Saturday February 5, 2011

7:50 a.m

I’m back at my favorite spot in Baling and about to have what has become my traditional café latte. They make a very good cup of café latte here. It’s got lots of coffee flavor and is very hot.

I haven’t written very much the last couple of days despite a lot happening. That’s because it has been so cold both inside and outside. My fingers have gotten so cold that I haven’t been able to type. It feels a bit warmer this morning, though. And it feels a bit warmer inside this restaurant.

I was in here last night having a café late, and all the children and adults gathered around my table again to talk to me. They were intensely curious about everything about me and hit me with dozens and dozens of questions. It was fun if a bit tiring. I’ve gone through many, many of those sessions in my life and they are always exhausting. For them, this happens rarely – a chance to talk to someone from Canada in English. I think other Canadians and/or Americans have come through this town. However, most people travel in groups or couples and they spend all their time talking to each other. It’s harder to talk to people when they are in a group. Someone like me on my own is somewhat rare. And it’s easy to talk to me. They also have a lot of energy for the conversation. For me, it is nothing new. I’ve been grilled so many times that it isn’t that interesting. I’m curious about their lives as well, but people overseas generally aren’t that good at talking about themselves. At least that is my experience. There is very little variety in the lives of them and their friends, and they aren’t accustomed to seeing it from the outside. So when I ask questions, I rarely get answers. They usually don’t understand my questions. For example, I have no idea where any of these people actually live. Where do they sleep at night? Do they have a house here in this town or are there rooms behind the restaurant? Who is related to who? I ask all these questions, but I almost never get a clear answer. I’m also very curious about money, of course. I want to know how much people get paid for their various jobs, how much they pay in rent, how much they pay for everything. But that question feels impolite, and I never ask. It probably isn’t impolite for the Chinese. They ask me those questions all the time, and they are always very happy to tell me that I always pay too much. This man I met, Eric, wanted to know how much I paid for my scooter. I gave him a price that was actually ten thousand dollars less than I paid, and he still shook his head and said that I had paid far too much.

I was glad when I got up yesterday to see that David, the Korean cyclist from Hong Kong hadn’t left yet. When I came down from my room, he was over fussing with his bicycle. As I mentioned, he bought the bike when he landed in Taipei. He found out at the last minute that Cathay Pacific had changed their policy and they were going to charge him $150 to take his bike from Hong Kong on the flight. That would be $300 round trip, probably more than his ticket, and he decided it would be better to just buy a bike here. He was somewhat lucky and found that folding bike for $100. I understood at first that it was a used bike, but he actually bought it new for that much. I was very surprised. It looked way too nice for that much money. I actually offered to buy it from him when he finished his trip. He was going to sell it to me for half what he paid. However, I don’t think we will be able to hook up. I gave him my cell phone number, but it’s unlikely that he will call me.

He was a very different type of cyclist from me. For one thing, I would never take a folding bike on a long journey. I would certainly never take a cheap one, and one that I had never ridden before. He also traveled very light. He had practically nothing with him. He had one set of clothes for cycling and one set of clothes for not cycling. He said he had a sleeping bag and a tent, but they were both extremely small, and that’s kind of my point. On his very first day, he road all the way from Taipei to Hualien – a very long distance. He arrived in Hualien at 9:30 at night. And he did this because he couldn’t find a place to sleep along the way. He found out, as I did a long time ago, that cheap hotels are not that common in Taiwan. He had a tent and a sleeping bag, but his tent was simply a one-man survival tarp. That’s why it could be so small and light. I have a 3-man 4-season tent. It is big enough to fit my whole bike inside if I need to. The point is that I could stop and stay in my tent overnight and be very comfortable. It’s like a portable home. It’s heavy and big, but at least it is useful. I also have a very warm sleeping bag and sleeping matt. He had a very small and light tent and sleeping bag, but they were useless except as emergency shelters.

We talked about his route back to Taipei, and I suggested all kinds of places he could check out and beautiful roads he could ride down. However, he was focused on covering a lot of distance. I guess he is a true cyclist. To explore the Yeliu Geopark would mean getting off his bike and walking around for a couple of hours. He wouldn’t do that because he wants to cover another fifty kilometers or something like that. I can’t see the point of covering all those kilometers just for the sake of doing so. This trip I’m on is an extreme example. I’ve barely left from Taipei, but there is so much in these mountains in all directions that there is no point in going farther south. I can feel the urge to go south. You want to feel like you’re TRAVELING. However, there is no point zooming down the main road for hours and hours and hours and skipping everything that is there to see and explore.

My day yesterday is a very good example of that. I had had no idea that the Lala Mountain Scenic Area/Nature Reserve was even there. I had seen a sign for Lalashan Forest Reserve but I didn’t know what it was. I spent an entire day and night with Eric and his family way up in the mountains hanging out and talking about everything. And yet they never mentioned this place. For them, it’s simply common knowledge. It didn’t occur to them that I didn’t know about it. Didn’t everyone? I kind of stumbled on it by accident because the girl at my hotel asked me what I thought of the big trees. “What big trees?” I asked.

So yesterday, my goal was to go check out the big trees. I saw David off on his cycling trip. I took a picture of him with his folding bike, then I had another cup of coffee, packed up my camera and gear and then went to find gas. This is another interesting aspect to this trip. A few months ago, I went on a wonderful trip to an area of Taiwan called Alishan. I wrote a letter to one of my cousins about that trip, and one thing I talked about was gasoline. I was driving deep in the mountains on my scooter all over the place, and I had to think about gas all the time because there are so few gas stations. I started to wonder how the local people got gas. In the Philippines, people everywhere sold gas at the side of the road in Coca-Cola bottles. In Taiwan, it is only sold at gas stations, so how do people in these remote mountain towns get gas for their cars and scooters? It’s been a puzzle. Anyway, I was talking to that Taiwanese fellow Carlson about this. He was on a scooter too, and he said something about being worried that he had enough gas to get to his destination. I brought up this idea that in other countries you can buy gas locally from people. You don’t have to go to a gas station. That planted an idea in his head, and when he went to pick up his scooter (his brake line was being replaced at a local garage), he asked about gas, and the guy said that he sold it. And that makes perfect sense and it solves the mystery for me. This guy at the garage had large plastic containers of gas in his shop. He would fill a big container for three or four liters and then use a funnel to pour it into your gas tank.

I was very pleased when I heard this story from Carlson. I had actually gone into garages in the past and tried to get gas there, but they always said they didn’t have any. So I gave up. But Carlson found some. And he found it based on my suggestion. Yet, this guy is Taiwanese. He has spent nearly his entire life in Taiwan, and he didn’t know that he could buy gas at a local garage.

I went to that garage with my scooter and indicated my gas gauge (which always shows empty, since it is broken), and in two minutes I had a full tank. I’m not sure how much gas I got, so I don’t know how much I paid per liter. I’m pretty sure that it was fifty percent more or even double what you’d pay at a gas station, but that’s okay.

I was very pleased with myself to have found gas. Now I didn’t have to worry about it. With my broken gas gauge, I’m constantly calculating kilometers and trying to figure out how much gas I have left, but with all the steep climbing I’ve been doing, I wasn’t sure. I know my scooter uses a lot more gas when it is going practically uphill, but I don’t know how much more.

My route to the big trees took me on road 116 on the way back to Eric’s place. I found out since then that everyone calls this place in the valley Lower Baling. The town way up in the mountains is called Upper Baling. At Upper Baling, Eric had led me to the right and we drove pretty much to the end of the road. I thought that was the only road up there. So when people told me that the big trees were at the end of the road, I was confused. I thought I had gone to the end of the road.. However, the road split in Upper Baling, and the main road continued far into the mountains and ended at the big trees.

It was great fun to drive to Upper Baling, this time in bright sunshine. The first time I did this trip it was in thick fog and clouds and I had no idea where I was going. Now I got to see the full views on the way up and they were spectacular. I stopped many times to take pictures. In fact, photography has been a big part of this trip. I’m still learning how to take pictures with my digital camera, and I’m happy to say that I’m getting much, much better at it. It’s so different from shooting with film.

I spent a lot of yesterday playing around with two different concepts: white balance and exposure compensation. White balance is a bit of a mystery. I’m not even sure why we have to do that. White balance didn’t exist as a concept when I shot slide film. If I took a picture of a green tree, it was always green. But with digital cameras, you have to adjust the white balance to get the right colors. And that is where the LCD screen on the back comes in. With a digital camera, you can see the picture as soon as you take it. I tend to pay attention only to the composition of the picture. Color and light feels somehow outside my control, since with film you had to wait for days and weeks or even months to see the pictures. Yesterday, I forced myself to look at the colors specifically and I realized what a huge difference white balance makes. I was taking all these pictures of green trees, but in my pictures, the trees were blue. And I realized that there was very little brown. In short, my pictures were all very “cool” (bluish). I chose different white balance settings until I got pictures with green trees and brown ground. I still don’t understand much of it, but I’m getting there. I’m starting to realize that it might be worthwhile for me to upgrade to a better camera eventually just so that I can get a better LCD screen. The screen on my Nikon D40X is very small and dim. In bright light, it is almost impossible to see.

I was surprised at how much difference the white balance settings made. For example, when I was in the forest, it was very dark. There was no direct sunlight. So I chose “cloudy” as my white balance setting. After a while, I realized that I was getting blue trees, not green trees. So even though there was no direct sunlight, it wasn’t truly cloudy. The sky was clear and blue. I did some looking around and found out that my camera has a “shady” white balance setting, and that was the correct one. I was in the shade of these giant trees. When I chose “shady”, the trees and moss suddenly came out green! When I chose “cloudy” they came out blue.

I don’t think these settings on the camera are perfect. They’re just meant as a guide. What you have to do is simply look at the pictures you are taking and see if the colors are right. If they aren’t, then you have to play with the white balance until it comes our right. It is a constant process. I guess you can also adjust the main white balance setting – do some compensation – but I don’t know how to do that yet. I’ll have to read the manual when I get back to Taipei.

The other concept I studied yesterday was exposure compensation. I’ve known about exposure compensation my whole life. I know the theory. However, I never, ever did it for the simple reason that I was shooting film. How do you know how much to compensate? You’re just guessing, and I never got to trust it. Now I feel kind of dumb because yesterday, I learned just how powerful exposure compensation is. And all the hundreds of pictures I took in Ethiopia that turned out terrible were terrible because I didn’t use exposure compensation. Had I used it, I would have gotten great pictures.

Once I discovered it yesterday, I found that it was essential, not just useful. And it was essential in almost every situation. I thought it was only for extreme conditions and for special effects. I always just trusted the camera’s light meter to make choices for me. I feel a bit foolish now that I understand it.

The main situation that always gave me trouble were landscape shots in bright sunlight. I always got bad pictures, and I just assumed it was because it was impossible to get good ones. You’ve got the bright sky and the dark ground in one picture. So how can you get a good exposure?

Well, with the digital camera’s LCD screen, I could see the pictures instantly, and I started to play with exposure compensation, and bingo, I had what I think are great pictures. I won’t know for sure until I get back to Taipei and put them on the computer, but they seem much better. The basic idea is that the light conditions fool your camera’s light meter. So you compensate. Essentially, you are overriding your camera’s decision. The conditions are exactly the same, but you are forcing the camera to let in more or less light. Where all of the land was completely washed out and overexposed, I suddenly had dark land with perfect exposures.

I kept experimenting with it when I got into the forest, and I found that it was just as useful there. My pictures were all either underexposed or overexposed. With exposure compensation, I played around until I got it right. With film, you couldn’t do that partially because it costs money every time you take a picture. With a digital camera you can take as many pictures as you like and it costs nothing. This trip has only been five days long, but I’ve taken nearly 600 pictures. I’ll probably keep about a hundred of them and delete the other 500.

My first stop on my way to the big trees was the Visitor’s Center. I didn’t even know it was there my first day. They had maps of the area and big displays of insects, mainly beetles. The park is home to the huge rhinoceros beetle and the stag beetle. They had lots of them on display.

Then I climbed the rest of the way to Upper Baling, taking pictures along the way. I stopped at the police station and the fellow I met was there. He doesn’t speak much English, but we had a good time making Rambo jokes. I asked him if there were any hotels in Upper Baling, and, not surprisingly, he had no idea. This puzzles me to no end. We’re talking about a very small place. It was essentially just one street. And he had lived there for years. How could he not know if there was a hotel there? But he didn’t. He did, however, have a surprise for me. He took me into the police station and showed me a bunch of hotel rooms on the second floor. The police station had its own hotel. I thought he was pulling my leg, but he wasn’t. The rooms were free for friends and relatives of police officers. He said that he could go all over Taiwan and stay in a police station anywhere he wanted to for free. What a deal!

From the police station, I followed the main road out of town and kept climbing and climbing. It was very beautiful and interesting. There were all kinds of little restaurants and what I figured out were hotels along the way. Now that I’ve been to Upper Baling and then along this road, I think I know more about the place than locals do.

The road got narrower and narrower and the temperature plummeted. There were large patches where the road was wet and covered in moss. It was as slippery as ice and I went slower and slower until I was barely moving. The last thing I wanted to do was crash. Even falling over could damage the scooter and I didn’t want to be stuck up there in the middle of nowhere.

There was quite a bit of holiday traffic on the road, and I pulled over to the side to let them all pass. Eventually, I reached the entrance to the park. Cars had to pay an entrance fee but scooters were free. Then I hit a small traffic jam. There were two parking lots at the park, but both were full and there was sudden gridlock and no one could move. I was lucky with my scooter and could just park it anywhere and walk into the park.

The park itself was gorgeous. It was much more interesting and beautiful than I expected. The main trail was about 4 kilometers long and took you by dozens of giant cedar trees all between one and two thousand years old. These trees were so big that you couldn’t really take them in. They were entire ecosystems by themselves. They went so high that you couldn’t see the tops of them. Their trunks were so big that sometimes I didn’t even see them. They were like walls of wood. I’d be standing right beside one of them and not even realize it was there. It would just be like a mountainside or a cliff at my side. Then I’d realize it was a tree. I’d practically fall over trying to look up them. I didn’t even bother to take out my wide angle lens. With nothing to compare the trees to, there was no way to get a sense of their scale and size. I tried instead to take close-ups of the bark and the moss and the lichen. That seemed to capture them better than trying to take a picture of the entire tree.

I had one happy encounter in the park. I ran into a young woman from Australia named Rachel. I think she was in her early twenties. She was staying with a Taiwanese family. She’d been in Taiwan for about one week and it was her first trip overseas except for a short holiday in England. She was overjoyed to have someone to speak English with and her impressions of Taiwan just poured out. She was overwhelmed with the place and had so many ideas and feelings that she hardly knew what to do with them all. I walked with her and chatted for a while. I would have been happy to keep her company all through the park, but I got the impression that her friend wanted me to leave. Her friend was a Taiwanese girl who had been living and working in Australia. It was her family that Rachel was staying with. She walked a distance away from us and wore these big dark sunglasses, and I got the feeling that she was very shy or ill at ease. I didn’t want to impose or monopolize Rachel’s time, so after a while, I went off on my own. I ran into her and her friends a couple more times. Oddly enough, Rachel had a Nikon D40, almost identical to my camera, so we talked about cameras a bit. I mentioned my new-found enthusiasm for exposure compensation, but Rachel had no idea what I was talking about. She pointed the camera and pushed the shutter button and that was it. She didn’t want to hear about “all that technical stuff.” So I took pity on her and didn’t babble endlessly about cameras.

I spent about 3 hours in the park walking. The scenery really was spectacular. I doubt that my pictures will do it justice. There were several places that were so jungly and exotic that they could easily have been movie sets. They were almost too perfect. The trails through these parks in Taiwan are extraordinary. In this park, every foot of trail was constructed. The trails were essentially huge boardwalks that climbed up and down the mountains. I can’t even imagine how much work it was to build them.

On my way down from the park, I saw an interesting building perched right on the edge of the cliff. It had a large balcony with people on it and I thought it would be a good place to stop for a meal or at least a cup of coffee. There, I ran into a common problem. I’ve mentioned that I’ve had some extraordinary meals on this trip. But there is a very common type of restaurant in Taiwan – much more common than the places that I’ve found. These restaurants cater to groups of people. The vast majority of Taiwanese travel in large groups and restaurants are designed to serve them. They sit around large round tables and get a dozen different dishes. They really aren’t suited to serving just one person. They don’t make individual meals. They make banquets and buffets. So I often can’t get a good meal. I can only order one dish rather than bits of many different dishes. So it took a long time for them to figure out how to serve me, and I ended up paying quite a bit for a very poor meal. I had the same experience when I got back to my hotel in Baling. All the places in Baling serve groups of people, and the best they could do for me was a big plate of fried rice. It wasn’t very good and it wasn’t very satisfying and it ended up very expensive for what I got. Luckily, I can survive on very little food as long as I have a steady supply of coffee.

 

Tags: bike, North Cross-Island Highway, scooter, Taiwan, Upper Baling