that purpose they are extremely cheap. I pay only 5TWD (about 15 cents American) to ride the 20 minutes or so to work every day, and i expect that's the usual distance for most people. Unlike in China where the dockless sharebikes were also used as utility vehicles by farmers, peasants and factory workers who could stack up a bunch of them in their village for pootling around, in Taiwan they mostly get used by young joyriders outside of the primary urban commute concept. People go up and down greenways and enjoy lazy bike rides in the park with friends. The best thing is that this usage is affordable too - a whole day might cost around 150TWD (5USD). As long as you get it back to a dock you're not going to break the bank.
So why am i switching bikes on the borders? Well it's not because the bikes are geo-locked. At least, i don't think they are. These bikes aren't like Chinese sharebikes which all have GPS in them and the company will immediately send you a text if you take it outside the designated area (and then fine you if you leave it there). These are "dumb bikes" where you slot them back into the machine, swipe your card again, and now you paid. But the company split the system into Youbike and "Youbike 2.0", which has different apps. And the bikes are different too. Notably, the metal thing that they slot into is different. Allegedly Youbike 2.0 is more space-efficient because they can fit the bikes closer together, but the trick is that you can't fit a Youbike into a Youbike 2.0 dock and vice versa. And - entirely coincidentally, of course - each city and county down the west coast of Taiwan is checkerboarded with the opposite bike from their neighboring jurisdiction. That doesn't matter so much for joyriders, since they will just go up and down the greenway in their own city before taking the bus or subway home, but it matters a lot if you are trying to travel across the country on the damn things.
And, although there are a handful of border villages which have docks for bikes on both sides (i luckily found one today), sometimes you gotta hike. I hiked the last 9km from Hsinchu County into Zhunan (Miaoli County) last night.
You guys, i was spent. I got a motel in an outer suburb of Zhunan, quite far from the touristy area downtown, but where i also found a great dinner. (More on food in a future post.)
I've actually been to Zhunan before. The first time i was in Taiwan, i wanted to try to take the train north from Kaohsiung to Taipei and stop in at least one town in every county. I stopped at Zhunan because i wanted to go to a beach and i heard Zhunan has a beach. Ah, those innocent times before i knew that Taiwan doesn't really do beaches. Zhunan is a town with a giant fucking Mazu temple and a bustling fishing port and a tiny strip of dirty mud where the 12 people in the whole of the country who like beaches occasionally go to take a walk.
Well, it's not quite that bad. But beaches in Taiwan don't have facilities because people don't hang out at the beach. There is no showers, no icecream stands, no lifeguards, no umbrellas, no nothing. Just the sand and the water and usually also a bunch of mud because it's all mangrove-y and tropical, and some grizzled fishermen and cooling systems from the nearby factories that's about it.
That's actually a pretty great kind of a beach, to be fair. It's nice that there isn't anyone around.
Anyway, i remember the last time i was in Zhunan i didn't have a card to rent a Youbike (or maybe they didn't have Youbikes back then) so i walked all the way out to the beach (it's miles out of town) and then it rained and it got dark and i walked back. This time i zoomed out there on my bike in the morning, and followed the coastal greenways and seawalls all the way down to Taichung.
The Miaoli coast is pretty great. It's pretty much standard Taiwan west coast. In the water is tons of windmills. There are a few beaches, but not much. Mud and wetlands are a bunch of it, and there is a riprap and a seawall that goes forever. Behind the seawall you have factories and cemeteries and aquaculture and rice paddies and some very poor villages with hardscrabble locals who seem to have nothing save for an extremely elaborate temple (or three).
I got stuck behind one of those villages on a seawall and wasn't sure how to get out without backtracking a long way because all the roads on the map were completely overgrown. Eventually i saw a dude on holiday with his son (i presume) and asked him how he got in. He told me to go through one of the overgrown laneways surrounded by graves and sure enough, i eventually popped out on the main road.
It was great. That's a section i would go back and cycle again. It looks kinda destitute but it has a sort of rugged, industrial scraggliness that appeals to me. If the big cities of Taiwan are cyberpunk, these hollowed out villages along the coast, windmills in the water, smoke stacks on the land, it's kind of a bleak post-industrial future shock and it fucking rules.
Oh, there is so much more i want to write about, the weird aquaculture pools where people go to fish, the guy blasting the same pumping party techno i heard in Laos which i now wonder if it might be Thai music... Thai people in general, and Indonesians, and Filipinos, and Vietnamese - the south-east Asians who BY FAR make up the biggest immigrant groups in the country but you would never know it if you only hung out in Taipei with all the white collar foreigners. The south-east Asian migrants work in factories and farms and fishing boats and get a lower class visa that does not allow them the same rights and privileges as white collar migrant workers. For instance, they can't leave and reenter at will. Taiwan still has an ugly side, and this is part of it. But it's a part i feel is ignored or dismissed in my professional circle, which is my only circle here.
This is something that the trip is solidifying for me. I fucking hate Taipei. I hate Rich Taiwan. Taipei is to Taiwan as Shanghai is to China. Boring food, boring people, boring lifestyles. Both cities are allegedly the cultural heart of their respective countries but you have to dig really deep to find any soul. When i lived in China people all over the country (and over the border in Hong Kong) shat on Shenzhen for just being a town full of migrants who only showed up to earn money and didn't have any culture of their own, but people missed the point. A town full of migrants is a diverse town. It's a place where you really get everything, not just the generic shopping mall food court version of everything.
That's what getting out of Taipei is about. Getting out of the bubble. Getting away from the rich migrants and the rich locals and the rich tourists. Being out here reminds me why Taiwan is place that i felt excited to visit when i was first here.
Of course Taichung is a bit of a break in that. Walking around to find some food tonight i didn't find a local place where the 老闆 proudly show me her home-made chili paste, i got the bored teenagers standing at the same night market stalls selling the same crap you can get anywhere in the country. Even out here in the industrial ass-end of Taichung. Oh well.
Dear lord, this meandered. Anyway. Short version. I cycled from Taipei to Taoyuan to Zhunan to Taichung and it was great. I am also terrifically, appallingly sunburnt. I applied sunblock what i thought was all over but every hour of reapplication, every day i missed another little stripe, and now it just adds up to sunburn everywhere. My body hurts. My shoes are soaked. My shorts need a wash. But i think tomorrow will be the day i finally have to end the ride, because Chunghua County only has two towns with a share bike scheme, and they're not Youbike, so i can't power through. Not that i could anyway because i think Yunlin County has no share bikes whatsoever.
We'll see. I still have time. I don't have anywhere to be. Life is good.