What a triumphant day today was, the day of the eclipse. This was an annular eclipse, on the day of the solstice, with a long but very narrow band of totality which happened to pass through Chiayi, the town from which went to Alishan a couple of months ago. Though knowing of course that the eclipse was due, the GF and I had done no planning whatsoever, simply talked idly about taking the train down to Chiayi to watch it. In the morning, the forecast was a bit dodgy: partly cloudy, partly rainy, and reports started coming in on an English-language forum of immense grey clouds sweeping into Chiayi, bring torrential rain. I logged on to the HSR website – all tickets there and back seemed gone. But this might be because of incomplete transactions so we decided to go up to the station to see if things changed, and if not, we’d go to Serenity for lunch and try to watch the partial eclipse here in Taipei.
At the station, at one of the machines, astonishing luck – two tickets for the next train were available, and there were also a few tickets left on one – only one – of the returning trains. We immediately bought them all, and a few minutes later were on our way to Chiayi, thinking we really should have bought a pair of eclipse glasses online.
Chiayi’s high speed station was packed and the queue for the bus into town was very long. As we shuffled forward, and as I’d secretly hoped, an enterprising young man came up with a box full of cardboard spectacles. I tried one out, it seemed to do the trick, so I bought a couple of pairs, no doubt at many times the market rate.
The bus dropped us off very close to the hotel we’d stayed at last time. Next to it was a little creative park, similar to Huashan etc, which had been designated by the government as an eclipse viewing spot. So we made our way there. All along, on every high spot there was a person or two standing and watching the eclipse. The light was definitely changing by now, getting watery and strange from the eclipses I’ve seen in the past – one total in Karachi in 1996, a partial in Lahore a few years earlier.
At the creative park it was very hot but not terribly crowded. A few stalls set up by banks with fat telescopes and long queues, we ignored those. First we wandered around a bit, into the old industrial buildings – some sort of grain store, I think, with massive steel and iron machines jammed to stillness with thick paint. Then we found a spot with a bit of shade and a good view of the late afternoon sun and waited. By us was a little school group, boys and girls in uniform, making little projection boxes to see the eclipse. A large group approached, middle aged men and women carrying folding chairs, and we worried they would crowd around us, but they went on.
The light got weaker and weaker, the air became cool. Then at last, totality: a ring of fire, with a single flame shooting up from near the top. There was a strange sound from everyone there, a sort of communal groan, awed and joyful, A cool breeze rose, and silence. Then, a minute later, totality ended and the moon continued on its way.
Euphoric, we stayed for a few minutes. I felt shaken by the sight, so different from the total eclipse when I had seen the corona, and wondering if the flame I had seen was in fact a mass ejection of some sort or a trick of the intense light. Then we went on, past that large group of people who it turned out had set their chairs in a large circle and were meditating through the eclipse, eyes shut tight.
We went on to a cafe we found using Google Maps, a lovely little place with excellent hand drip coffee, and even lovelier people: a husband and wife running it, all their friends there with them, and when we couldn’t get a cab to take us to the HSR station, the husband dropped us off himself and the GF practiced a bit of Chinese, with great success.
Such a lovely day, and a reminder to never say no to anything.