“Do you need help?” The fish geng (thick) soup seller asked, in English, as I began setting up my tripod in front of his shop on Guiyang Street in the heart of Taipei’s Wanhua District.
“No,” I smiled, “but thank you.” Unless you can touch up my botox for me, I thought silently and laughed. Behind me, traffic lights strobed green, yellow and red as motorcycles raced underneath neon signs on either side, Taipei 101 so far in the distance that I could only spot it because I knew to look for it.
I’d walked down this street (and explored all of Taipei’s central districts) dozens of times over the years. To be sure, I’d planned to be resting on my first morning back in the country (after a whirlwind trip through Japan, I needed some extra sleep), not out on the streets shooting.
But whether it was the iconic scene in front of the soup shop, the perfectly placed “pocket” temple opposite my Airbnb (itself down an alley that felt trapped in time), or the countless delicious-smelling food stalls I passed en route to my preferred xiaolongbao dealer, I was seriously—and surprisingly—inspired.
So much so that as I made my way toward Songshan Airport just a couple hours later, I felt wistful, even sad. But alas a destination completely unknown to me awaited, to say nothing of the fact that I’d be back in the capital in less than 72 hours.
As the ATR-72 lifted off, its climb seemed anemic. Neither the Taipei skyline (nor, after that faded behind but not necessarily below us, the lush jungles all around the city) seemed very far beneath the turboprop. I wondered, if the plane did go down shortly after taking off, what the chances of surviving would be.
This wasn’t entirely surprising, of course: Propeller aircraft don’t fly nearly as high as jets, certainly not on sectors like Taipei-Beigan, which are less than 200 nm in length.
Still, the ocean felt too close for comfort; I could see individual waves below, though this was likely as much a function of proximity as it was the sheer turbidity of the seas around Taiwan. I wondered how long I could tread water without succumbing, if I found myself in such waters dozens of miles from shore.
Beigan is famous (to the extent that any place so obscure can be described as such) for its so-called “blue tears,” a name given to the bioluminescence that laps in some abundance at its shores in the late spring and early summer. They were the main reason I came.
So the announcement from the young man who picked me up at the airport stung badly. “You won’t see the blue tears tonight,” he declared matter-of-factly, though it seemed the forcefulness of his speech might’ve been a function of limited language ability. “The season is already over.”
I smiled and considered pushing back, or asking for qualification, but didn’t.
After we arrived at his family’s B&B, to be sure, he arranged for a rental car to be delivered to me, and quickly went through a tourism map with me while we waited for it. I had put most (but not all) of my eggs in the blue tear basket; many of the spots he ended up recommending were on my list anyway.
My initial impression of the island, the bad weather (which, sadly, I’ve come to accept as almost inevitable in Taiwan) notwithstanding, was that it reminded me slightly of Kinmen, which I’d visited in 2020.
Not the architecture or attractions (to the extent that either island has “attractions”), but in how cast-away both feel. That, and the military presence.
Here more than there, however, it was unclear when a fort or vehicle was actually owned or operated by the army, or when it was some kind of tourist attraction.
Walking down from the Bishan Mountain viewpoint, for example, I found two young couples sitting at picnic tables set up in front of walls painted in camouflage. But they were clearly civilians, and somewhat reckless ones at that.
“Are you sure you don’t want to share a Corona beer with us?” The more gregarious of the two men (who had just seconds before been behind the wheel of his SUV) cajoled me after having refused to take bu dui for an answer not once but twice.
In contrast to Kinmen, Beigan was extremely simple to navigate. There was, effectively, one road that went around the entire island, though it did branch off here and there; the shape of the island made a circuit impractical.
As the afternoon dragged on, the sky intermittently cleared; at times, the sea was calm enough that it appeared blue or green, rather than the brown that had been lapping at Qiaozi Village when I first arrived from the airport.
Certainly, the scenery seemed more beautiful under these conditions, though “beautiful” is not the first word I’d use to describe the place. It was unrefined, maybe even ugly.
In order to most efficiently see whatever blue tears (if any) there ended up being, I decided to have a relatively early dinner, of mussels and goose barnacles that the young man’s father literally brought inside in a bucket as I returned from sightseeing.
On my way down to the dining room, I noticed a surprisingly profound message in a decal embossed on the wall just at eye level. Our lives are not meaningless dreams.
As he showed me how to eat the kamenote (as they’re called around these parts), Freddy (as I learned his English name to be) softened his position on the tears.
“You might be able to see them here,” he pulled out his map, and pointed to a beach not far from the airport’s runway. “But they will be faint.”
I did manage to see a few tears, though I won’t lie: I had to enhance my images not-so-slightly in order for the tears to be perceptible to you. Nevertheless, as I got in the car to drive home, my jubilation quickly dissolved.
“Air India 787 crashes just seconds after take-off,” the notification on my phone said. The aircraft, the article it linked went on to explain, had apparently failed to gain altitude.
I thought back to the vision I’d had lifting off from Songshan. Our lives, the words hit differently, all of a sudden, are not meaningless dreams.
The next morning, rain eventually gave way to dry clouds, which eventually gave way to sunshine. It transformed Beigan dramatically, though if I’m honest, I had already moved onto Nangan, if not in my mind then in my heart.
Which wasn’t a heavy lift, of course: The latter island was only 20 minutes by high-speed ferry from the former.
The better weather resulted in me having an immediately more positive impression of Nangan than I had of Beigan.
The colors were bright, be those the emerald forests beneath the towering Mazu statue, the threateningly blue skies above or the fuchsia bougainvilleas everywhere, matched only in their strikingness by the deep, back wings of the swallowtails who fed on their flowers.
Wisely, I’d known that such conditions wouldn’t last long; after arriving by taxi at my hotel near the statue from the port, I quickly talked my hotel owner into renting me his personal vehicle.
Within an hour I’d ticked half the items on my list off it; while both the sky and the sea were significantly more muted by the time I sat down for lunch in Jinsha Village, I was satisfied with all I’d seen while conditions had been optimal.
The food was disappointing, however: There was no fresh fish left for the day; I’d had to choose an oyster omelet (which was greasy and flavorless) instead.
As the winds picked up and drizzle turned to torrential rain, the older woman who prepared my meal (lovingly, if light on seasoning) invited me to come inside the restaurant, which she’d previously said was off-limits.
On the wall hung what appeared to be some kind of memorial image, with the years “1981-1991” centered at the bottom of it. The message seemed poorly translated, at best. If a life too long no feeling, then choose to change a different way of life.
The next morning, after exploring the offerings at Jieshou Shizi Market (I eventually settled on the deep-fried oyster pie), I walked up to an unnamed temple (it isn’t even on Google Maps) to enjoy it.
Built in a Fujian style, with walls shaped like scalloped hexagons hued a cool, cherry red, it was completely deserted for most of the time I was there, though an older man (who responded to me only with a half-smile when I attempted to speak Chinese to him) did show up just before I left.
Throughout both days on Nangan, as you might imagine, additional details continued pouring in about the plane crash, including the fact that there had been a single survivor.
Apparently, the feeling of the plane sinking had compelled him to open the emergency exit (he’d been sitting in the exit row), and jump around 100 feet to the ground just seconds before impact.
Whether or not that ended up being the true story was irrelevant. He had lived even though he should’ve died; that reality, as illogical as it was, was the only one that mattered.
Looking out to sea, another storm blowing in, I noticed that the swallowtails here were struggling to continue feeding from their bougainvilleas. But one in particular refused to be carried by the wind.
Riding the high-speed rail southward to Yunlin (one of the only Taiwanese counties I’d never previously visited), it dawned on me that the 10-year anniversary of my first-ever trip to Taiwan was close. Maybe it had even passed.
It was June of 2015, and I’d decided to combine two countries I hadn’t yet visited at the time—South Korea and Taiwan, in that order—into a single trip.
I’d stayed entirely within the capital of each country, and notably hadn’t taken even a single day trip, unless you count Tamsui Fisherman’s Wharf as a day trip from Taipei (I don’t).
Milestones notwithstanding, the traveler I am today has little in common with the one back then, for whom this whole travel blogging thing (which he was sure, at some point sooner rather than later, would come crashing down around him) was more of a means to an end that a career or even a lifestyle.
These days, to be sure, I dig deep. Though not as deeply as I had to dig into my wallet to park for just five minutes near the underwhelming Taiping Old Street, in Douliu City.
NT$900, the notification displayed with a joyful ding in my Apple Wallet as I tapped my phone on the kiosk, whose screen did not display any pricing. I crossed my fingers that this had merely been a pre-authorization.
Yunlin is a rural part of Taiwan, so it made sense that things started getting interesting only went I arrived in agrarian Wukeng.
It’s famous for coffee plantations (though, curiously, visitors are not permitted to enter hardly any of them—we can just visit coffee shops); I instead found my creative inspiration amid pineapple fields and banana groves.
“Did you climb Mt. Hebaoshan?” The friendly man at Baden Coffee Shop, who spoke surprisingly good English considering how far out in the middle of nowhere he lived, asked me as he sat a complimentary (and curious) “brown rice coffee” down in front of me. I nodded.
“The park was a bit poorly maintained,” I complained, remembering how I could scarcely see any of the surrounding countryside for probably 90% of the hike. “But the view from the top was nice.”
I thought back on the massive, seated Buddha statue I’d noticed towering over some greenery in the far distance, and wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake in choosing not to go there.
The man, whose name I would later learn was Wen, was effortlessly kind, almost gentle. Some of this was his job, of course; it was a smart strategy for talking me into the shop’s lunch special: A crispy-fried pork knuckle with a layer of fat atop it as thick as the brown rice coffee had felt in my mouth.
But he was also genuinely charismatic, asking about my trip to Taiwan (and even my life in the US), and insisting before I left (though not after another gift: A homemade coffee jelly, which he encouraged me to pour a small cup of half-and-half over before I enjoyed it—I obliged) that we taken a selfie.
Though I doubt I’ll ever see him again, it was the sort of interaction I live for these days, the kind of meeting that makes the plan I’m following less of a road map and more of a series of touchstones.
The sort of human being that, all on his own, humanizes and personalizes the destination. Which is not to say my engagement with Yunlin became or remained wholly emotional.
Visiting the Yunlin Hand Puppet Museum in Huwei, for example, I read intently about how the seemingly frivolous art form had been a highly supervise form of resistance during kominka, aka the Japanization period when Taipei had been under Tokyo’s control.
The museum, which appeared from the outside to be a charming, old building, even had three life-sized prison cells within it. They were empty, thankfully.
I ended the evening at Chaotian Temple in the town of Beigang, not to be confused with Beigan (where I had, for all intents and purposes started this trip to Taiwan).
Truth be told, I’d wanted to come here for years, even before I knew exactly where it was. I’d seen it in a whole host of images, many of them related to the Mazu Procession, which took place this spring for the first time in many years.
I initially admired the magnificent edifice from atop another nearby temple; it was only when I got to ground level that I realized the source of the smoke in the air: People had been exploding firecrackers, though I didn’t know why (and, feeling overheated, I didn’t want to ask just then).
Initially, I observed the scene and thought there might have been a funeral; however, walking through the inside of the temple and seeing the sheer number of worshippers, this seemed unlikely: No dead person is popular enough to draw out an entire town.
Just then, the firecrackers started; within seconds, the sound of hundreds of thousands or even millions of them going off filled all the air and sky around me.
They echoed off the intricate pieces of the temple as if all the locusts in the world were singing at the same time, as if all the water in the world rained down at once, in the same place.
I overheard a tour guide explaining the significance of the day in English, but demurred from asking her ask well: I hadn’t paid for her services, after all.
Eventually, just before returning to the nearby rooftop to try and capture sunset, I mustered up the courage to inquire with the temple’s staff, having unsuccessfully asked half a dozen fellow guests (in Chinese) if they spoke English and found that none of them did.
Shockingly, he didn’t seem interested in fully explaining the spectacle. “Other temples come here to burn their incense,” he spoke into my translator app, neglecting to answer me asking him directly if the festival had a name (or if it was even really a festival), and if so what it was.
Walking back to my rental car to begin the long journey back to Taipei (and, the next day, back over the Pacific), I saw a mural that seemed to depict the scene I’d just seen. Why on earth had this person not had anything to say about it? Why couldn’t he have been like Wen?
Approaching the United Airlines 777 (which I could, of course, barely seed through the fogged, small and aged windows of Taoyuan Airport’s decrepit Terminal 2), I got a whiff of deja vu.
This was unsurprising: I’d departed Taiwan on a United 777 about 10 years earlier after my first trip to the country, potentially this same flight number, and maybe even this same gate.
Which got me to thinking: What precise day had I left Taipei in 2015? A search of my photo library revealed a shocking truth: It was June 15—it was today.
Now, I try not to give too much credence to numerology or to superstition in general, the fact that I spend so much time in the most superstitious part of the world notwithstanding.
At a minimum, this was a wonderful coincidence that gave me another opportunity to reflect on how far I’d come.
At best, it was serendipity that reaffirmed my being on the right path (which is especially welcome today—up until a few days prior, I’d been booked instead on a Turkish Airlines flight to the south of France, via Istanbul).
As the island disappeared beneath me (which always happens so quickly, given how thick the blanket of clouds covering it usually is), I simply sat with how right everything felt. A meaningless dream, maybe, but a sweet one.
