Cruisin' for chicks

Like the fact that everything is in miniature. Not just the people, but the entire place. Having some idiot Westerner continually banging his head on door-frames and signs is a bit of a giggle for the locals, but the laughter works both ways. Check out this twit on the toy car.

This is not a toy!

Didn't these guys get to play with Mechano sets as children or something?

No, it isn't a dodgem car. This

Now this is a toy
is a dodgem car. And you thought Japanese cars were too small?

Words fail, Confusion reigns

Motorbike, car, truck, or dreadful failed genetic experiment?

Stop the train!

Even the infrastructure is toy-like.

This bridge fell down twice. Once in 1929, and then the extra bit in the 1999 earthquake. Apparently they used rice-sugar for mortar. My guides got quite offended when I said 'Well what did they expect?'

Job thief

It's not all low-tech though. Times have moved on since the locals worked in salt mines. This robot is actually packing bags of salt onto pallets.

'Mum?'

This guy was in a wood carving shop hoping for someone to buy him and take him home. I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to take him home, but it takes all kinds.

Not happy, Jan

Presumably this guy had been rejected too many times, and wasn't happy. I mean who wants Genghis Khan in their lounge room?

Ignorance is bliss?

I don't know why someone with their testes hanging off their ears would be so happy, but I guess that's just the nature of the Buddha. From what I can work out, Buddhism seems to be realizing that you are going to die, realizing that you don't have soul, therefore realizing that there is no meaning to your life, and that if you change your value set so that you don't care about any of the things you currently do care about, you will stop worrying and be happy. Happiness through the recognition of the total futility of your own existence? I'm crushed - and therefore happy. Each unto his own.

Child's play

I was trying to understand Buddhism and looking for the hidden collectivist gotcha ('.. therefore you must conform to the collective will, or something like it). Either I missed it or it's not there. 10 years of meditation, and that's the best the Buddha could come up with? A philosophy undergraduate could come up with that after an afternoon's drinking at the uni bar. And then have the good grace to be embarrassed about it when she sobered up.

And speaking of embarrassment ..

Men? Women? Its?

Thinking of going to Taiwan? Unless you want to spend a lot of time with your legs crossed, memorize these characters. They seem to mean 'toilet'.

Kneeling room only

Taiwan is not just full of toilets though. It's also full of temples. 32,000 of them according to my guide (estimates of the number of toilets weren't available). Who would have thought that 22 million people devoted to the workings of capitalism and creation of wealth would spend so much time building temples? Well ..

Some of them are pretty small. There is barely enough room to kneel in this templette.

Whatever ..

That's Buddhism for you. So many gods, so little time. These are everywhere - gods of the land, to bless it and produce good crops.

Another slightly larger temple. These don't lock up, but rarely get vandalized. Note the total lack of graffiti.

Got a complaint? Tell God!

And they're not all deserted either. This is a bunch of people worshiping in a temple at the top of a mountain. The locals climb to the top of a tall mountain where the air is marginally fresher than in the polluted factory plains so they can light up some incense. Obviously. Most worshipers do their thing in silence, or at least quietly, but this bunch are funny because they are making complaining noises as they worship. Loud moans which presumably let the gods know how hard life really is, and how much they need providence to smile on them.

My guide discouraged me from photographing them, so I had to do it from a distance - through the cloud cover.

Another bloody temple

Yet another temple, or shrine or something. Why do guides assume that Westerners just want to take endless pictures of temples and monuments?

So many bloody temples. Just take me to a topless sushi bar already!

Out of key, out of time, out of patience

WTF? I expected to end up in a topless sushi bar or something, and ended up in this karaoke joint.

There are two types of people in the world: those who can sing, and those who do karaoke. People usually require alcohol to make a total ass of themselves in public, but karaoke is the exception. All they need is a glass of water, and they'll get straight up on stage and wail like stray cats.

And for some reason they think that putting echo on their voices makes it sound better. Get real. It just makes the off-key notes last for twice as long.

Note to self: never apply for a job working in a karaoke bar.

Especially as the fun things always happen to other people. 10 minutes after I made my excuses and left the karaoke bar, the police raided the place. Apparently they were concerned that some cash-for-consent might have been happening in the private function room out the back, and they dragged some stoner out and took him away.

Go get 'em, coppers

The police actually handcuff their suspects to the bar in the back of the car. Heaven help them if there is an accident, but hey - serves them right for getting arrested.

Taking the piss at karaoke

But the karaoke bar wasn't a total loss. I got this picture.

No tourist story would be complete without some toilet humor. Particularly when taking pictures in public toilets can get you into a lot of trouble in many parts of the world. This isn't just funny because it's a toilet. This is funny because

The far urinal is almost totally inaccessible if anyone is using the middle one. Technically it could be done, but it would require an intimacy which would well and truly stretch the envelope of normal toilettiquette.
There are (apparent) live wires sticking out above the urinals. Presumably these were for a (since removed) auto-flush system. I can just imagine some drunken karaoke yobbo playing the reverse limbo ('how high can you go?'), and learning that salty liquid is an excellent electrical conductor. It would be the last thing they ever learn.

At least there would be one less karaoke singer in the world.

Check out the silly Westerner

Not all Taiwanese are bad singers though. The old chook on the left was some kind of spruiker, and the young one sang and wiggled a lot, and she was good. She was a pretty good singer too. I had to get quite close to take this shot to avoid sun-glare (honestly), and the old chook pointed at me and said something I couldn't understand and the whole crowd laughed. I smiled politely and slunk away. I thought she had said something rude, but my guide later translated something like 'look at this handsome man'. That would explain the laughter from the crowd, anyway.

As you can see, the local girls don't mind cashing in on their looks. Especially the La Mai ('foxy little sisters') who sell betel-nut from little booths with lots of glass to give a clear view of their .. um .. product.

Betel-nut is popular with truck drivers and their ilk. Being a capitalist nation, someone spotted the pattern that pretty girls sell more than ugly old fat men (who'd have thought?). Many booths have glass going right to the floor, so you get a petty good view of the la mai in very few clothes. I took pikkies from the car as it drove past.

Some kind of retractable booth - like James Bond.

My guide didn't seem to want to stop and let me take a decent picture, so they are all pretty blurry. He seemed disappointed. "In south Taiwan. Real la mai. Wear only bikini. Very see-through.". Clearly my guide lacked confidence in his imagination, but so do I. I had picked the wrong destination again. Note to self: next time go to South Taiwan.

It was hard to get a shot with the sun on the windows.

This one was very pretty. You'll have to take my word for it.

Nice of her to provide a translation for the silly westerners.

Slow the car down dammit - I can't get a decent shot!

This one was pretty too.

This one was bending over so everyone could see her red fishnet stockings. And her bottom.

Almost see through ..

OK, I finally get my guide to actually stop so I can get a decent shot and she turns away. She must be shy. Clearly I didn't do enough to make her feel relaxed. Have to work on that camera-side manner.

Making Betel-nut

Enough soft porn. This is the actual product that they sell. Betel-nut.

Fishing anyone?

Back to serious stuff. Economics - and the means of production.

The Taiwanese are big on food. Americans will shoot anything that moves, but Chinese will actually eat it. And what better for an island nation to eat than fish?

This boat is a really odd construction. It is actually built of pipes.

Old fishermen never die ..

And here is a smaller one, but it gives a clue as to the evolution of the design. It looks a lot like a bamboo raft.

This demonstrates that the tubes are not hollow - they are full of foam, which adds to the weight, but also the safety. It's a bit of surprise that these would be abandoned because they are so modular. Just replacing each tube as it wore out seems the most economic option.

Raft

These boats are actually rafts, which are enlarged versions of modern boats built on bamboo rafts.

These large drains, full of rubbish are everywhere. They are a real hazard. You have to be very careful not to fall into them when some truck driver forces you to the side of the road. Falling in a drain and being knocked unconscious in the process would drown you. This is good reason to wear a crash helmet even on a bicycle (which nobody does here of course, except the odd Western tourists). They are also waste of space (the drains that is, not the tourists).

Use the space

Which is why many people grow vines over them. Of course if you fell off the road and through one of these, you would probably only be found at harvesting time. And they wouldn't report anything to the authorities until they had already sold the fruit.

This is rice. And you thought it came out of a packet! Sometimes you see it being tended to by Asian women with those cane hats. One expects to see an American B52 fly over a bunch of cowering 'Nam vet's or something.

But this ain't Vietnam. This rice paddy was in the middle of a town of 50000 people. The shop behind it sells plasma TVs.

See? The prices looked pretty good too. Elsewhere I saw a 106cm Sanyo for under $AU3K.

The farms are tiny by Australian standards. A funny combination of agricultural subsidies and cash society allows people to run totally uneconomically small farms and still make money. Between the little farming blocks, there are concrete structures which double as drains and walls. The walls allow one block to be flooded (for a rice paddy or something), and its neighbor to be kept relatively dry.

These pumping stations are everywhere. Haven't these people worked out that it's cheaper to run a hose to your neighbor's station and pay him some money rather than build your own?

Ten days in a town with a population of 50,000, and the only Caucasian I saw was when I looked in the mirror. That was pretty good going. The impression is of a totally homogeneous population. The local aborigines (the 'mountain people') look too similar to the locals for outsiders to spot, and even the scattered Vietnamese mail-order wives blend in for the locals. Apparently Taiwan has an extremely low fertility rate (something like 1.2 children per female), but the birth rate for Vietnamese wives is much higher, and people have started to realize that, like it or not, Vietnamese half-casts are Taiwan's future. They seem pretty relaxed about it.

Latte: $NT40

Apparently the only sit-down coffee shop in town. Thank heavens there was one. My reputation as a latte drinking member of the chattering classes was in great danger until I found this shop.

Starbucks? Not really ..

It was educational too - hanging around the coffee shop trying to pick up local girls, I learned that seduction requires greater language proficiency than counting to ten in their native language. They probably thought that it was a measure of duration, and that anything less than 30 seconds wasn't worth it. I thought eight seconds was standard ..

Maid in Taiwan

There are lots of Vietnamese maids too. Being a good socialist at heart, I initially felt a bit uncomfortable having a Vietnamese maid to cook and clean. And she folded my undies even more neatly than gran used to. The wife seemed to adapt to the situation more quickly than I did, and phrases like "I'm not doing that - the maid can do it", were rolling off the tongue almost immediately. But when I eventually agreed with her inescapable logic - that we should both take full advantage of the maid in our own way - she suddenly found her socialist roots and started babbling about 'exploitation'. In order to keep the peace I had to avoid the maid completely for the remainder of the trip. I even had to take this photo in secret. The rest of them are on the other web site.

Wanna facial?

Getting a facial

It's not what you think! These women seem to put cream on people's faces, and run two twisted threads across them, which seems to be for pulling out hair. The other market trick is the ear dewaxing stand where old men put their ears over these conical steam things, and melt the wax out of their ears. They have these tables with bowls like ashtrays over them full of extracted wax to show how effective it is. Maybe the facial women could use the wax as a hair-removal wax? Anyway, it's totally disgusting.

Teach the children well

No good deed goes unpunished.

This guy tried to teach me Tai Chi. I was probably his worst ever student. I don't know if it was the language thing or cultural thing, but the "All movements slow. Like cat." was hard to relate to for someone used to martial arts which put an emphasis on speed. Isn't the point of martial arts to .. like .. you know .. hurt people?

He got me to draw a plan of my house and told me I should change the walls (and lose a bedroom) to improve the feng shui. I would prefer the extra bedroom, and take penance by burning some incense or something.

Japanese Garden

And it's not as if the Taiwanese live in great looking houses. This house is the only decent looking house in the whole of the town. It was built by the Japanese during the occupation, around the turn of last century. Presumably it was for the local commandant.

Small Japanese Garden

In fairness, this house across the road from it is not too bad either. Just much smaller and on a tiny block (by Australian standards). It must have been where the commandant kept his mistress or something.

Strangely enough, the older generation don't seem to bear the Japanese much ill will after their 50 year occupation (1895-1945). One old lady lamented that during the occupation they didn't even have to lock their doors (thieves had their hands amputated by the Japanese before you could say 'hold on ..'). She was sorry the Japanese had lost the war. She said that if the Japanese hadn't lost, they would be part of Japan now, and would be able to invest in Tokyo. Instead, the American victory had brought the waves of mainland Chinese, the decades of trouble, the much hated KMT, and the political stand-off with an ever more powerful Chinese dictatorship threatening 'unification'.

It's always refreshing to get an alternative view on world history.

Unfinished Business

Modern history can be interesting too. This is a huge unfinished Buddha statue. It is unfinished because it was being built with donated money, and the man with the donation box ran off with it (with the money inside). And so the Buddha just sits there. It must be hard to concentrate on the meditation with a crane sticking out of your head.

No one will donate any more money (the whole experience left a rather bitter taste in the mouth), so it can't be completed, but no-one will remove it either. In fact the government doesn't bother to remove very much. People leave whatever they like wherever they wish.

Contemplating destruction

The man who owned the adjoining land said that if it was still unfinished in 2006, he would pay to tear it down himself. He said it would cost around $AU5M to complete. I didn't ask how much that would cost him to tear down.

People who live 10 meters from the beach normally have a view of the ocean, but not when there is a massive anti-tsunami levy between them and the water. Presumably they can go and sit in the observation area and look out for waylaid sea-going men-folk or something.

The old observation point, built of scrap and falling down is on the left. It was empty when I was there, but looked like it would occasionally fill up with old men and lonely wives drinking tea, and complaining about their husbands.

And the new one is on the right. No one is bothering to remove the old one though. In fact no-one bothers to remove anything much in Taiwan. Not even rubbish. It's everywhere.

I wasn't brave enough to take the shot showing the rest of this wall, because that would have included the domed-radar installations in the air-force base to the north, and the guard at the front gate with the machine gun was the only unfriendly face I ever saw in Taiwan. I thought it would be best to avoid provoking him.

Where are the passengers?

Apparently the KMT built this to show the Chinese how keen they were on reunification. As soon as the details were worked out, this was to be the main ferry terminal for the anticipated mainland traffic. It has never been used. A testimony to bureaucratic stupidity of the corrupt KMT.

It's never even been used you morons

This sign tells how successful the terminal is. Only government could regard this level of waste and incompetence as a success.

Stray dog looking for home

Speaking of mainland Chinese living in poverty and socialist squalor, there are lots of stray dogs like this in Taiwan. They have lost much of their fur, and they presumably live on donations and waste. They don't seem to actively beg, people just feed them food scraps. I thought it was Hindus who believed that failed people were reincarnated as dogs.

Some Australian social workers many years ago decided to feed the stray dogs at Aboriginal camps to reduce the prevalence of disease (having a mangy dog lick a baby's face didn't seem to bother the parents, but it bothered the social workers). The result (of course) was an explosion of the dog population. The animals were just as sick - there were just more of them.

Why does every generation of every culture have to relearn this lesson?

Neighborhood goes to the dogs

And at what point to locals realize that dogs are genetically programmed to hunt in packs, and when do they perceive this could be a problem for their children running around the streets? Apparently never.

The Cable Guy!

This man was running fiber-optic cable, while a man about 100m away was plowing his field with a plow pulled by an ox. 19th century meets 21st century technology, and presumably nothing to do with have-and-have-nots. It's just the efficient way to do it.

Some years ago there was a suggestion in Australia, that Internet cabling could be run though the sewers. Some religious puritans thought that was the best place for it. But in Taiwan, that's pretty much a reality.

Out of the sewers

These guys were pulling communications cable through the drains.

They had a thin rope, then a thick rope, and then the communications cable itself. It wasn't clear how they got the first cable through. I couldn't see any long flexible push-rods.

The cable guy said it had 24 optical fibers in it, but everything has to be taken with a grain of salt. He originally described the cable as 'ADSL', which in Taiwan is just synonymous with 'Internet broadband'.

Oriental Tranquility ..

They are building a new overhead railway, and putting offices directly under it. I can only imagine how noisy this will be.

There is almost no graffiti in Taiwan. It's part of Western culture which has fortunately not caught on. Apparently railway underpasses are the

I love you

exception, and this was the first graffiti I came across. This is the nicest graffiti I have seen. Clearly some conscientious students decided to practice their English on the way home from school. And what a lovely message to give to that attractive class-mate you've had your eye on.

Alas, a few moments later I also .. er came .. across this one further up the

I love you too

underpass. The ejaculating penis seems to be universally seductive for frustrated teenagers. It's hard to know whether this second message was a step backward or forward. Maybe the author of the previous work decided that the "I love you" message wasn't getting through, and thought that a more direct message would get better results from the object of her affections.

ATM envy

And speaking of size fixation, these ATMs have a full sized screen. The Australian ones seem to have a tiny screen. Not that an ATM really has much to communicate which can't fit on a tiny screen. The message "Insufficient Funds - contact the bank." has fit easily onto every ATM I have ever used.

ET phone home

And this payphone is straight out of Blade Runner. It has a BIG display on it to tell you about how to use it and stuff (it even has an 'English' option for idiot western tourists to press, only to find that most of the 'English' section is actually in Chinese). And yes, that thing towards the top is a camera. In fact it's not possible to do broadband-video conference. You can send a picture via Internet (or MMS to a mobile), but not actually video conference yet. Give it another 2 years, judging by the fiber which is running around the streets.

I only counted 87 floors

Who says only Westerners have insecurities about the size of their .. you know. The tallest building in the world - 101 floors designed to look like a stick of bamboo.

This is really close to the Taipei World Trade Center, and there were more Westerners in the foyer of this building than I had seen anywhere else. Speaking of Westerners, they all fit pretty consistently into one of three categories:

Small groups of single guys, usually in yobbo-like baseball caps, and looking for a bit of Asian nookie. Someone should tell these guys that they are better off hunting as individuals.
Men accompanied with Asian women far more attractive than they are. Yours truly might fit into this category.
Men accompanied by Western women who are determined not to let them out of their sight. Feminism may have taught Western women to be unreasonable and self-serving, but it hasn't made them totally stupid.

Erosion? No problem.

Anyone who thinks that it's only Australia that has an erosion problem better think again. Taiwan has a bit of a problem too. Yes, this house is slowly falling into the river (sorry about the blurry photo). And every few kilometers along this road was a collapsed edge that you just had to drive around. The view was pretty good though. Unfiltered, and straight down.

Sometimes you have to take photos to avoid offending your guide. These ones are real purdy like.

Greenie's wet dream

Ditto

Get the idea?

Then he got excited about showing me that the stream had live fish in it. I thought fish came out of tins.

Water? Oil?

Apparently most of the waterways are too polluted to support life. No surprise considering what gets dumped into them

The drains seem to contain more oil than water.

Pristine rivers

That doesn't stop them using it for irrigating the food crops though.

Presumably this is for flooding the rice paddies. The amount of rubbish gives an indication of how much rubbish there is around the place.

Who wants last year's fashion?

Everything stays where it is dumped.

Pick of the litter

Except in the cities, where armies of workers clean up the waste in a collectivist fashion which would have made Chairman Mao green with envy. Of course these guys are getting paid for their efforts, unlike the 'volunteer labor' in communist countries. Mao would probably have struggled with that concept.

Got water?

Not everything is run in a collectivist way though. Like the water tanks. Consider this: 'Why not get a water tank when the mains water is quite consistent?'

Why stop at one?

The locals don't have a good answer either, and demonstrate displacement activity worthy of a love-struck teenager when a Hansonesque 'please explain?' is demanded.

In fact why stop at all?

Everyone has their own water tank, in spite of the fact that the government water supply is quite reliable, and hasn't had a significant failure in decades. Do they distrust the government? Surely not.

For your protection

The government certainly trusts the people. And likes to keep an eye on them to show how much. One of the advantages of a dense population is the relative cheapness of surveillance cameras. They are everywhere.

Quick quiz: name one famous real life liar who was not a politician. Okay, how long did it take you?

Take your pick!

Governments love lying to their subordinates, and here is a case in point.

The sign claims these two tunnels (for west and east bound traffic respectively) are the same height. They are not. The one on the right is a few inches higher, and one of the locals has a truck which fits through the right, but not the left. Fortunately all the other locals know this, so they never assume they won't meet someone coming the other way. The moral: always drive with one foot on the brake.

You gotta keep 'em separated.

Not everything the government does is a waste though. This is the sea wall. Not quite tsunami proof, but probably better than Ache. It's also somewhat comforting to think of what the mainland Chinese invasion party would face - a concrete wall with lots of angry little Taiwanese men taking pot-shots at the new arrivals. Warms the heart.

Rich dad, rich dad

Speaking of keepin' 'em separated, my guide described this as a typical rich man's house. The rich dude and his wife live in the middle part, the first son (and wife) live in the left wing, and the second son (and wife) live in the right wing. No house is big enough for two Asian daughters-in-law, but this one comes pretty close.

Eyes toward the West

An abandoned (mothballed?) military post for keeping an eye out towards China. These outposts are every few kilometers up and down the coast in this region. Got to keep an eye out for those mainland Chinese. The locals don't like the Chinese very much at all. Advising the locals to never trust the Chinese government gets a quick retort - "never trust the Chinese people". Never mind that they are the Chinese people. There must have been some mainland genetic malfunction over the last 200 years or something. These guys take this stuff seriously!

War games

This bunker was apparently built by the Japanese in the second world war, fearing an invasion from the direction of China. The inhabitants are no less concerned about that now.

Snug and warm

The machine gun bunkers can only be entered from the room underneath. There is also an entrance room, and a small room about the size of a toilet - which was presumably an ammunition room.

Take that commie swine!

This bunker is hidden inside the sea levy facing mainland China. A nasty little surprise for any freedom-hating commies.

The corrupt mountain of flesh called the People's Liberation Army would still face a grim prospect even after thousands of 'softening up' missiles destroyed much of the island's infrastructure.

The invading troops would see an endless 4-meter wall which would suddenly start shooting at them. I want a copy of the video.

They still glorify dictator Chiang Kai Shek for some reason. Offensive perhaps, but the changing of the guard at the Chiang Kai Shek memorial hall was truly spectacular. These guys were throwing their bayonets around and catching them with the skill of a circus juggler. More entertaining than a bunch of nancy boys in CFM boots at Buckingham Palace.

"A stranger." "From the outside." "Oooooh."

At least they don't mind Western visitors. Everyone is pretty friendly. There were plenty of stares but none unfriendly. Some of them seem pretty intense at first, but when you consider they are from old people who haven't changed their expression in 30 years (yes, eventually the wind changes and they stay like that), you realize they are just curious.

If there is racism here (against anyone but the Chinese), it's not obvious to a naive Westerner. Racism is normally a reaction against being forced to deal with people you don't want to. One dopey Westerner wondering around town is not a prelude to invasion. One dopey Westerner is just a novelty.

C'mon Aussie

And no wonder there are so few Australian tourists here. This is the closest they can offer to Weetbix - Weetabix. And the corners are rounded! Haven't these people got any idea of how to make breakfast serial?

It's real purdy

Getting bored with looking at temples? Well ..

Home away from home

Now that's the only temple I want to see - the Temple of the Twin Golden Arches. A much needed to antidote to eastern food and culture on returning Taipei! An oasis of Western decadence in a sea of oriental confusion.

The menu is in Chinese, but they say that with sufficient sign language and patience you can communicate anything but the principles of phenomenology.

Of course any seasoned traveler knows that waving money around and shouting at

MacDonald's, MMMMM ..
at people gets results much faster. This strategy produced some fries, coke, and something that could almost (but not quite) be described as a hamburger.

There's no point asking for 'Royale with cheese' or even 'Royale avec frommage'. And it's got nuthin' to do with not having the metric system.

Xenophobic Observations of the Toy People

A trip to Taiwan, through the eyes of a redneck