Road Trip mark II
Trip Start
Nov 17, 2006
1
12
19
Trip End
May 09, 2007
All the way to the tip and back,
Taiwan
Thursday, April 5, 2007
So, this week's holiday, the mysteriously (or ridiculously) named Tomb Sweeping Day was on Thursday, and very nicely, we were given Friday off too. Have to work on Saturday this week to make up though, that isn't going to be fun! As far as I can tell, the name pretty much says it all - it's a day for remembering and honouring your ancestors by sweeping and cleaning their tombs. A lot of religion here in Taiwan is based on ancestor worship. Throughout the year, people burn 'ghost money' - paper money for their ancestors to bring them fortune (because even in death, they're all obsessed with money). Over the last weekend people went absolutely crazy with this! Outside almost every house, office, business is a little metal bin for burning the stuff in - not the nicest smell when they're all burning inferno style!
Anyway, in true ignorant foreigner style, we ignored the holiday and packed up to haul ourselves to Spring Scream, Taiwan's "biggest" music festival. Compared to the last one, it was a thriving metropolis, but still distinctly country-fair ish. The festival is held every year over this weekend, near the southern most town in Taiwan, Kending. Kending is pretty cool - a seaside town with a difference - instead of candy floss, everyone eats barbecued squid on a stick, and instead of a pathetic muddy beach, the coast is pounded by the Pacific (well, almost the Pacific). It's pretty much the surfing capital of Taiwan - not amazing waves, but pretty fun! The festival is normally held just outside the town, but this year was on cowboy ranch (!!) style resort about half an hour's drive away around the very tip of the island. Believe me, strange is not the word....
Anyway, back to the adventure - we decided a bus would just be too boring, so we got down there in a really round about way. On Wednesday night I took the hideously over crowed train to Taichong to lovely Iani's place. Her Chinese class was graduating BuPuMuFu (Chinese ABCs), so I walked in, hot and flustered to a room of westerners screaming at each other in bad Chinese!! They were playing some sort of Monopoly game I got roped into playing (although I had no idea what was going on), and then I chatted to a lovely Taiwanese girl called Ika that had studied in Sheffield for three years. My first proper Taiwanese friend, yay!!
We flopped into bed about 2, then woke up ridiculously early to get a bus to Tainan a couple of hours down the coast. Sounds easy enough, but our Taiwanese friend Peggy was bringing her brand new surfboard down to test it out! It took a bit of searching and waiting around for a bus big enough to fit the board, but we managed it after a while,. Just about enough time for a breakfast dan-bing (kind of like a crepe with a thin omelet and a slice of plastic cheese, rolled up and sliced. Yummy!), WHO! The buses here are ace - they don't have so many seats, so they make th the seats huge and comfy, like a massive squishy armchair. It took about three minutes before I was asleep already!
Tainan is about halfway between Taichong and Kending. It's the oldest town in Taiwan, and apparently has loads of cool temples (because all the other old buildings have been torn down to make way for monstrous tower blocks), but we just popped in to pick up Peggy's car and head out of town. Peggy's car is ace - it's a proper old, beaten up surfer car, and then we strapped a huge surfboard to the roof. It was perfect!! The drive down was stunning. I'd forgotten again that Taiwan is beautiful once you escape the concrete jungle - beautiful hills and forests, and after an hour of so we hit the coastline the rest of the way down. Really, it was the most amazing journey - trees everywhere, then empty flood plains, then back into the mountains all craggy and beaten. And a few huge Buddha statues about to spot too!
We made it down to the festival about 7, just in time to put up out tent in the dark. Oh, how i love doing that!! Yeah.... After that fun adventure we explored around - the resort was really really odd. A load of little wood cabins, the tiny campsite we pitched at, and cowboy stuff all over the place! Really really strange. Didn't feel so festival like - maybe because by the time we got ourselves sorted out and in the mood for dancing everything had stopped already! Couldn't believe it! 12 o'clock and already no music to be found, boo. There were loads of my friends there though, a lot of people I hadn't had the chance to speak to in ages, so it was nice catching up, meeting a few more people.
The next day was pretty cool too. We got up silly early (tents aren't great for lie ins!) and had breakfast in the big hotel building. A festival with a proper bathroom, it was heaven! Anyway, breakfast - a huge buffet affair, there were normal things like toast, eggs, bacon, cereal, and then things only the Taiwanese could come up with! Mashed potato, chicken nuggets, Chinese breakfast things (runny porridge called congee and a lot of things I don't know the name of), crazy madness! We gorged ourselves silly - they had REAL bread! With bits in and everything! Such a luxury after only being able to find sugary whiter than white yucckiness for the past few months. It took us a while to haul our fat bellies out of the comfy chairs, but we finally managed to pry ourselves off and head into town. Our taxi was crazy too - the driver Sunny (a man, not a girl) was mental, but sweet, and the cab was a huge souped up chav/pimp my ride monstrosity! Still, there were so many of us that even though there were two rows of seats, i had about a square inch to fit my recently stuffed self into. Wasn't too pleasant! It was very very funny though - Sunny was cool, and his stereo had these lights rigged up to it - our very own disco at 11 in the morning!
We got dropped off at the beach just outside Kenting - it's at the bottom of a cliff just away from the road. Don't worry mum, there were stairs, I didn't risk life and limb climbing down!!As far as beaches go, it was pretty cool - a nice little cove, and the waves were crazy. The sea got deep really suddenly, which made the water jump up to get you. Every now and again there'd be a huuuge wave that gt everyone standing on the edges of the waves completely soaked (me included!)But, there's only so much sitting around on beaches I can handle, so Iani and I snuck through the secret tunnel that connected the beach to a super posh hotel complex across the big road, then headed into town to check out all the seaside tat.
Kending is pretty much the same as tacky seaside towns everywhere - shops and shops and shops full of tacky shirts, board shorts, crappy souvenirs, jewelry made from sea shells, blah blah blah. Didn't stop us wasting a good few hours poling around though! I bought a pair of flip flops - splashed out and bought some Havianas. They're so comfy (the ozzies I lived with in Bristol never stopped raving about how much they loved theirs), but cost me 550NT. That's almost a tenner for a pair of flip flops! But they are super comfy - I may actually wear them sometimes instead of buying them and shunning them because they hurt my feet!
The evening at the beach was way more fun than the daytime - when we came back from dinner (in a lovely Mexican/Italian restaurant) the boys had a fire going in a quiet section of the beach. I haven't sat round a fire on the beach in forever, it was nice. We had slush puppies from the 7-11, and sat and chatted for a few hours. Everytime the smoke blew in your eyes we'd all scream "I hate bunnies! I hate bunnies!" Made me feel a bit mean, but it seemed to work at getting the smoke to go bother someone else instead. The Taiwanese are crazy about fireworks - you can buy them all over the place, any time of year, and people took the excuse of the holiday to set them off continuously for about 3 hours. It was nice to start off with, then got annoying/a bit scary. No one is bothered about how far the fireworks are from people, and the kinds here are all set off from a box you put on the floor - you light it and it'll set off about a million fireworks, one after another. Some of them are so loud it sounds like a damn cannon - quick, Napoleon is coming! Bonfire night won't ever be the same again now, sniff sniff.
We managed to survive though, and had another trip in Sunny's Super-Disco-Taxi back home - the party lights were more fun in the dark! Sunday we had another huuuuge breakfast, then decided to stick around the festival in the sunshine. We saw a few bands - a couple of foreigner bands from a town called ChangHwa played at the start of the day. I wasn't too impressed (I even had a nap during one of them) - if they weren't here in Taiwan they certainly wouldn't be able to play at festivals like this! They were ok, just not great.The band after that was lovely - a cute Taiwanese band called 929, playing guitar, bongos, xylophone, and the keyboard that you blow through to play. They were ace, even if I didn't understand what they were talking about! We stumbled across the same people in another band later, that was pretty cool too.
The weekend was a lot of fun - hanging out with my friends, a little bit of music, a little bit of dancing, and some really pretty surroundings. Well done if you made it this far!
