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Published: June 13th 2010
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Serenity
Sam as glimpsed mid-ride. Several weeks ago, two of my closest friends in the world flew to Taiwan to meet me. Though it seems like an incredible distance to travel just to meet a friend, there is precedence in our relationships for such a trek--Sam and Sarah both live in Salt Lake City, the town in which I was born but which I've lived several thousand miles away from since I was 13. Every year since I moved away I have flown back to Utah to visit at least once, and hence fragile bonds which were formed in the awkward primordial soup that is middle school have since blossomed into unique, remarkable relationships. In that context, their decision to hop across the ocean to spend a few weeks together, though still flattering, was natural.
My friends deliberately staggered their arrival times so that we could each have one-on-one time as well as time together as a threesome. Sam arrived first. He and I spent our days together in Taipei in much the same way we spend days together in Salt Lake City or in Lancaster-- lingering in cafes, going on bike rides, walking for long and aimless hours, all the while feeling equally free
to share our thoughts or to simply pass the time in easy silence. As always, our conversations were flashbulbs of new thoughts and ideas, and many of the notions which have been tumbling about in my head during these three months finally had a forum in which to mature.
That first week passed quickly, and Sarah soon arrived. Almost immediately, "real traveling" began. On Sarah's first full day on the island, still reeling from her jet lag and an unpleasant bout of food sickness incurred (we think) during her layover in Tokyo, the three of us joined my friends Calvin and Irene for a trip to the historic mountain village of Jiufen. In a dense fog and under a consistent drizzle, we five made our way through the narrow, lantern-hung streets of this mining town-cum-tourist spot, taking pictures and eating Taiwanese "little eats". Calvin was in her element as our tour guide, ensuring that we ate only the most authentic foods and visited all the most interesting spots. All the while I was playing the somewhat demanding and fun role of intra-group interpreter, being the only one of the five of us who could (sort of) speak both English
and Chinese. On our way back to Taipei and on Sam's request, we took a slight detour to the coast and my two friends from the high desert stood before the awesome and incomprehensible Pacific.
The day after Jiufen we rested and prepared for a four day-long trip down the east coast. On the morning of Monday, May 31 we boarded a train bound for the coastal city of Hualien (the same place, you may recall, where I met my Taiwanese bartender friend all those weeks ago). Our trip encountered its first pitfall almost immediately-- not yet even out of Taipei County, we were booted off the train by the conductor because we weren't holding the right kinds of tickets (my bad). Though their confidence in their misinformed and chagrined guide must have been a bit shaken, Sarah and Sam took the incident in stride and we ended up taking a very pleasant stroll through the small town of Xizhi as we waited several hours for the right train to arrive. We ultimately made it to Hualien and got to bed early after a delicious (and cheap!) vegetarian dinner.
The next day we caught an early bus into
The Hall of Great Strength
At a Zen temple we found on our ride. the jagged, intense mountains of Taroko National Park. After a sleepy brunch of powdered coffee and rice cooked in bamboo, we started on a long hike up to Lotus Lake. The terrain in Taroko is totally wild; soaring, sheer mountains and canyons like those of Yosemite, but adorned with the obscenely verdant flora of the sub-tropics and graced with a constant veil of mist. The weather was gorgeous, and the sudden solitude (we encountered only two other hikers on the trail) was delightful. We returned to Hualien that night, elated and peaceful despite our achy feet and sunburned necks.
Early on Wednesday morning we began the long series of train and bus rides that would ultimately deposit us in the southern resort city of Kending. The contrast was startling-- from a mountaintop overlooking vast, silent expanses of marble and greenery, punctuated by the rapid flight of a swallow or the hoot of a macaque to a dense, noisy, tawdry, hyper-commercialized tourist trap in less than 24 hours. We checked into the first hotel we found (a dive, as it turns out, but cheap) and ate our first proper meal of the day (during the long hours spent riding the
trains, the three of us subsisted entirely on candy and bread-like things purchased from the station 7-11s). We spent the late afternoon basking in the calm, warm waters of a small cove, marveling periodically at the absurdity of the whole situation. We walked down a quiet and floral highway outside of the city until the sun set, then returned to the fray for an uninspired Mexican dinner (our five-dollar order of nachos consisted of a plate of old Nacho Cheese Doritos and a small dish of salsa from a can). We strolled the length of the tourist market for completeness's sake, then returned to our motel for the night.
On Thursday we retraced our steps northward, experiencing for one last time the long, improbable stretches of sea and mountains featured through the windows of our nearly-empty train. We ate dinner at my favorite vegetarian restaurant in Taipei, then ended our evening at a coffee shop near my school called Zabu, a haven of good music and great coffee at which I've become a regular, and with which both Sam and Sarah fell quickly in love.
Sam flew back to the U.S. the next afternoon, and Sarah and I
spent her remaining days in Taiwan like Sam and I spent his first. Illuminating conversations, luxurious afternoons spent reading or walking, lots of photos and naps taken. She hung around for four lovely days, then boarded her own flight home.
Only since Sarah's departure has the surreality of her and Sam's presence here really struck me. Beyond the simple pleasure of allowing me to be in their fine company, the significance of their visit lay in that it shattered the illusion of Taiwan as a place entirely removed from the rest of my life, which has allowed me to feel even more like a resident here and not merely a traveler passing through. It's becoming clearer that Home is not a place, but is a state of being which is accessible anywhere.
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