Two-day cycle: Tainan to Chiayi and back

Just a quick one - and no photos for a change.  Andrea finished up at Sharefun English school last Friday and left early the following morning for Vietnam.  There she will meet up with a friend and they will experience the experiences of experiential Vietnam.  I, on the other hand, will not finish at my school until the 14th of August; these are private schools and they schedule their academic calendars differently from one another.  And so I will have the next three weeks all to myself.

The van arrived to pick Andrea up at 5am on Saturday morning.  I arose around 7am, breakfasted while poring over a map of Southern Taiwan, packed up, and headed out for two days on the road.  I felt I really needed to get out of Tainan and to go exploring.  I chose to cycle to Chiayi because the distance suited me for a two-day tour and because starting off from Chiayi on Sunday morning would allow me to return to Tainan via the foothill roads through the hot-spring mecca of Guanziling and southwards behind Wushantou Reservoir.

For some reason (perhaps related to the she'll-be-right,-mate attitude I inherited as an Australian by birth) I neglected to apply any sunblock to my surfaces, believing that my tan made me immune to the effects of prolonged exposure to ultra-violet radiation.  Despite making amends by applying some sunscreen several hours into the journey, I could feel that I was sunburned by the time I arrived in Chiayi and I still had a return journey to make!  This presented me with a tough choice on Sunday morning: catch the train back to Tainan to avoid further burning; or do my best to minimize any more skin damage and cycle back to Tainan as planned.  I decided to cycle back and accept some level of skin damage.  However, I used all the strategies available to me to protect myself including: buying some strong (SPF50+) sunblock cream and applying liberally; riding on the wrong side of the road (in places where there was shade on the other side); alternating between walking in the shade and cycling in the sunny stretches (I only did this in the hills to avoid having to walk up any inclines in the sun), timing my rests in the shade to coincide with full sun; cycling anytime there was any cloud shadow; altering the position of my hands and arms on the handlebars to spread out the sun's effect; and when I got back to Tainan, I steered a course through the city to keep me in the shade of large buildings.  It all seemed to have worked and I suffered no noticeable additional burning.

Altogether I covered just over 200km in the two days and arrived back in Tainan weary but satisfied with my effort.  Finally, here is a map of the route compiled on the Bikemap website.

Bike route 599966 - powered by Bikemap 

Cycling around Taiwan: Prologue

Taiwan is an island. So is Australia. One day I'd like to ride all the way around Australia but right now I don't have the essential luxuries I need to attempt that. However, Taiwan is much smaller and cycling all the way around it is much cheaper and won't take six months. In fact, depending on how fast you are able to cycle (which in turn depends on things like your physical condition, the weather, what kind of bicycle you have and how much gear you need to take with you) you could cycle around Taiwan in as few as four days. You might be able to do it in fewer days but I don't know what the record is. However, most average people attempting this feat will probably take around 7-14 days.


It would be a terrible shame for someone who loves riding their bicycle (i.e., me) to have lived in Taiwan and not spent a long week just traveling around the country only as fast as their two legs carried them on two wheels. The island really does offer a diverse landscape of different terrains, climates, local specialty foods, cultures, and random encounters with its inhabitants. My desire became a reality in February and March of this year when I cycled with my two friends, John and Andrea, around the country. Our big break came with the Chinese New Year vacation of 2010. We were all freed from our employment obligations for two weeks; Good time in which to make the most of brakes, chains, gear levers, handlebars, pedals, spokes, tires, and saddles. We started out from our home base in the city of Tainan on the south-western coast on the 9th of February and started cycling anti-clockwise around the island. Unfortunately a series of three cold fronts was on the way and it was only a matter of time before their paths crossed with ours. After three days of wind and rain we were forced to abort our peregrination in Hsinchu, within one or two days of Tainan. We were despondent.


Almost one month later we were in Hsinchu again, setting off to complete our circumnavigation of Taiwan. We rode all through the night and into the morning until once again we were standing outside our apartment building having our photo taken by one of the security guards: A 'finished' photo to mate with our 'before' photo. The photo showed the three of us looking more or less the same as we had over five weeks earlier. What it failed to capture was how we had been enriched by our experiences: the people we had met, the time we friends had spent together, and all the beauty of this remarkable place that we had been steeped in.


This series of thirteen posts and the accompanying map at Bikemap.com describe our journey. We hope that it may inspire other ordinary people wanting to experience something extraordinary.

My friends on this journey:

The beautiful and very capable Andrea.

The dashing and charismatic John.

Me. That was a stupid idea.

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Links

• John has also blogged this trip although he has included edited video sequences on his page here.
• I have retraced our route and left remarks and photos on the Bikemap website here.
• I have written up some useful advice for anybody touring around Taiwan by bicycle. You can find that information on my page about cycling in Taiwan.

On the eve of the first day of the big ride, I do some last-minute packing in our living area.

A Day out at the 2009 Tainan International Boat Fair & Oceanic Culture Exhibition

Hoist the main brace, scrub the poop deck, and winch the yard arm into a satisfactorily-compliant-with-the-relevant-marine-statutes position! The 2009 Tainan International Boat Fair & Oceanic Culture Exhibition was held last month and brought together a whole lot of stuff that had a whole lot to do with water - especially the salty, briny kind. The purpose of the 2009 Tainan International Boat Fair & Oceanic Culture Exhibition is officially to:

"... create new values for the city, expand maritime industries and create economic values, while starting from static and dynamic displays to encourage all citizens to participate. At the end, we hope to promote Tainan City through integrated marketing and establish quality images of the country."

Yes, yes. I couldn't have put it better myself. I took that quote from the 2009 Tainan International Boat Fair & Oceanic Culture Exhibition website which can be found here .

I don't know about you but I find that a title like 2009 Tainan International Boat Fair & Oceanic Culture Exhibition is a little too long and cumbersome and by the time I get most of the way through saying it I've lost my cognitive grasp on the start of it. Perhaps, from now on, I'll just refer to it as the TIBFOCE2009. Ah yes, that's much better. And now I beg your indulgence as I continue to quote from the very quotable TIBFOCE2009 website regarding the government's hopes for the exhibition's effect on people:

"The City Government hopes to bring in the vision of development, natural landscaping, historic and cultural edges and the population yacht building industry to encourage people to get close to the sea, love the sea and do good deeds to the seas while improving their knowledge and experience about the cultural and historic monuments."

You have to be careful not to injure yourself on those 'cultural edges'. There is one more quote I will take from the website - the best quote by far. Right at the end of the Mayor of Tainan's speech found this gem:

"And may the event harbor great success."

I like that mayor. And that's in a second language too.


You can see a lot of TIBFOCE activity on the other side of the river. In the foreground (but behind my head) are the piers where fishermen tie up their boats.

Down in the water you can see a pier from which kayaks and canoes were being rented. For a while we toyed with the idea of buying our own kayak in Taiwan and plying the rivers of the city at dusk. But dusk is the best time for mosquitoes so we won't be doing that.

Typhoon Marakot

On Friday August 7th typhoon Morakot slammed into Taiwan. The centre of the typhoon passed directly over the north-east coast of the island while the south of the island was blown and battered the whole time. The wind and rain didn't really die down until Sunday. According to this website a location in Pingtung County received 1,403mm of rain on Saturday; that's almost a metre and a half of water in 24 hours! Over a few days, from Friday to Sunday, rainfall reached proportions of between 2,500 and 2,900 mm.

Let's compare this to a couple of statistics drawn from the climate of my hometown, Collie, in Western Australia. The average annual rainfall in Collie is about 749mm (according to this page). So that one location I mentioned in Pingtung County received almost twice as much rain in 24 hours as Collie does in two years! Many locations recorded as much rain in three days as Collie receives in four years. Moving to Perth, the capital of Western Australia, the highest rainfall ever recorded in a single 24-hour period was 120mm in 1992 (according to this site). Compare that with the 1,403mm Pingtung received in the same amount of time.

So how did we fare? Well, it did eventually get boring holed up in our apartment for almost three days waiting for the storm to pass. Our water, electricity, gas, and internet were uninterrupted the whole time. We didn't suffer any flooding: we do live on the 10th floor of a large apartment building. The wind howled at any cracks and gaps it could find around our windows and doors but we were fine. Some of our friends suffered a bit of water in their apartments and my school is going to have to replace some large panes of glass on the third floor. A couple of months ago I tied some of my class' work up in one of the stairwells at our school and when I looked for it today it had all been torn away by the wind apart from one rather sad-looking clump of paper.

You may have seen the footage of a hotel falling into a surging river on TV or on the internet. That happened in Taitung County on the south-east side of Taiwan but not really that far from Tainan. Here is a link to a video of the event on Utube. I think I remember hearing on TV that all of the people were evacuated from the building before it collapsed.

Anyway, on Sunday it was still pretty gusty, blustery, tempestuous, and inclement but by then we were so desperate to get out of our apartment that we decided to take the scooter for a ride around to survey the changes that Morakot had wrought upon our city.

Happy to be out of the apartment. You get really sick of being in your apartment after a couple of days.

This statue of a bird is situated in the peace park by the canal close to our place. The wind has managed to tear away sections of the outer covering leaving holes in the statue. I guess it's hard to appreciate the damage if you have never seen the statue complete and undamaged. Note the trees in the foreground.

Corrugated iron fencing catches the wind very effectively and so corrugated iron fencing all over Taiwan was either blown down or sent on its own journey of discovery to new environs.

Going to the beach has never been as interesting and never accompanied by such a sense of apprehension as I apprehended what we might find as we approached one of the local stretches of coastline. For a start, all that water shouldn't be there; there is a small inland sea between us and the beach proper. And I'm sure there were more trees with more leaves here before the typhoon.

Standing on the beach we looked out at the sea, choppy as the man with the cleaver at the chicken-rice restaurant down the street. This picture doesn't capture the breakers still erupting over the breakwater in the background, sending water exploding into the air.

Down the beach at the mouth of the river. The place is covered with debris. I realized, being here, that an event like a typhoon creates an enormous amount of extra pollution and waste: a lot of stuff that was previously useful is either broken (becoming garbage) or moved from where it belongs (often becoming garbage). A lot of garbage gets washed down rivers into the sea along with a lot of other more insidious pollutants and a lot of new things have to be replaced which means a lot of extra manufacturing which creates a lot of extra pollution. I also saw here a lot of nice wood from what might have been some kind of boardwalk. We found out later that the typhoon had completely destroyed a nice, long raised wooden walking path along the river. I watched it being built over the course of many months as my journey to work takes me along the river on my bicycle. What a shame.

This road among the fish farms north of the city was cordoned off. Note the house in the background that is flooded. The road ahead was also flooded.

Hoardings on buildings also caught the wind effectively. A large part of this hoarding was torn down and we saw it being removed from the site.

We don't have any water right now and won't for a few more days. But it is remarkable that after such a violent and destructive event people are so calm and get straight down to business or making business possible again. Apart from the lack of water, life was almost back to normal by the start of the week when we went back to work. We have been told to expect a rise in the price of some foods such as fruit and vegetables. My school's graduation show was also postponed due to the typhoon. Some people have said that it's just nature and there have been suggestions that it's nature's way of trying to tell us something. I think it's just sad, wasteful, and unlucky.