dispatch from the psychedelic front
Taking the bus up to this party led me largely along the same route I took two weeks ago to get to Yilan for the company off-site. The weather was slightly less typhonic, so it was a bit easier to appreciate the nuttery of anyone trying to build a community out here. It is all steep-ass mountains completely covered in verdant jungle and it rains pretty much non-stop. Even as there were a few rays of sunlight in Taipei, up here it's cloudy and worryingly chilly (by which I mean under 25 degrees).
The campsite is down a steep driveway that was off a curly wurly mountain road with sheer drops into the creek. There is a small clearing here and a wier in the creek that makes both a lovely clear swimming pool and a pleasantly gurgling whitewater just downstream. I feel, however, like I am caught in a cleft of the Earth and about to be swallowed up. It is extremely claustrophobic.
The majority of the campsite is indoors. There are three large sheds with concrete floors and corrugated iron rooves, plus some "nature" pads under the trees whose thick moss covering indicates how often Taiwanese campers choose to risk their tents under mostly-open sky.
Car campers don't have a problem camping "outside" of course, because they have so much paracord and scaffolding that they practically build tarpaulin temples before they even get to pitching a tent, laying out chairs and tables and whatnot. One crew set up a full ass movie theater with projector and Netflix and everything.
It occurred to me that car campers are the reason many campsites don't have picnic tables any more, something I noticed a lot on my cycle tour across Canada and the US. Everyone just brings their own folding tables and chairs, so if you travel light you are stuck trying to find a suitable boulder or just sitting on the ground like a caveman. Not that there's anything wrong with sitting on the ground in dry places, but the mountains encircling Taipei are less an island fortress than a dank, dripping, dungeon.
I should be thankful, I suppose, that when I was in a luxury hotel as the typhoon passed by a couple weeks ago I wasn't at the previous festival, which by all accounts was an extremely muddy experience for all. And that wasn't even in the (notoriously wet) mountains round Taipei!
Anyway, I found myself a boulder and I am eating some peanuts next to the river, listening to music blasting from some car campers who are all wired up and ready to DJ. My tent is not only pitched in a shed but also on a wooden stage, so well-protected from any weather that might occur. I thought long and hard whether I wanted to pitch under a tree by the river, and I realized that my tent is just the place I sleep. I don't have all the accoutrements to make a "campsite". That's just not something that appeals to me, then camping would be no different from nesting in my apartment. A tent is just a temporary shelter for when there are no other nearby options. I sleep, I wake up, I leave. So why wouldn't I pitch in a shed? You'd be mad not to!
Well, I say this now, early Friday afternoon. It's cold. It's wet. It feels like I'm trapped in a crevass. A pretty crevass, but nonetheless. Maybe I should go take a nap.
-o-
Dear lord the lack of fucking coffee. This time there is no hot water available at the bar and no handy dandy temple at the entrance featuring a holy hot water device. People might be camping on concrete pads but they're sure expected to carry their own gas cookers. I could just make cold coffee, as I did for 6+ months on the road, but in Taiwan the instant coffee is supreme garbage whereas the origami unfold-a-drip-filter coffee is very good, so I have switched to that as my primary coffee source. Except that presupposes you have access to hot water, which almost everywhere in Taiwan you do except here. Fuck!
My favorite breakfast stall is not at this party, the woman who wakes up at 5am and cheerfully serves espressos and breakfast burritos to the mostly foreign crowd who are also awake this early and haven't built an entire living room and kitchen around their tent. The soup and coffee guy was out of coffee. The fruit juice guy had a thermos of "strong" coffee that he waters down for people who like the fantasy that they're drinking coffee but actually they want a milkshake. A bit of negotiation he filled my cup from his thermos for 100 kuai. He will be revisited, and I shall also buy fruit juice.
Because the nearest town is about 9km back down that very windy freeway - the old route from Taipei to Yilan before they built the tunnel. Nowadays it's a favorite for motorcyclists and kids with cars who imagine themselves famed tofu delivery driver and drift king Takumi Fujiwara.
Well, it's not that bad, there also seems to be plenty of families in SUVs going camping, or driving out of their campsite back to the city to pick up breakfast. Which is kinda what I would want to do!
But anyway, the point is, it's a busy road, nothing like these backwater farm roads the past few parties have been up, so not really the most fun place to walk 10km each way just to find a hot water outlet and fruit market. Maybe Pinglin doesn't even have a fruit market? The tourist gimmick is that it's a tea growing town. Imagine walking 10km along a busy highway only to be rewarded with fucking tea at the end. Oh wait, no need to imagine, that's life in rural China.
I think about my routes of exfiltration because the music is on its scheduled 3 hour break. Saturday/Sunday it will go through, but Friday/Saturday has the break, time for local office workers who worked late last night to arrive and pitch their tents, time for the campsite owners to clean the toilets, time for people to catch a few Zs before partying hard through till Sunday afternoon. Waking up with no music to welcome the sun, and also no sun because the mountains round Taipei are entirely overcast, makes me plot.
The music last night was fine. Lots of three note basslines. It's psytrance, it's not tremendously exciting, but this promoter does psytrance very well, not just throwing DJs into a blender but making sure there is a musical progression from singing bowls and gongs and hippie om shit through to progressive and minimal and dark and full-on. It's the way people who understand the journey of an acid trip plan parties, and it's something I wish more urban promoters would learn from. It's another reason why I liked the clubs I did in Berlin, run by hippies who'd done their time in the psytrance scene, Burning Man etc. They get pacing and progression. A good rave should feel like an adventure story!
So I guess this is the part of the adventure story where the heroes are resting before battle, sharing stories of how they got here as they sit around a fire in a threatening forest, drinking swigs of whatever swill one of them still had strapped to his belt.
Or, well, I have no friends and this coffee isn't abysmal. And the weather is surprisingly mild, not so cold I needed to wear anything in my sleeping bag, and quite comfortable in my flip flops and tank top today. No rain, just humid droplets of cloud. It's fine. Let's go.
-o-
Amusingly just as I was copying this entry from my notes app into LiveJournal, the rain exploded. Just a shower, but surely enough to make sitting by the river with my phone untenable. I have retired to my shed, where happy warm ravers with dry tents are waking up smug and cheery. Soon the side room will open, where we might get to hear a sliver of music-that-isn't-psytrance, and I still owe the juice guy a visit too, so might be time for me to brave the elements and revel in my cavemannery. Allez!
The campsite is down a steep driveway that was off a curly wurly mountain road with sheer drops into the creek. There is a small clearing here and a wier in the creek that makes both a lovely clear swimming pool and a pleasantly gurgling whitewater just downstream. I feel, however, like I am caught in a cleft of the Earth and about to be swallowed up. It is extremely claustrophobic.
The majority of the campsite is indoors. There are three large sheds with concrete floors and corrugated iron rooves, plus some "nature" pads under the trees whose thick moss covering indicates how often Taiwanese campers choose to risk their tents under mostly-open sky.
Car campers don't have a problem camping "outside" of course, because they have so much paracord and scaffolding that they practically build tarpaulin temples before they even get to pitching a tent, laying out chairs and tables and whatnot. One crew set up a full ass movie theater with projector and Netflix and everything.
It occurred to me that car campers are the reason many campsites don't have picnic tables any more, something I noticed a lot on my cycle tour across Canada and the US. Everyone just brings their own folding tables and chairs, so if you travel light you are stuck trying to find a suitable boulder or just sitting on the ground like a caveman. Not that there's anything wrong with sitting on the ground in dry places, but the mountains encircling Taipei are less an island fortress than a dank, dripping, dungeon.
I should be thankful, I suppose, that when I was in a luxury hotel as the typhoon passed by a couple weeks ago I wasn't at the previous festival, which by all accounts was an extremely muddy experience for all. And that wasn't even in the (notoriously wet) mountains round Taipei!
Anyway, I found myself a boulder and I am eating some peanuts next to the river, listening to music blasting from some car campers who are all wired up and ready to DJ. My tent is not only pitched in a shed but also on a wooden stage, so well-protected from any weather that might occur. I thought long and hard whether I wanted to pitch under a tree by the river, and I realized that my tent is just the place I sleep. I don't have all the accoutrements to make a "campsite". That's just not something that appeals to me, then camping would be no different from nesting in my apartment. A tent is just a temporary shelter for when there are no other nearby options. I sleep, I wake up, I leave. So why wouldn't I pitch in a shed? You'd be mad not to!
Well, I say this now, early Friday afternoon. It's cold. It's wet. It feels like I'm trapped in a crevass. A pretty crevass, but nonetheless. Maybe I should go take a nap.
-o-
Dear lord the lack of fucking coffee. This time there is no hot water available at the bar and no handy dandy temple at the entrance featuring a holy hot water device. People might be camping on concrete pads but they're sure expected to carry their own gas cookers. I could just make cold coffee, as I did for 6+ months on the road, but in Taiwan the instant coffee is supreme garbage whereas the origami unfold-a-drip-filter coffee is very good, so I have switched to that as my primary coffee source. Except that presupposes you have access to hot water, which almost everywhere in Taiwan you do except here. Fuck!
My favorite breakfast stall is not at this party, the woman who wakes up at 5am and cheerfully serves espressos and breakfast burritos to the mostly foreign crowd who are also awake this early and haven't built an entire living room and kitchen around their tent. The soup and coffee guy was out of coffee. The fruit juice guy had a thermos of "strong" coffee that he waters down for people who like the fantasy that they're drinking coffee but actually they want a milkshake. A bit of negotiation he filled my cup from his thermos for 100 kuai. He will be revisited, and I shall also buy fruit juice.
Because the nearest town is about 9km back down that very windy freeway - the old route from Taipei to Yilan before they built the tunnel. Nowadays it's a favorite for motorcyclists and kids with cars who imagine themselves famed tofu delivery driver and drift king Takumi Fujiwara.
Well, it's not that bad, there also seems to be plenty of families in SUVs going camping, or driving out of their campsite back to the city to pick up breakfast. Which is kinda what I would want to do!
But anyway, the point is, it's a busy road, nothing like these backwater farm roads the past few parties have been up, so not really the most fun place to walk 10km each way just to find a hot water outlet and fruit market. Maybe Pinglin doesn't even have a fruit market? The tourist gimmick is that it's a tea growing town. Imagine walking 10km along a busy highway only to be rewarded with fucking tea at the end. Oh wait, no need to imagine, that's life in rural China.
I think about my routes of exfiltration because the music is on its scheduled 3 hour break. Saturday/Sunday it will go through, but Friday/Saturday has the break, time for local office workers who worked late last night to arrive and pitch their tents, time for the campsite owners to clean the toilets, time for people to catch a few Zs before partying hard through till Sunday afternoon. Waking up with no music to welcome the sun, and also no sun because the mountains round Taipei are entirely overcast, makes me plot.
The music last night was fine. Lots of three note basslines. It's psytrance, it's not tremendously exciting, but this promoter does psytrance very well, not just throwing DJs into a blender but making sure there is a musical progression from singing bowls and gongs and hippie om shit through to progressive and minimal and dark and full-on. It's the way people who understand the journey of an acid trip plan parties, and it's something I wish more urban promoters would learn from. It's another reason why I liked the clubs I did in Berlin, run by hippies who'd done their time in the psytrance scene, Burning Man etc. They get pacing and progression. A good rave should feel like an adventure story!
So I guess this is the part of the adventure story where the heroes are resting before battle, sharing stories of how they got here as they sit around a fire in a threatening forest, drinking swigs of whatever swill one of them still had strapped to his belt.
Or, well, I have no friends and this coffee isn't abysmal. And the weather is surprisingly mild, not so cold I needed to wear anything in my sleeping bag, and quite comfortable in my flip flops and tank top today. No rain, just humid droplets of cloud. It's fine. Let's go.
-o-
Amusingly just as I was copying this entry from my notes app into LiveJournal, the rain exploded. Just a shower, but surely enough to make sitting by the river with my phone untenable. I have retired to my shed, where happy warm ravers with dry tents are waking up smug and cheery. Soon the side room will open, where we might get to hear a sliver of music-that-isn't-psytrance, and I still owe the juice guy a visit too, so might be time for me to brave the elements and revel in my cavemannery. Allez!