July 24, 2010

The Puli Trip began with another snap decision based on the weather. It looked like it was going to be sunny for the weekend, so I started to cast around for a destination. I’m not sure anymore why I settled on Puli. It got a nice write-up in Lonely Planet and in lots of places online. There seemed to be some interesting temples in the town. Sun Moon Lake was nearby. And it was close to Taichung, where I could rent a scooter. The main reason it appealed to me, however, was that it was supposed to have a nice mountain setting. It seemed like an interesting place to base oneself for trips into the mountains. I thought of it as another Feniqu. Things didn’t turn out quite that way, but I still saw some great scenery and enjoyed myself very much.

I took the High Speed Rail down to Taichung again. It was too late to take a regular train, so I didn’t even check to see if there were any tickets available. Taking the High Speed Rail made things a bit more complicated in that the HSR station is not in downtown Taichung. It is not in Taichung at all, and that is where I needed to go to rent a scooter. Luckily, I’d done this once before, so I had a vague idea of what needed to happen. The HSR line meets up with a TRA line (Taiwan’s regular rail system), and you simply transfer from one to the other. It feels a bit odd, to tell the truth. I spent double the fare in order to get to Taichung in half the time by High Speed Rail. But when I get there, I then have to transfer to a slow local train to actually get me to the city. It seems a bit of a waste. The fare for the local train was something like NT$46 and it only took ten minutes. However, that ten minutes doesn’t include the half an hour to get from one station to the other and buy a ticket and then the twenty minutes of waiting for that train to arrive and then leave.

I’m not saying that any of this was a big problem. It was all very pleasant and easy. I actually went into a Starbucks in the HSR station and had a coffee there for thirty minutes or so. I used the bathroom, where I had the pleasure of showing an older man how to use the sensor-driven faucet. This poor fellow was in the bathroom trying to wash his hands, but he couldn’t get the water to flow. All around him, faucets were pouring out water and people were washing their hands, but the water refused to flow out of his. He hit the faucet. He tried to push it down. He tried to twist it. He looked for buttons. Nothing he did got any water flowing. I got his attention and then put my own hands under my faucet from which the water magically started to flow. I had to do that three times before he got the idea and tried it himself.

From Starbucks, I found the arrows pointing to the TRA station at exit 3. For the casual visitor, this might have been a bit more confusing, but I knew what TRA stood for. I also knew that the TRA station and the HSR station were in a place called Xinwuri. And I also knew that if you actually exited at exit 3, you’d be in the wrong place. I’d figured all that out the last time. So I happily followed the TRA signs, ignored exit 3 and kept walking, bought my ticket at the vending machine, and then hopped on the first train that arrived. The vending machine was a showstopper the last time I did this, and I had to get help. This time, I simply looked over the shoulders of other people to refresh my memory and then I followed the system. Putting your money in first is the key. Once you do that, all the available button options light up. You choose your options one by one starting with the top row of buttons. I believe the top row was your choice of destination. The next row was how many tickets and whether you were an adult, child, or student. The next row was something else. And one row was your choice of train type. This would be difficult to figure out for a newcomer, but I knew to ignore all the standard train types and choose a “local” train. Of course, I couldn’t even have accomplished all of this except that the buttons were in both English and Chinese. Without the English,, I couldn’t have done it at all.

Getting on the first train to arrive was also just a random guess mixed with a bit of experience. The train that pulled in did not look like a regular long-distance train. It looked more like a subway car, which told me that it was a local train. It seemed to be going in the right compass direction for Taichung, so I hopped on. I asked someone on the train if it was going to Taichung, and they said yes, so I settled in. I could very easily have been on the wrong train, but I knew it didn’t really matter as long as I got to Taichung. The ticket I had was a little piece of cardboard with a magnetic strip. This gets you through the turnstile both onto the platform in Xinwuri and then out of the station in Taichung. In other words, the ticket applied to the stations, not to the train itself. So as long as I got to Taichung station, I’d be fine. It didn’t matter to me which train I took.

The train stayed at Xinwuri for twenty minutes, and then it took only ten minutes to get to Taichung station. In the end, my trip by High Speed Rail, though it cost more than twice as much as a regular train, got me there in the same amount of time and was quite a bit less convenient and comfortable. Perhaps in time, Taichung will grow outward and engulf the HSR station, but for now placing the station so far away is not exactly convenient. At least my trip on the train was more comfortable than my trip to Lukang the other weekend. There were no grandmothers smacking me in the head and grandkids smearing greasy hands over my knees. I had a window seat and a nice young man sitting beside me. I emphasise the “young” part because older men have that habit of being unaware of their surroundings. They sit with their knees, legs, elbows, and arms spread wide as if they are sitting in a lazyboy in their livingroom. (They also tend to burp, fart, and sniff a lot.) This young man kept his body nice and contained (as I did). And when he read the newspaper, he kept it small and within his own seat area. He didn’t spread it wide and jam it in my face as older men tend to do.

I rented a scooter at a little shop right outside the train station when I got to Taichung. It was a very different experience from renting a scooter in Chiayi, Taitung, and Lanyu. The woman – Teri – running the place spoke excellent English and was very professional. You’d think that would be a good thing, but in the end it wasn’t. Her professionalism meant that she was very strict about the rules. I don’t think she would rent to anyone who didn’t have proper ID and driver’s licenses. She also charged twice as much – NT$600 per day as opposed to NT$300 per day everywhere else. She imposed a 100-kilometers per day limit on distance traveled – which meant that the odometer on the scooter actually worked – a rarity in Taiwan. If I drove more than 100 kilometers a day, I would have to pay for an extra day. If I returned the scooter late, I’d have to pay for an extra day. She also had a form on which to write down all the damage to the scooter so that new damage would be charged to me. It was a little bit of a farce because even the best-cared for scooters in Taiwan end up with scrapes on the body on every single side, corner, and surface. It’s unavoidable when people jam scooters together and manhandle them so much when parking them. I remember doing this with rental cars in Canada, and you might end up writing down one scratch on one panel of the car. In this scooter’s case, it was scratched on every single surface, so the form was completely filled out. However, I can see how the form would be useful from Teri’s point of view. Going through the motions did made me think about the condition of the scooter, and perhaps I would be more careful with it because of that.

Professionalism like this is a breath of fresh air in Taiwan, but it doesn’t mean it is better. I often find that prices in Taiwan don’t relate to what you get. Spending three times as much on a hotel room doesn’t always get you a better room. You can easily get a worse room. In this case, I paid twice as much for my scooter, but it was by far the worst scooter I’ve had. It had almost no power. The front wheel made a disturbing rattling and banging noise. And, worst of all, the brakes grabbed hard. I nearly crashed during a rainstorm when I touched the brakes and the front wheel locked up completely. I had no confidence in this scooter despite its professional presentation.

The fact that Teri spoke English was also a mixed blessing. She asked a lot of questions, which made me feel like a criminal, like I was trying to get away with something. Speaking English as she did, she could also translate all the items in the rental contract – things like how I had to pay extra for this and that and something else. She also poured lots of warnings in my ears about how dangerous the traffic was and how I shouldn’t speed and shouldn’t do this and shouldn’t do that. By the time, she was finished, I was yearning for my young guy in Chiayi who spoke no English at all and rented me a scooter in two minutes with no fuss and no bother and no extra charges for anything. In an odd way, it matches how I think of places like Taiwan and Canada. Canada might have a lot of things that a place like Taiwan doesn’t have in the efficiency, cleanliness, and modernity departments. However, that comes with a price – heavy bureaucracy and lots of rules and conditions. Taking all of it into account, I far prerfer the loose and crazy nature of Taiwan.

One thing Teri’s English did do for me was give me good directions on how to get out of Taichung. This speaks to the overall theme of the Puli Trip – Lost. I was lost almost the entire time. I simply couldn’t get my bearings anywhere. So as many maps as I looked at and as many times as I looked at them, I couldn’t figure out how to get out of Taichung and onto highway 136 to Puli. Teri, after warning me strenusously against taking 136 (it was too small and winding), gave me perfect directions, and I was zooming out of Taichung in no time at all.

The trip to Puli was far less dramatic than my trip to Alishan. There was also quite a bit more traffic – and this was to become something of a theme for the weekend, too. I tried to stay on back roads. I even went off 136 and took a detour on 133 to try to find quieter roads, but 133 was just as busy. Puli was also not what I was expecting. I thought it would be a small mountain town. In fact, it is a very large city, and a very confusing one. Arriving in Puli made me realize how dependent I am on English road signs. Maps are very useful, but they are only useful if they correspond to streets signs in English. And in Puli, road signs in English were quite rare. I found myself driving around for a very long time completely lost and disoriented. I couldn’t find a single intersection or landmark of any kind to get my bearings. I finally found my way through sheer bloodymindedness. I simply drove in several different directions as far as I could until I reached the city’s limits. Then I’d note what things I could. Then I’d drive in another direction. I kept doing this until I put just enough pieces together to find one street on which I’d read there was a cheap hostel. That I found this place is something of a miracle since I never did see a street sign in English for that street. Luckily, this place had a Hostelling International sign in English out front. Otherwise, I might never have found it.

Looking back, I can see that the existence of this hostel kind of screwed me up. I got fixated on staying there. And even when I realized that Puli wasn’t my kind of place and wasn’t deep in the mountains, I still ended up staying in the hostel there. Without the hostel being there, I’d probably have given Puli a miss and kept driving into the mountains. I didn’t know of anyplace in the mountains to stay, but it stood to reason that there would be something out there. As it was, though, I stayed in Puli.

The hostel, despite its Hostelling International sign, was not a hostel at all. The office off the street was actually a lottery ticket sales place. The woman there was very friendly, though more than a little scattered in her mind, and she showed me the hostel, which was an old and dilapidated three-bedroom apartment in a typical apartment building. The neighbors were all normal Taiwanese families with the usual clutter of shoes and umbrellas and bicycles outside their apartment doors. I had my pick of the 3 bedrooms, and I chose the one that had its own bathroom. The place was partially furnished with mostly junk and everything was sort of dirty and broken and old. There was a tiny refrigerator on the floor in one room. I plugged it in and it whirred into life. There was a kettle in the kitchen, but its electric cord was long gone. In any event, it was far too dirty to use. Hot water was available according to the woman, but I would have to figure out how to turn on the gas flow, and she implied that only dummies would want hot water in this hot weather anyway. So I didn’t press her on this point and took cold-water showers. I hoped this woman could help me find a cheap place to stay in the mountains, but she knew nothing about anything like that. However, she thought her daughter might, and she turned to a computer and opened up a chat windown with her daughter in Taichung. For some reason, she wrote to her in English and said, “Do you know cheap place in Chingjing?” There was no reply, and she said that her daughter must not be at her computer.

Once I settled into my room, I packed up my camera, and set off on my scooter to drive to Sun Moon Lake, which was about 16 kilometers away. I should say at this point, that Puli is far and away the champion city in Taiwan as far as crazy and erratic driving goes. It was nuts. People drove slow, fast, any speed they wanted. And when I say they drove slow, I mean they drove slow. Like turtles. I’ve never seen anything like it. And they simply did whatever they wanted at any time. They stopped in the middle of traffic. They turned, they spun, they backed up, they zipped in front of you, they did anything and everything everywhere. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I started to have more sympathy for Teri’s warning stories. I can only imagine what has happened to other foreigners who rented scooters from her and came up to Puli and Sun Moon Lake and the highway to Taroko Gorge.

I had been to Sun Moon Lake once before a long time ago on a visa run from Korea. I was in Taiwan for two or three weeks, and I hitchhiked along the east coast to Hualien and then up through Taroko Gorge to Hehuanshan and Sun Moon Lake. I didn’t have very good impressions of Sun Moon Lake from that visit. People rave about its beauty, but perhaps we Canadians are spoiled when it comes to lakes. We have tens of thousands of them, and they don’t strike us as anything special. Sun Moon Lake struck me back then as a lake and nothing more. And the town I stayed in was pretty grungy and unattractive. I remember my hotel room being a dismal affair. My best memory of that trip is of a puppy that adopted me as I walked around the dirty streets.

Apparently, Sun Moon Lake has undergone something of a rebirth since then. There was a huge earthquake in 1999 centered in Puli, and there was massive destruction all through the area. Hotels and trails and roads were all rebuilt in Sun Moon Lake, and the story goes that is has improved tremendously. And from my experience, I suppose that’s true. I didn’t spend the night at Sun Moon Lake, but I did drive around the whole lake stopping here and there to check it out, and the place seemed to have nothing to do with my memories of it. There’s a very pleasant road circling the entire lake and other than a confusing section where I got completely lost, it is easy to drive around stopping here and there to admire the views. There are temples here and there and small hiking trails. There are also new bike paths along the lakeshore. There is even a big cable car ride going high into the mountains from the lakeshore. It was raining pretty heavily most of my time there, so I didn’t take the cable car, but I assume there are nice views from up there.

From my previous trip, I only remember one town on the lake – Shuishe Village. It struck me as a rundown and somewhat depressing place. This time, it seemed like a bustling metropolis. There were so many people there and so much traffic, that I didn’t even try to stop and explore. However, from what I’ve read, it is supposed to have a nice boardwalk area, and you can take boats from the pier to different places around the lake.

As I drove around the lake, I came across a second bustling little town called Itashao. Lonely Planet (my copy dates from 2004) calls it an unattractive place and says little else. It must have changed a lot since then, because Itashao is now a very developed place with an attractive waterfront. I’ve been to lots of places with these kinds of tourist-oriented old streets lately, so the area in Itashao didn’t strike me as that appealing. But if you like to snack on local delicacies and all that sort of thing, I can see it as a nice place to hang out and even spend the night.

I think my problems with Sun Moon Lake came largely from the huge amounts of rain that poured onto my head while I was there. It wasn’t the most ideal time to visit. It started to rain as I was driving there from Puli along highway 21, and that rain made an already incredibly dangerous road even more dangerous. People drive dangerously slow in Puli, but they make up for it when they go to Sun Moon Lake and race at recklessly high speeds. They also weave in and out of traffic like crazy people, totally oblivious to the sheets of rain coming down and the scooters hugging the edge of the road. It was very crazy, and I almost gave up and turned around. It continued to rain off and on as I drove around the lake, culminating in one bad moment when I applied the brakes and my front wheel locked up almost dumping me off the scooter. The crazy driving continued all the way back to Puli and then inside Puli itself. I was mentally exhausted when I pulled in at the hostel. I couldn’t get past the contrast between the dangerous speedy driving and the dangerous slow driving. It was crazy.

Tags: Puli Trip, scooter, Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan, train