Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (32 page)

I thought it was amazing that we were picking tea at 9 a.m., and an hour and a half later we were in the shop drinking what we had picked. It had been cleaned and dried, the leaves refined to the point where it was ready for sale. It was very much a family business and I was impressed by the way they all pulled together. Lo Hsiu-Mei’s three sons worked the plantation with her, and she had a grandson which meant the next generation was involved as well. It was a beautiful spot, high in the mountains, the tea planted on lush, green terraces with the mist draping the landscape. Given how much cooler it was, I was loath to go down to the valleys again.

But we had to, and Lo Hsiu-Mei’s son Chan-Kjao kindly gave us a lift to the railway station at Fenchihu. From there we were taking a train back to Chiayi and hopefully a local plumber would be there to meet us. We had arranged for him to drive us to the Sun Moon Lake and I was looking forward to meeting him. Not because I needed anything fixed, but because he was indigenous Taiwanese.

I was still thinking about the monastery and how flat it had left me feeling. The more I thought about it, the more disappointed I became, and I began to wonder if that was indicative of my mood, or if my mood was indicative of that. We would see other Buddhist temples in Japan and I was looking forward to comparing them.

The station was busy and we had to wait for the train. It was an hour at least to Chiayi and we’d be hungry by the time we got there, so we bought traditional lunchboxes from a little kiosk café that had been going since the 1930s. They cooked chicken or pork on the premises and sold it with spicy rice. The guy running it told me that his father had been there before him and his grandfather before that. In addition to the lunchboxes they sold rice pancakes filled with a mixture of ice cream, nuts and a hint of coriander that were absolutely delicious.

Finally the train rattled in - an old box-fronted diesel. Spotting the camera, the driver invited Claudio and me up to the cab and told us he had an English friend called Andy he was desperate to say hello to. So, Andy, if you’re reading this - your man in Taiwan says hello. I couldn’t grasp his name, he was speaking so quickly, telling me he had been driving this train for thirty years and rarely took a day off. He told us this had cost him his marriage.

The Japanese built the line so they could log this area. The tracks encircled the mountain, the train descending in spirals through thick forest where the trees overhung the rails so densely that if you stuck your head out of the window you’d be slapped in the face by leaves. Halfway down, however, we had to get out and walk. A few years previously the area had been hit by a typhoon that ripped away a great chunk of the mountain and took the train tracks with it. We had to walk five hundred metres on a twisting path through bamboo to another station and another train. It was pretty cool, actually: a train trip, a bit of downhill hiking and then another train.

Finally we arrived in the bustling and modern Chiayi City, where Yang the plumber was waiting. His van was our way of getting to the Sun Moon Lake where we would camp for the night. Despite the fact it had rained every night for the last fortnight, I was up for camping - a bit of fresh air and a night under the stars. I was thinking campfires and wilderness, a break from all this modernity. It had only been a couple of days, but after the Philippines and Indonesia it was more of a culture shock than I’d expected.

Yang was in his early fifties with hair the colour of slate. He told me he was very proud of being of aboriginal descent. Far from being a dying race, he said that his culture was alive and well. The government was keen that all peoples of indigenous origin should be fully integrated, without losing their culture, which was Malay islander, historically. Yang’s people had been in Taiwan for four thousand years, and his grandparents had spoken a similar language to that spoken in Malaysia today.

The aborigines were a tough, resilient people. The early tribes cultivated their own crops and fished the waters off the coast. The Chinese tried to settle here many times, but the tribes were so fierce they were always driven off. The Chinese settled in the nearby Penghu Islands in the thirteenth century, but the only people who came here were fishermen.

Halfway to the lake it started to pour with rain and I sat there trying to envisage putting tents up in this kind of deluge. I had been hoping for some good open country, but we were driving on a three-lane motorway and the closer we got to the lake, the busier it seemed to become. When the lake first came into view the rain had ceased, but the road ran right alongside the water and the traffic was very heavy. Far from being open country, there were buildings everywhere - restaurants, hotels, even a new white terminus for the cable car.

The campsite was run by Ling and his wife Chen, a young indigenous couple who were friends of Yang. They were very welcoming and as it had started raining again they invited us to take shelter under a large-framed canvas tarpaulin where their kids were playing. It looked like part of their home, with a few weather-beaten sofas arranged in front of a massive TV. Books, children’s toys and bits and pieces of bric-a-brac were everywhere. It was dry though, and with the rain teeming down they told us that if the tents were no good we could sleep on the sofas.

It was very kind of them, but I wanted to camp. I didn’t care about the rain or the traffic or the fact that this wasn’t in the least bit out in the wilderness. We got the tents up without our gear getting soaked, then ate spicy steamed rice barbecued in bamboo sleeves with Ling and Chen. By the time we had finished, the rain had stopped, and after a long and hectic couple of days, I was more than happy to crawl into my tent and get my head down.

FORTUNATELY, THAT WAS the last we saw of the rain and I ended up getting a pretty good night’s sleep. The main problem was the massed ranks of black mosquitoes eager to feast on my blood. Like someone trying to deter a vampire with garlic, I applied plenty of Deet and thankfully it kept them at bay for most of the night. And I suppose I should have expected a few mozzies, given we were in lush grass and moist air, camping beside a lake.

If you ignored the large buildings surrounding the lake, it was quite beautiful. The water was very still, the only ripples caused by fish jumping close to the shore. Dotted here and there around the bank I could see a number of fishermen’s huts with moorings for their boats. It was a gentle place and a good spot to spend the night. Much as I like a comfortable bed, there is something invigorating about being in the open air.

I was keen to press on; today we were making for a farm at Meifeng, high in the mountains that form the central spine of Taiwan. We were crossing to the mountainous east coast before taking a train north to Taipei and I was keen to see the difference. I guessed it would be pronounced - 90 per cent of the population live on the western side of the mountains.

With our camp packed away, I crossed the lake in Yang’s fishing boat - a narrow skiff made of plastic but built in the traditional style his ancestors would have used. In those days the lake was stocked naturally, but today small fish are brought in from local hatcheries. As we made our way across I noticed islands of vegetation bobbing on the water. Yang explained that these would encourage the fish to lay their eggs underneath and so breed naturally in the future.

He dropped me at the jetty at Shueishe, where a mountain bike was waiting for me. I hadn’t cycled yet on this trip, and I wanted to get some exercise. I had entered the Royal Parks half marathon in the autumn and so far hadn’t managed to get in much training.

A Taiwanese manufacturer called Giant had loaned me the bike, which was made of carbon fibre and weighed just eight kilograms. The brakes were state of the art and it even had an odometer to tell me how many kilometres I had covered. I planned to do only about twenty - which would get me as far as Puli bus station - but I was not as fit as I wanted to be and I thought I might be a bit stiff come tomorrow morning.

I was not riding alone. Our translator Sunny had found a companion for me, a sixty-ywo-year-old guy called Tim who had become a keen cyclist since he retired.

‘Sixty-two?’ I said. ‘He’ll never keep up with me.’

‘He might, Charley,’ she said. ‘He’s just cycled round Taiwan in ten days.’

Bloody hell, I thought; this could be embarrassing. Forty-two-year-old Charley Boorman, veteran of
Long Way Round
and the Dakar, outpaced by an old codger from Chinese Taipei . . . I’d never live it down.

Tim was waiting for us a little further down the road. He was a lovely guy and clearly the cycling had paid off - he was very trim and fit and didn’t look anything like sixty-two in his orange Lycra cycling shorts and trainers. I was wearing my favourite baggy shorts,
By Any Means
T-shirt and flip-flops and I had picked up a cycle helmet too, just in case.

We set off riding side by side and for a lot of the journey it was downhill. That was perfect because going downhill I was way ahead of Tim. Going uphill, however, was a completely different story: he was brilliant, up on the pedals with his legs pumping like a veteran of the Tour de France. He told me he had only had this bike for a couple of months and already he’d put over nine hundred kilometres on it.

‘I ride two hours every day, Charley,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I climb as high as three thousand metres.’

Christ, I thought, that’s more than twice the height of Ben Nevis; no wonder I was struggling to keep up.

It was good to be in the open air on good roads, pedalling along merrily. There’s no question you see more of the world on a motorbike than you do in a car, and more again on a bicycle. It’s all about pace; the slower you’re travelling, the more you’re going to see. On my bike I got to see plenty . . . particularly as I climbed the same hill twice. Tim was yelling at me to head for the peacock gardens, but I went the wrong way. I heard him all right and I saw the gardens, but I just thought it was some tourist attraction that I didn’t want to see. But of course it was the only way to go, so I had to double back and re-climb one of the steepest hills we had seen. Puffing and panting, I told myself it was worth seeing twice - the hillside climbing steeply, the trees broken only by a glimpse of an old landslide and a Chinese pagoda. Yes, it was definitely worth seeing again.

As we came into Puli, Tim rode up alongside me. ‘This town is a very good place,’ he said, ‘famous for the three Ws.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘What are they then?’

‘Well, first there’s the water. The water in Puli is very good to drink. Then the wine, that’s also very good to drink.’

‘What kind of wine is it?’

‘Shaoxing wine. A type of rice wine. The Japanese like it very much and use it all the time for weddings and other ceremonies.’

‘What does it taste like? Sake?’

‘No, I think it’s more like whisky.’

‘And the third W, Tim, what’s that all about?’

‘Women,’ he said with a wicked glint in his eye. ‘The women of Puli are the most beautiful in Taiwan.’

I explained that I was happily married, so the women of Puli were of no interest to me. The wine, though, was a different matter. A little later at a busy restaurant in the heart of the town, I decided it tasted like a cross between soy sauce and sake - a little harsh but quite sweet at the same time.

The restaurant was run by a guy who played Spanish guitar. Strumming away, he told me that he used to be a farmer but had lost his farm in a devastating earthquake nine years previously. He moved to the town and opened this restaurant, which he decided to give an Andalucían feel. As well as the guitar, the decor included a mass of Spanish posters plastered on every wall. With Sunny’s help I managed to work out that his love of all things Spanish came from when he was a boy and used to fantasise about flamenco dancers. So much for the beauty of Puli women then. I asked him if he had ever been to Spain.

‘No,’ he said sadly, ‘but I intend to.’

‘You’ll love it,’ I told him. ‘The wine is good and the women are very beautiful.’

After lunch I parted company with the super-fit Tim and his bicycle. He showed us to the bus station and we got aboard a pretty ropy-looking bus that would take us into the mountains. I was quite glad - this old jalopy was reminiscent of the buses on Sulawesi and anything but modern. It was as close to a traditional, modest form of transport as I was likely to find in such a technologically advanced country.

The bus driver let us out at Meifeng farm lodge, where we were spending the night. We were much higher up now and the air was much cooler, giving the place a strangely alpine feel. The lodge, a sprawling white building with a chalet-style roof, looked anything but Chinese; if you shifted it to Switzerland and started yodelling no one would have batted an eyelid. I discovered apples and tea plants clustered on the terraces, lots of vegetables and a greenhouse where a woman called Li Mei-Ling was dead-heading flowers. She spoke some English and I asked her about orchids and tea, and the different kinds of vegetables she grew.