Bike to Baolai and back: Part 2

(This being the second part of a most excellent visual account of the highlights of my junket to that most wonderful spa-town, Baolai.)

I think this is Nan Hua reservoir. It was a nice relief from more mountains and more orchards on either side of me.

Aboriginal mother, boy, and giant mango. Mangoes are important in this part of the country.

At the end of the day, after a journey of some 97 kilometres, I negotiated my campsite with the people at the desk of the spa resort. I was allowed to pitch my tent upon the patch next to the restaurant. That night I slept beneath the benevolent glow of the small temple across the road dedicated to I know not which deities. As usual, my inflatable air mattress deflated during the night due to the puncture which I hadn't gotten around to fixing.

The new day began early for me, as is the way when you camp outdoors. This is the view from the entrance of the resort. The sun is about to protrude above the tree line behind the resort.

There was nothing for it but to pack up and start back home again. But I stopped down the hill from the resort in the town of Baolai, famous for its hot springs and white-water rafting. Downtown on the main street (above) I ate at Mei & Mei, a franchised breakfast restaurant found all over Taiwan. A soy milk, coffee, and toasted sandwich later, I was ready to begin the long haul back to Tainan.

This seems to happen a lot up in the mountains. I won't hazard a guess as to the causes.

The Big Taro. Speaks for itself really.

A couple of towns away from Baolai: This is the spot where I danced in the rain with John on my last trip to Baolai. Things are changing and there are a lot of roadworks taking place in this town.
Anyone fancy a bit of fishing? Not a popular spot but boasts some beautiful scenery.

One of the last pauses on my journey home, just outside Tainan city, the ubiquitous, convenient, ever-ready, reliable, one-stop-shop: 7-11. This one had some tables and chairs outside in the shade of some trees. Nice.

By the time I got home my left knee wasn't functioning without pain and I couldn't have gone much further. But it was wonderful having done something with my week off, something that I could be proud of, and good practice for a possible bicycling tour at the end of the month. Good work Brown.

Bike to Baolai and back: Part 1

Last week I enjoyed a blissful reprieve from the hard grind of the kindergarten (oh, how hard we work in kindergarten) and spring afforded me a vacation. Unfortunately the teachers at Andrea's school do not enjoy the same benefit so it was business as usual for her. So I was free to employ myself in whatever schemes or machinations I so desired. I actually had a very productive time, knocking off chores and miscellaneous jobs that had been sitting on my "To Do" list for ages. But I did manage to ride my bicycle to Baolai and back. On Wednesday I rode about 97 kilometers to Baolai and on Thursday I managed 98.1 kilometers before I parked my bike back at home in the parking lot under our apartment block. So here is a photologue of my journey to Baolai and back by bicycle.

My bicycle, sitting in our apartment immediately prior to departure. Behind the seat are my panniers and rack into and onto which I have loaded my tent, inflatable bed-roll, sleeping bag, map, fruit, change of clothes, camping pillow, insect-repellent, suncream, and other essentials.

Out of the city, passing through small towns, keeping an eye out for signs that I'm still on road number 180. In this case the green sign tacked on under the route number tells me that I have now travelled ten kilometers from the origin of the 180. There are usually distance markers every half-a-kilometer or so. And of course you can see the ubiquitous 7-11 up ahead.

I took the opportunity to take a shot of myself on the road. Taking photos with you in them is, of course, a problem when you are travelling solo.

A mango orchard. We are at the start of mango season and the mangoes are plentiful. And cheap.
Chickens. But they're all black. A black chicken is not abnormal but an absence of any other colours? I don't know. Maybe it is normal. I'm no expert on fowl.

I don't know if you can describe a field of pineapples as an orchard; the term doesn't seem to fit too well. How about "plantation"? The pineapple in the foreground possesses a particularly magnificent crown. It always seems to be pineapple season in Taiwan.

Off the main roads. I love the way this road leads down the hill and disappears in the trees. Note the church rising up above the rest of the horizon.

On this mango orchard the mangoes have all been bagged. I guess it protects the fruit but it must be a lot of work putting all those bags on all those fruit.

A huge temple. To get to this temple you must pass through a huge arch set within a front wall and proceed down the avenue of palms. The temple itself rises up from the surrounding grounds and is topped off with a large white cloud.

A traffic tunnel. It's kind of cool to ride from the open air into and through one of these.

Yilan marathon 2009

Last week (or was it two weeks ago?) we travelled to Yilan on the north-west coast to participate in the 2009 Yilan marathon. I ran the 10km race while Andrea and our friend John ran the 21km half-marathon. The weather was perfect: overcast, cool, and just the lightest spray of rain towards the end of the run. John and Andrea's run started at 7:00am while mine started half-an-hour later at 7:30.

At about 7:28 I was in the thick of it, standing amidst the throng of sweat-shirt-clad humanity waiting behind the starting line. In the last few minutes before the race when there is nothing to do but wait for the starting pistol to go off, some people jog on the spot while others just stand, some talk to their friends while others keep staring in the direction of the starting banner, some give off the impression that they are taking this very seriously while others might be here just because they had nothing better to do at seven-o'clock on a Sunday morning. Suddenly there was some kind of commotion at the very front of the pack as several people moved from somewhere off-track and took up a position in front of everyone else. At least two of these people were rather large and wore some kind of ear-phones. I also saw the bald, old-looking head of someone who seemed to be very famous from the way that the crowd focused on him. I found out much later that the celebrity was current president Ma Ying-jeou who is, apparently, very keen on running.

Random runners, at least two hours after starting.

Medallion in hand, Andrea looks happy; happy with her effort, or perhaps just happy to be finished. I was happy to get the free cup of hot Milo and the free fruit soy bar.

It's nice to see your name in the lists of finishers. It is somebody's job to stick up the results of the marathon as they are generated. You can see John and Andrea's finishing times in this extract from the list.

John and Andrea bask in the hormonal glow that accompanies each massive 21km assault on the body.

For once I manage to look genuinely happy while being fully aware that someone is taking my photo.

The journey home. The realities of life slowly creep back into the consciousness. Work. Home. Obligations and responsibilities. But Andrea knows that at least she will sleep well tonight. Actually she will sleep before she gets home, in whatever way she can make herself comfortable on the train and bus seats.

A day on the betel-nut farm

Betel nut is a bit like chewing-tobacco and is very popular here in Taiwan. The annual crop is huge, second only to rice. I think the stereotypical betel nut consumer is a middle-aged man who drives a blue truck as part of his business. One of the side effects is that it can stain your teeth red and that can make you look a bit scary.

Our friends inherited a betel nut farm and are in the process of tidying it up. They invited us to join them for a day's labor and we accepted straight away. We relished the opportunity to travel to their farm in Ping Dong and help them for a day. A day working on the betel nut plantation meant a day not spent in Tainan with Tainan's noise, Tainan's air, Tainan's ... everything else, and it also gave us a chance to be active outside and socialise with our friends.

Here I am collecting garbage from the boundary fence. I was having a great time: while being out in the beautiful surrounds, I was listening to episodes of the ABC's Bush Telegraph program and catching up on rural news and issues in Australia. Fantastic.

John is almost as tall as me and here he is with this enormous banana tree leaf.

Lunch break.

Our friend J chops up a banana tree, of which there is no shortage on the property. It was my first experience of banana trees being considered a weed, an idea that is still hard to come to terms with and yet, in the right environment banana plants will happily multiply willy-nilly very effectively. By the way, banana trees are not "trees" at all and the bananas we eat these days don't have seeds because they are the offspring of mutant ancestors.

The colors of dusk and the shapes of the silhouettes remind me that I am living on a tropical island.

After a good day's work it's time for a well-earned beverage. Andrea and J soak it up as did we all. It was so nice to experience a different kind of life just for a day, working on a plantation with the mountains in the background and the possibility of snakes hiding within every clump of grass. We loved it and we'll probably be back.

Adrian & John's Little Switzerland cycling peregrination

Switzerland! Or is it? It would help if you could see the big mountains close by which help to create an alpine feel about the landscape. But of course this is not Switzerland, not even Europe. This is Tainan county, Taiwan. One recent weekend my friend John and I packed our camping gear onto our bicycles and headed off to a place called Little Switzerland.

Note the new carry-rack attached to the back of my seat pole. Attached to it are my tent, sleeping mat, and sleeping bag. This rack is not mine but borrowed from John. I think Andrea was so impressed with the rack that not long after this trip she bought me one of my own, plus a small, battery-powered computer that measures distance travelled, speed, etc. Oh, and she bought me panniers too. Pannier (or panier) is the name for one of those bags that fit either side of a wheel of the bike. It was really nice of Andrea to get me those things.

Here's John on his more technically-advanced bicycle, further along the road to the future of cycling.
I think John and I came to the same conclusions regarding the Switzerlandness of Little Switzerland. I guess that if you've never seen a picture of Switzerland then this place bears some similarity to the authentic article. In the photo above you can see the hydro-electric station generating electricity from the water flowing from the reservoir on the other side of the dam wall. We camped on one of the green grassy terraces you can see on this side of the wall. On the way here we had had trouble finding the place and one woman from whom we asked for directions told us that we couldn't camp here anymore. I think what she meant was that it was possible and not illegal to set up camp but that there were no facilities whatsoever available for campers. There was no place to get food in the nearby village and no place to buy water or obtain potable water. And there were no bathrooms either. Walking about on the following morning we discovered the remnants of an old campsite with picnic tables and tent spaces. A large channel had been dug through the area and it was obviously well along the fall into disrepair.

What can I say about this photo? Nothing.

Same goes for this one.

Andrea's birthday, Taiwan 2009

Another birthday away from friends and family back home. (*sigh*) Oh well, I suppose my attitude towards my own birthday (one of neglect or cultivated disinterest) means that I don't really miss out on much by being here in Taiwan; it's possible that I have better birthdays here because here I have someone to organise something on my behalf with the friends that we do have. But I know it's different for Andrea: if she were home her birthday would probably mandate some kind of family event with generations of relatives coming together and no small number of people involved. I feel that a birthday in Taiwan is altogether less meaningful for Andrea than what she could expect back home in Canada. However, that doesn't mean that we can't have fun and that we don't have friends here!

Andrea blows out the candles ... candle on her birthday cake. In an age of resource conservation the consumption of excess candles on birthday cakes seems a departure from the proprieties of good consumer behaviour. I can report that this particular cake was bought by none other than my wonderful self from none other than that wonderfully cakey bakery, Glory Earth, purveyor of cake to the moneyed masses of which I am one in the scheme of Taiwanese things. This particular cake was covered not in icing or cream but in raspberry jam which attempted to cling to anything it could besides the cake itself. It was a very tasty cake. To Andrea's left you can see our friend Tim looking on intently while sipping on a large ice-tea and tending to his swine [look harder].

After the proper rites had been enacted (eating cake) we played a game of Bite the Bag. I had never played this game before. The only person who knew the game was Andrea and she seemed to lose interest not long after we started (she was quite tired). However the rest of us kept at it for what must have been an hour. Bite the Bag involves picking a paper bag off the floor using only your mouth while touching the floor only with your feet. A round consists of every participant attempting to bit the bag and pick it up with their mouth. When everyone has had their turn the bag is made shorter by cutting a strip from around the top so that it gets progressively shorter each round and, depending on the limberness of the participants, is inevitably reduced to only the base of the bag. This photo above describes Megan's method of achieving the pickup. The bag is about half its original height here.

James tackles the bag with only a centimetre of bag wall left.

I wouldn't have thought I was physically capable of this feat of flexibility but I surprised myself. I can't tell you who won but it was a great game to play for the first time and made Andrea's birthday a memorable one.

Food poisoning (again)

Just a quick update on our situation. We both asked for a day off work on Friday so that we could travel to Taipei and go to the Korean embassy to apply for a police clearance for Andrea. That was okay but the rest of our time in Taipei was a bit of an anticlimax. We decided to return to Tainan earlier than we had planned to, on Saturday morning. It's funny then, that deciding we just wanted to go home precipitated being in Taipei longer than we wanted. We got a coffee and some fruit and a newspaper and took it all to a nice park not far from the central train station. It was a nice day to sit in the park with a newspaper and have time to talk. Talk took over and we argued about the merits of computer-based entertainment versus more traditional forms of leisure activity (among other things) for quite a while. Meanwhile a girl wearing a long-sleeved, button-up, collared shirt but no pants shaped herself into various poses around the small lake/pond, a small army of male photographers giving her all their attention. We guessed that it was a lingerie shoot although we still aren't quite sure. [I said no pants; I didn't say no underwear]

The day was late enough to warrant lunch and we both happened to have a lunch warrant so we chose what looked like a promising Korean restaurant across the road from the park and enjoyed a feast of really good Korean food.

About two-thirds of the way through the bus ride home from Taipei we both started to feel a little unsettled somewhere in the deep recesses inside us. This feeling developed into nausea and vomiting. For Andrea the vomiting began on the bus (in the bathroom). For me it began two minutes after we walked into our apartment and about 10 seconds after drinking a cup of water. The next day was spent recovering. Andrea's still sore although I think I have almost been restored to glory barring a preference for eating smaller portions than I would have a few days ago.

This house was my home

My mum ("mother" didn't sound right) sold her house recently. When I say that she sold "her" house I mean that it had become hers when my parents agreed to go their separate ways (dad had his own place). And when I say that she sold her house "recently" I measure time by the number of years that we lived there. I was born in Collie and lived in this house from as far back as I can remember until I moved to Perth just before I was 18. I grew up from here and I kept coming back, of course. This place was always as at home as I could be. In Perth, over the winding, wending way through twelve years of my life, I lived at about twelve different, consecutive addresses. But a part of me always lived on in Collie, through my parents who were both there, through the remnants of a childhood's worth of consumerism, and through me, even though I was elsewhere. I wonder if any other place I could live in will ever be as homely as this place was; I don't mean to say that it was possessed of great lineage or architecture, or that I had a wonderful childhood there, or that it glows with some sort of mysterious, emotional inner-glow. I mean that, due to the reality that I lived there for the first 18 years of my life, this place will always be where I have come from.

This entry is dedicated to the house. The photos are in no way a specially selected set that somehow best present the house or frame my memories of it. They just happened to be all that I have access to right now in Taiwan. But they're good enough to show you around.

Welcome to my old house.
I took this photo one foggy winter morning. I love this photo. The harsh, all-revealing Australian sun is absent, allowing for a bit of obscurity and uncertainty. Perhaps this is what my memory of the house is like.

Off the street and down into the front driveway: this is where my friend Alex and I set off on our trip around the South-West of Western Australia.

Up the driveway and in through the front door: you can see directly through to the lounge-room and the tropical sunset wallpaper that covers the far wall.

Here's that wallpaper again in the lounge-room and here's Andrea posing for a tropical-island getaway to destinations sublime.

The backyard, looking towards the house. There's the lemon tree that had grown in our backyard for as long as I can remember. I suffered many thorns in my feet over the years, but it was a worthwhile trade-off for all the lemons and lemon-juice we enjoyed.

Another shot in the backyard, looking up at the house from a different angle. The lemon tree is now in the far left of the shot and not obscuring the house. That room up top had big windows which looked out over the Collie River Valley, giving me a view of my home town going about its business, day in, day out. I think that moving into that room after it was built had an important impact on my psychology: the town of Collie which had once seemed limitless and always seemed big suddenly looked very small and its extent was visible. A whole microcosm of Australia was revealed at once, a whole community enacted itself without caring that I knew. My world seemed smaller and the real world seemed closer.

Taken from the same spot, looking in roughly the other direction (the lemon tree is now in the far-right of shot). You can see that large green shed in which my dad (again, "father" just doesn't feel right) spent so much time and creativity fixing things, building things, and breaking things. How many plots and schemes were concocted in there? I loved to walk in there and marvel at the possibilities offered by all the tools and materials scattered along shelves and walls, hiding in boxes and cabinets, or simply laying about on the floor. I wish I had spent more time learning how to make more of it useful.

From outside the big green shed, looking up the garden path towards the house. There on the left is our vegetable garden which supplied us with a wealth of vegetables all the years we lived here. Beautiful blue sky. Bag of manure.

Down by one of the two sets of gates that opened up onto the back-laneway. Once upon a time these laneways were used by the nightmen whose job it was to collect the human sewage. These days they are good for lugging useful things to the rear of the house, things like scrap metal and firewood. This is where Andrea and I started off on our 5000km road-trip into Western Australia and where we finished that same trip weeks later.

Of course a house itself is not a home. But this house and this street, these streets, this town, will forever, I believe, be home to me, for better or worse. For better or worse, I suppose I wouldn't be me if this wasn't my home.