Descending toward Taitung Airport just moments after the pilot of the Mandarin Airlines turboprop announced that we had reached cruising altitude, I felt conflicted.
On one hand, I was refreshed. The previous 24 hours in Taipei had served as a badly-needed palate cleanser after two exhilarating—but exhausting —weeks in Japan. It’s amazing what just a single day without an agenda can do for your mind and body.
On the other hand, I was exhausted—and I don’t mean in terms of the physical fatigue that lingered, in spite of how mentally rejuvenated my time in the capital had left me.
No, you see, I ended up being in the window seat on this flight, the side that looked down on the country’s east coast.
And from Yilan (with Turtle Island floating just offshore), to Hualien (where Taroko Gorge looked fine from an altitude, in spite of being badly damaged by April’s earthquake, maybe irreparably so) and finally all the way down to Taitung, one thing was constant: The grey.
Had I not been looking out for them, I might not have seen the pair of islands—Lanyu and Lyudao, known in English as Orchid Island and Green Island—that would comprise the bulk of this particular Taiwan trip.
To most eyes, their charcoal-looking landmasses would’ve been indistinguishable from the mercury seas, themselves blending into the pewter clouds floating through a silver sky.
But I saw them, albeit neither clearly nor with much enthusiasm. I wonder if my flight will even take off tomorrow? I wondered silently as I bit into the cookie the flight attendant had left for me when I went to the bathroom.
It wasn’t until I finished it that I realize it had been shaped like a hot air balloon, which was fitting: Prior to my time in the islands, I’d planned to hit up the last day of the Taiwan International Balloon Festival in the nearby Luye Highlands. Assuming it would even take place, which at the time my flight landed seemed like a coin toss.
The good news? The balloons did end up flying that next morning, even if the Hello Kitty one (which, on account of Sanrio’s sponsorship of the event, was arguably the most important) failed to inflate. The bad news? My flight to Lanyu did not, in fact, take off.
Instead, I found myself in a taxi with two Taiwanese strangers, speeding along a (thankfully) empty road toward Taitung’s Fugang Harbor for a mere chance at boarding a ferry departing at 12:30.
The time on the car’s clock, as I glanced down at my phone, was 12:23. We still had a kilometer-and-a-half to go, and I still needed to buy tickets. I couldn’t speak for my taxi-mates.
“We’ll make it,” the driver, whom I’d hoped would focus entirely on the road given his 140 km/hr speed, said in English via his Google Translate app. “Please don’t worry.”
The ironic part about my taking a ferry to Orchid Island (which I did end up making) is that I’d booked the flight precisely to avoid this fate, which the internet had described as worse than death. The ride was rough, don’t get me wrong, but not anywhere close to the worst I’ve experienced in my life.
I was tempted, upon exiting the vessel into Lanyu’s fresh air, to declare that perhaps I’d gotten lucky. I’m glad I held off on expressing that sentiment.
To be sure, the state of my rental car—a turn-of-the-century Toyota Vios with 300,000 kilometers on it and a condition I can only describe as hideous—was not enough, on its own, to cause anxiety.
No, it wasn’t until I realized that a closure of the island’s only contiguous road would result in the two-kilometer journey to my accommodation becoming a 30-kilometer one by no fault of my own that I became ever so slightly hopeless.
That, and how grey and dark everything remained, 36 hours after I’d first remarked upon the greyness and darkness of the scene. It hearkened back to my first comprehensive Taiwan trip in 2018, a saga whose misery almost killed my love for the country before I’d really even started feeling it.
While I had ended up getting some decent pictures on my first afternoon in Lanyu, including of the iconic taratara canoes of the indigenous Tao people at Iranmeylek Bay, it wasn’t until I emerged the next morning that I put pressure on myself to create.
And “emerge” was definitely the right word for my exit into the world. The sky was brighter at 5:15 than I expected, but also apocalyptically dark; the clouds that hovered over the turbid, milky turquoise waves of Miyue Bay seemed like they could plunge the world back into night it I wanted to.
Driving up to Hutoupo before I set off to photograph the scene, and doing my best not to step in the droppings of the several dozen goats defying death along its cliffs, I saw a name from a quarter-century earlier in my mind’s eye: “Monsoon Marge’s,” the water park gift shop where I’d worked the summer I was 15.
Lanyu was the sort of place the shop and its wares had evoked in me back then. Back then, when I was desperately waiting to see the world, and stuck selling mass-produced Chinese good that were vaguely tropical to rural Missourians twice my age who were proud of how poorly-traveled they were.
As I drove back around the entire circumference of the island, the only energy more violent that the fierceness with which the waves lashed the rocky beaches was they way the wind whipped all the palm fronds and grass blades and Taiwanese flags I passed.
Making my way past so-called Dragon Rock, I noticed my first fellow humans of the day: A young family on a motorcycle—they did not appear to notice me. As dad made wave motions with his arms; the daughter held her arms out as if she was flying.
As had been the case working at an artificial Six Flags waterpark circa 2000, the scenery here was inconsistent. Some views evoked the South Pacific; others called to mind Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way.
On the southwestern side of the island, it appeared that hell was quite literally breaking loose; by the time I’d looped back around to the northeast, where the taratara were still unbothered, huge patches of sky as blue as my eyes had torn through the greyscale.
As I admired Warship Rock through several bushes of amethyst-petaled ruellia, I realized I’d been hasty in having dismissed the possibilities this trip held, in reverting so quickly to hopelessness.
Even if the sun never fully came out during my 48 hours on Orchid Island, it was still unlike any place I’d even been in the world. That had to count for something.
The actual sun rose over Lanyu on morning two, in contrast to the apocalypse of morning one. Toward the horizon, where light colored the ocean a deep tangerine as it flooded over it, half a dozen taratara floated. For my own amusement, I imagined them filled with fishermen or seafarers rather than Taiwanese tourists.
The events of the morning proved a good omen for the day: It was completely clear during my flight back to Taitung (which did take off as planned), the grey rainbow of three days prior replaced by a blue one, whose gradient ran from navy to cobalt to sapphire to periwinkle.
In the distance, Green Island—my next destination—seemed to be enjoying similarly favorable weather conditions, though I took nothing for granted.
For one, transiting through Taitung Airport proved far from seamless. A rogue security staff member insisted that I check my tripod, claiming it was a policy of Daily Air in spite of me just having carried my tripod onto another Daily Air flight.
As the propellor plane lifted off, seemingly failing to gain altitude, I noticed one of the pilots busting out a paper manual. I remained strangely calm. I guess I won’t be mad about the little man bossing me around for long, I thought, and laughed to myself as the plane rocked and rolled for the entirety of the short 15-minute flight.
The plane did land but ynfortunately, for the first few minutes I was on the ground, it seemed like the rental car I booked via Kkday might not have existed.
But only for a few minutes: Soon enough, an obese man smoking a cigarette and chewing betel nut (yes, at the same time) sped through the pick up area so fast I wondered if he would stop.
I didn’t understand a word he said through his chewing and smoking, but I knew this was my car, given that he’d stopped specifically for me, the only foreigner on the island so far as I could tell.
But enough about process: I need to sing the praises of Green Island.
After an ill-advised trip up (and back down) a road I realized was military-use only after I’d driven its entire length, I began circumnavigating the island, which if you drive counter-clockwise starting at the airport only gets more beautiful the further you drive.
From the pine-lined beaches of the south coast, to the east coast’ collection of dramatic geological formations whose names riff on fairytales (Sleeping Beauty) and sites in mainland China (The Little Great Wall), I quickly began to wonder if everything I’d read about this place (namely, that it was inferior to Orchid Island) had been a lie.
Even without the gale-force winds blowing in seemingly all directions through otherwise clear air, Green Island was every bit as dramatic as its sister, if much more developed and accessible.
At a natural tidal swimming pool I accessed by hiking over spiky coral reefs in Havaianas flip flops—for reasons I’ll never understand, I left my sneakers in the car—I had a conversation with a group of university students, who engaged me (in English) upon noticing my camera equipment.
Having met during their own long stays on the island (one was working in a bar, the other as a scuba assistant), they were further down the path of falling in love with this unassuming place than I was. Or would ever get, given that I only planned to spend two days here.
The one working in the bar implored me to come have dinner in his workplace (which overlooked the pine-lined southern coast), an offer I wish I would’ve taken in retrospect.
Instead, I followed the advice of my hotel staff, and ate seafood at a restaurant definitely not intended for solo diners. I spent over NT$1,000 on huge plates full of steamed squid and clams I mostly couldn’t finish, before nearly ripping the skin off one of my toes when I tripped over a broken sidewalk pavement on the way back.
But I still went to bed enamored, if also emo: My trip was nearly over.
As I informed the students I’d intended to do, I woke up at 4:15 on my first morning—my second-to-last morning—on Green Island and headed west to Zhaori Hot Spring, where I watched the sunrise. Well, kind of.
You see, a hired hand sitting in a folding chair prohibited me (and, presumably, everyone else) from entering the actual hot spring, which is famous around Taiwan primarily because it seems to flow directly out of the ocean.
They instead relegated us to paved and formed ones, whose paving and formation obscured just how cool the place was. That, and the fact that my camera lens kept fogging as it fired mounted atop my tripod.
90 minutes later at breakfast, where I chased Taiwanese “carrot cake” and fried dumplings with milk tea, I came to a surprising conclusion.
As much as I’d loved my first day on Green Island, it made more sense to wrap up some practical elements of my trip—editing remaining photos and, perhaps more importantly doing laundry—than exploring more, at least during the hottest hours of the day.
(Which, in spite of Green Island being pretty significantly north of Orchid Island, are some of the hottest I’ve experienced anywhere.)
Sitting with my laptop in the laundromat (which was also hot, on account of ambient heat from the dryers), I thanked my lucky stars not only that I’d boarded that ferry Monday in Taitung, but that I had come to Taiwan at all.
You see, on Japan’s Miyako island a week earlier, I’d convinced myself that perhaps my trip around that country had been “enough. “Maybe I didn’t need to do my first legitimately deep dive into Taiwan since I ceased living here four years ago.
I imagined myself having walked down that path—I shuddered, I shook. It would be cliché to say my explorations of these islands have been life-changing, but it certainly is true that taking any particular path changes one life from what otherwise might’ve been. Anyway, my clothes were finished; there was no more time for contemplation.
When I finally did emerge from my hotel just past two—I had more than a few photos to edit, and wanted to get them completely done before heading out one last time—I headed for the so-called “Blue Eye,” a sea cave I’d somehow missed at the natural swimming pool the previous afternoon. I wore my sneakers today.
The scene felt lunar, in spite of the moon having neither an ocean nor an atmosphere, nor the quantity of chartreuse seaweed I’ve decided is the reason for this island being named for the color green. I didn’t spend long there—it was hopelessly hot, and the spiky corals made the ocean un-swimmable.
But as I headed back toward the car and then drove it up the hill, I did reach a satisfying conclusion.
Lanyu feels shipwrecked, like what I imagine the film Robinson Crusoe to be, even though I’ve never seen it; the island is unlike anywhere else in the world, let alone Taiwan.
Green Island, by contrast, feels like Taiwan in miniature—and distilled. More beautiful and intense and eclectic but also far simpler, with less space and nuance and fine detail.
I smiled as the plane (my last super-small propellor plane for the foreseeable future) took off again for Taitung the next morning, this time without the pilot flipping through a paper manual. Visiting these islands had changed my life, but more to the point, had improved it: I’m a better, happier person for having come here.
Taipei was once a walled city, with four gates. Two of them—the north and south—still stand (albeit rebuilt) in physical form, while the others—east and west—exist in name only. If you’ve ever been to Taipei, you might recognize the name of the west one: Xi-men.
Without anything else on the agenda for my last evening in Taiwan, I took it upon myself to explore Taipei’s former core, which is more or less the current Wanhua district.
Individual elements of this are exciting, not just the gates themselves or the remains of Nishi Hongan-ji, which add a pop of spirituality to otherwise soulless shophouses, but more than that, the idea itself is alluring: Just because something seems small or physically confined, doesn’t mean that it always has to remain so.
To paraphrase a popular…public intellectual, what can be needn’t be burdened by what has been. (Yes, I realize that Brat summer is over, and I’m a decade too old for it anyway…I digress.)
Seated on a bench overlooking Beimen, traffic swirling around it almost oblivious to its existence (and certainly oblivious to its significance), I imagined how Taipei residents and leaders must’ve felt as the fortifications around their city crumbled. How would they stay safe; how would they stay protected?
What they couldn’t see, and what I guess most of them never did in their lifetimes, was that neither safety nor protections were the object of the game.
No, it was something bigger. Something I can see coming over the horizon, like tangerine sunbeams leading aboriginal explorers in hand-carved canoes, even if like them, I don’t know exactly what it is or where it will lead me.
