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Took a massively long ride with some unexpected happenings today. I'll be leaving Taiwan for a while soon, and I want to get some riding in before I head out. I Left Shijr, where I'm house-sitting, at about eleven and headed along the ugly road to Keelung. Shijr I'm indifferent towards, and Keelung I like. But the road between the two is one of the uglier ones in northern Taiwan. Flat out nothing to write home about for 16 kilometers. Got to Keeling at noon and rode through the Keelung night market, barely recognizing it in the bright daylight. There were vendors out, but there are some thing that are better in the dark. Octopus tentacle on a stick is one of these. I went to a Buddhist temple restaurant I'd written up for Taiwan 7, and in deference to my fine employers at Lonely Planet I'll leave the name out to encourage those so motivated to buy the book. It was still good. After lunch I headed along north of the city, stopping at a movie theater on the edge of town and toying with the idea of seeing that flick about the evil orphan kid. Had Public Enemy been playing, my whole day would have been different.

It wasn't. I headed along the road, also nothing spectacular as it wound through the coastal hills on the outskirts of the port city until finally emerging into what they call around these parts the northeast coast scenic area , suitably northeast and somewhat scenic. It was the hottest part of the day, in the hottest part of the year, and that voice in my head that I never listen to anyway told me this might not be a good idea. I kept riding, chugging my special blend, 2 parts water to 1 part Pocari sweat. I played around with the new mini DV camera that my pal & ex-wife's boss Brody gave me, and shot a few moving films that I'll post once I figure out how to, and am not on the verge of passing out.

Somewhere in there, it got to be three O'clock. The road got prettier, and it got hotter, if you can believe it.

I was riding up a curving hill, somewhere well north of Fulong beach, I forget the town name because there was no town, not even a row of trees. Just a hilly road, rocks on one side and ocean on the other, sun beating down. There's this panic attack I get in the ocean when I look around and see that I'm farther from land that I'm comfortable with, and my feet aren't touching anything, and the ocean is probably trying to kill me. I had one of these a few months ago, not far from the very spot where one today, similar but different, climbing up the hill, on the verge of sunstroke, nothing but passing trucks for shade.

I could die here, I thought for a second. Get off the bike. Rest. Hyperventilate.

Fuck that, I realized, soldier on. I may not have been born a bike messenger, but I will die one. Never get off the bike.

I made it up the hill, and was rewarded with more blinding white coast and blue water. But it was downhill at least, and I rolled down, tired and sweating, and stopped at a rest stop, a place with an ocean swimming area, snack stand, and inexplicable pony rides. Taiwan is at its most wonderful when it gets weird. Best of all where the vents around the perimeter shooting out streams of cooled fog. Good for people, good for ponies. I went in, got some more water, and passed out for ten minutes on a slanted white cement pillar in the shade.
I felt better, but not well enough to continue yet. Maybe I should just live here, forever.

I walked around, watched some kids swimming, and consulted a wall map. I was getting ready to head on, again ignoring the voice I always ignore, when I heard Jiashi?

That's Chinese for Joshua. That's my name around these parts. Standing before me, shirtless, was an old friend I hadn't seen in ten years.

Peng was a fireman back in Shuangxi, the Hakka town I lived in for my first two years in Taiwan. When we first met I spoke 20 words of Chinese, and he spoke 20 words of English, one of which was "Submarine" - we became good friends, despite this communication limitation. His wife, an aboriginal Taiwanese woman, was a school teacher who spoke just a bit more Chinese.

I yelled "Peng," and gave him a big hug, which East Asian's generally do not do, and freaked him out just slightly, but what the hell, I was recovering from sunstroke and glad to be alive.

Peng was on vacation with his wife, and his teenage daughter and son, both of whom were just toddlers when I'd last seen them. His son was off swimming, and his daughter and wife were hanging out at a picnic table outside the food court.

His wife remembered me off the bat, and his daughter was about as nonplussed at being told that I was an old friend who'd she'd met as an infant as any self respecting teenager should be. We all caught up. The last time we had hung out was in 1999, two years after I'd left Shuangxi, when my Chinese was far more limited.

Speaking with people who you haven't seen in a while, who you remember liking alot despite not having been able to communicate all that well, and now being able to communicate with fine, is a trip.

It was freaky for them as well. It was as if we were speaking on an even playing field.

"Do you remember when I told you I was an aboriginal?" Peng's wife said. "You didn't know the Chinese word for aboriginal, so I said taiwan indian "

I laughed. "At the time I had only a vague idea what a Taiwanese aboriginal was. Since then I've written about aboriginal affairs and areas in one of my books."

We talked about how small the world really was, and about the concept of serendipity. We had lattes. At about four, we swapped numbers, and promised to stay in touch, if not before I leave for Sri Lanka then after Chinese New Year. They were about to drive north; I kept riding south.


My muscles were sore and cramped, and I was coffee tired; wired but physically exhausted. I kept riding along the amazingly beautiful - by now, mercifully cooler - northeast coast. I headed down past a few small oceanfront towns, some harbors, fishing vessels. There are small remnants of typhoon damage, but this far up they were slight. A felled pole here. A rock-slide there. The one truly noticeable thing was the mud; at places where rivers met the sea, the water had turned brown from all the earth that was still flowing into the ocean.

At Fulong I decided I'd had enough. I still wanted to go to Jiaoshi, to sit in the hot springs of this famous coastal hotspring town, but I didn't want to ride any more. I'd brought my new folding bike bag, and went to the train station. But the next south-bound train wasn't scheduled for another 50 minutes, and I figured I could make better time riding, possibly hitchhiking.

Riding would have been a bad idea. I hitchhiked, and the drive down, with three beer drinking, betel nut chewing telephone pole repairmen in a big yellow truck with a massive crane, took exactly one hour. Turns out I'd been 40 kilometers away from Jiaoshi when I thought I was only 20.

The four of us had a grand time in the truck, which I filmed and may upload for anyone who misses Taiwan enough to want to watch an hour long video of three Taiwanese guys waxing philosophical while stunning scenery passes by and the sun goes down. I'm thinking of billing it as kind of a moving "My Dinner with Andre," only in Chinese, with three Andres, and the dinner is betel nut, Taiwan beer and more Pocari sweat.

But that'll go up later, if I ever get around to it. I made it to Jiaoshi as the sun went down,. The hot spring was great, the baby octopus (it was night now, and thus appealing) delicious. and the train ride home, uneventful.