A recent holiday witnessed a small party of friends taking a trip to Taroko National Park. These friends were gracious enough to let me join the party. To express my gratitude for my compadres' generosity, I will not use their real names in this blog. I will conceal their identities by referring to them henceforth as Derich and Nelley, Kaland and Kaydlin, Roanna, and Don. Nelley and Roanna, who we may call good chums, found excellent accommodations for us at a hostel named "Amigos" in the city of Hua Lian. Considering the fact that I have now used the word "friend" or its synonym six times in six sentences, you may rightly conclude that the company on the trip, and thus the trip itself, was on the whole quite congenial.
Having introduced the characters of this narrative and hinted at the nature of their relationship to one another, I am now compelled to describe the setting. As I stated above, our objective was Taroko National Park. This is roughly an hour's bus ride from Hua Lian. Allow me to give you a glimpse of the park. Stand with me now at the edge of an expansive, forrest-lined meadow. Look at the swirling sea of grasses; here in the shadow of the great oaks they are a shimmering blue, while further out where the sun's rays dance upon their tips they flash a more greenish-gold. Like children making shadow puppets against a wall, so the clouds dot the meadow with strange figures. See Regal Buck--still, calm--imposing his majestic presence o'er his world. The wind now whips the grasses all to bend their heads before him. His only movement is a slight dip of his antlers in recognition of the honor due him. See also Dainty Fawn as he prances playfully about under the careful watch of Graceful Doe. Enter Comely Maiden. Her golden tresses are tied loosely behind her though certain rebellious strands drop down to frame her angelic face. Her flowing gown ripples along, seeming to provide all her movement. A flower basket, yet unadorned, dangles from her arm. The meadow's blossoms lunge toward her, pleading to be plucked by her elegant hand and planted in her basket. Gaze now upon Dainty Fawn as he presses his soft nose into that elegant hand. Golden Finch and Crimson Cardinal encircle the couple as the harmony of a choir of songbirds fills the air with a glorious anthem. Cast your eyes about this magnificent scene. Soak in its splendor. Capture it as a living memory. File this memory away to be recalled when life lacks beauty, wonder, and romance.
File it far away from anything bearing even the slightest connection with Taroko National Park. Let there be no intermingling of the two. The fanciful scene above is the east to Taroko's west, and "ne'er the twain shall meet." They are opposing poles, each rejecting every attempt by the other to encroach upon its territory. They are, in a word, as far apart as a first-grade class from a junior high class. Taroko National Park consists mainly of a gorge for heaven's sake. When have you ever seen Regal Buck, Graceful Doe, Dainty Fawn, and Comely Maiden come together in a gorge? Never.
Sheer rock cliffs. Narrow passageways. Torrential river. Dangling vines. Winding paths. Swinging bridges. Ominous caves. Sizable resort. These are the sights of Taroko Gorge. The morning after we arrived in Hua Lian, we took a small bus roughly twelve miles deep into the gorge, and then proceeded to hike our way back out. This left us slightly fatigued considering the fact that we had hiked about twice that far the night before in search of a little sushi bar. However, the weather was wonderful and the gorge was gorgeous. Here bald rock faces loom endlessly above you. There the river bounces off of boulders beneath your feet. Here clumps of trees and vines cling stubbornly to cliffs. There stones and pebbles threaten to drop from precipices above onto your head. The gorge is infested with monkeys. By infested, I mean that we saw about seven of them, that being the largest amount wild monkeys I have seen in one place in my life. As a matter of fact, they were the only wild monkeys I have seen in my life. We saw them from across the river about 150 yards away. Even from that distance I could identify them as being of the macacus cycplosis species. There were four females, two middle-aged and one adolescent, and three males: one elderly, one middle-aged, and one adolescent. They were the extent of the wildlife, not counting ourselves, that we saw in the gorge.
Having seen the gorge, we were left with a day and a half to spend in Hua Lian. We deemed it wise to fill this time with steamed dumplings and scooters. There is a famous steamed dumpling stand in Hua Lian, and we felt it our solemn duty to patronize the spot. It was easy to find. Or at least it was easy to find the stand's general vicinity. An line of people trying to acquire these dumplings snaked its its way through the city's blocks before reaching the outskirts of the town and then lapping the city three times. It is this long line that is the infallible sign of quality here in Taiwan. If ever, in your journeys in Taiwan, you see extraordinarily lengthy line, jump in it. You may ask what the line is for later. Note, however, that it is not the case that quality causes the long line but that the long line causes the quality. Upon seeing such a line, people automatically and without reservation assume quality. So unshakeable is this belief that even if a person stands in line for hours only to receive vile fare, that person will assure you it is the best vile fare you will find anywhere. Starting a successful business is quite easy. All you must do is pay a bunch of friends to line up outside your establishment for the first few days, and soon there will be long lines for you product everyday. An effective advertising campaign might make wide use of such slogans as "Leonard's Soaps and Baked Goods. We have the longest lines in town!"
The steamed dumpling stand did indeed have the longest line in town. Standing in line, however, was not the only way to get the dumplings. Potential customers were given a choice; they could stand in the line for five hours to purchase dumplings to go, or they could eat in and get their dumplings in fifteen minutes. We took the most reasonable route of standing in the line for three hours before abandoning it in favor of eating in. We consumed roughly three hundred dumplings a piece before rolling back out into the street. As evidenced by the line, the dumplings were good. Of course, they were not as good after only a three hour wait in line as they would have been after a five hour wait, but we were all in agreement that we did not need our dumplings to be that good. The stand is worth a visit. If ever you find yourself in Hua Lian, I suggest you take them up on the invitation given in their familiar and catchy jingle:
"Zheng's Homemade Dumplings, yummy, yummy!
Please slide them down into your tummy!"
We wanted to see more of the surrounding area, so we decided to rent some scooters to putter around on. After a bit of looking, we were able to procure four scooters that fit our purpose. Actually, we found three scooters and one motorcycle, thus breaking up the general democratic feeling of the trip and instituting something of a class system. There being seven of us on the trip and the bikes being able to carry two a piece we split up into pairs with one left on his own. Lord Derich and Lady Nelley took the motorcycle. They were attended by Kaland and Kaydlin on one scooter and Don and Roanna on another. I trailed along in solitude. The name of my scooter is worth noting. I scooted about on a Yamaha Fancy Jog. This name is truly remarkable in that it was quite antithetical to my experience on the bike; neither I nor the bike was fancy, and nothing like jogging took place. What did take place was a pleasant afternoon of riding around Hua Lian. Those of us with a zest for life even took the bikes out for a late night spin along the river. Unfortunately, some of the group lacked a zest for life and stayed at Amigos. To shield Derich and Roanna from embarrassment over their lifelessness, I will mention no names.
Don left us that night, so I reluctantly turned in my Fancy Jog and teamed up with Roanna for our final half day. This turned into the most enjoyable portion of the trip. We had heard rumors of a scenic coastal road that headed south out of Hua Lian, and we decided to hunt it down. We found it, and it was worth the whole trip. Roads winding around the edges of mountains that plunge down into a beautiful blue ocean. Monstrous waves throwing their full weight against craggy cliffs only to be repelled each time. Tunnels swallowing you with darkness before spitting you back out into the beautiful scenery that is Taiwan's east coast. Dense, tropical vegetation to one side and the vast expanse of the ocean to the other. Small fishing villages flashing by. All of this we experienced on a perfect spring day. It is good to be reminded sometimes that I live on a tropical island, and there are benefits to that.
I will admit that I was a bit anxious about operating a scooter for the first time. The idea of zipping around narrow streets teeming with cars, scooters, bicycles, and pedestrians was slightly unsettling. The idea of flying around hairpin turns on what I perceived to be a somewhat clunky two wheeled vehicle with someone sitting behind me also gave me some little concern (for those westerners who doubt the verb "flying" is properly associated with scooters, you would be surprised. The may not move along at the rate of your sports bike, but many of them will take you at a very nice clip.). I am proud to say that I passed this test with flying colors. These colors mainly consisted of a deep purple and yellow painted liberally about the chin and throat area. The wind was quite fierce at times, especially when emerging from a tunnel, and my helmet was not fastened on tightly enough. The helmet was a bowl-like affair with a chin strap. When a good gust would come up, the bowl would fly back off my head, and the chin strap would slip down to my throat, keeping me from losing the helmet altogether. This predicament raised two concerns for me. First, my chin strap was choking the life out of me. Second, I worried that I was throwing out something like a parasail and creating too much drag to maintain my desired rate of speed. Roanna was more concerned about the first of these two problems, since at that particular moment my health and wellbeing were of no small consequence to her own. I also suspect that she did not appreciate being beaten in the face by a bowl. Thus, she took it upon herself to place the helmet back on my head at regular intervals. After a while I stopped to fix the problem by cinching up the chin strap a little tighter. Unfortunately, I was too zealous in the tightening process. Just after we got back underway, I realized that my teeth were being fused together and my jaw would never work properly again. There will forever be scars on my chin where the strap dug its way to the bone. One must pay for beauty somehow, though, and I counted it a trifling thing to lay my throat and mandible at Beauty's altar in order to see the sights I saw that day.
When the ride was over, we gathered our belongings, bid farewell to Amigos and our scooters, and boarded the train back to Taipei. It seems, though, that after such a marvelous three days I left part of me in Hua Lian. Most notably, I left the part of my skull that we could not dislodge from the bowl. But that, too, is a trifling thing in light of the delightful memories I took away of time with friends.
