Yesterday we went for a stroll. First a taxi down to Xinbeitou (since the shuttle bus was on reduced hours for the weekend). We shared it with a couple from Japan and their young daughter who are staying in the building and will be taking over our flat when we leave this week. The wife was very enthusiastic about a Japanese instagram account about Beitou food. We didn’t really have much need for it as we’re leaving the area soon, but the journey down was enlivened by the struggle to give us the name of the account which was in Japanese. Our quiet suggestions that we take a photo of the account and type it in later, or else to receive the name through a messaging account were ignored and instead the couple spent most of the journey devising every more baroque (and failed) ways to convey the name of the account. Finally defeat was admitted and the name was shared over Line.
We went to a small Japanese restaurant for lunch, which for my money has the best food we’ve had in the Beitou area. They serve a main with a few standard sides (soup, cold tofu, fish cakes and rice), all made with great finesse. The tofu in particular is excellent, topped with wasabi mushrooms, and the main I had, a sort of chicken kiev, was superb. Lovely stuff.
Then off to the best cafe for a latte and a slice of cake. I usually get a drip of some sort, a nice sour tasting one, but here their lattes are very good indeed, as are their chiffon cakes. We had one in coffee.
Then the day’s actual stroll began. First we walked back to Beitou, and on to the Hong Gah art gallery, up on the 11th floor of a nondescript office building. On the way we got schooled on our tones in shíyī, 11.
The gallery was very nice. Some lovely enbroidered images from their permanent collection, using a fine but dense satin stitch to make some very alive pictures. The temporary exhibition was a show of local work, by students and other residents, but was far, far better than that might lead one to think. It included a video installation called ‘Happy after school’, which was a video of older women, all dressed in vivid pink and presumably teachers, standing like a choir and singing into electric plugs and extension wires, before switching over to hairdriers plugged into the extension wire. There was a gorgeous view over allotments and rice fields, and what looked like a jacket dropped onto the floor. This turned out to be part of another show, one of a series of performance art works put up by local students. We saw a couple: one with a young fellow wrapped in a green towel and crouched on the floor, weeping, as the others watched him intently and expressionlessly, and the other of another boy lying on a slab as a girl gave him CPR while all around the other laughed. Nothing profound but well done.
The next stop was a modernist Buddhist monastery a 10 minute walk away past a candy factory which gushed its artificial fruit scents onto the street. It was a very fine space, peaceful without seeming separate from the busy roads and industrial landscape – or indeed the rice paddies – around it. It was of the grey concrete open space school, with a beautiful lilly pond the only colour. The main hall had a slight feel of a municipal building but I did really like how they’d cut the calligraphy into the walls so that the sky shone through it, and the sconces with small Buddhas were white and grey, lit up and scattered across wide walls. Shame it didn’t come together for me, but the GF liked it.
We continued strolling, through quiet neighbourhoods and past grimy workshops, a little ramshackle temple, under overpasses and over bridges crossing the river. We finally got to Qilian which was the start of the actual city stroll: I’d found a Taiwan walks blog which laid out a very nice sounding stroll, surprisingly green for something in the middle of the city, it sounded like. It was rated 3 out of 10 for difficulty and ended up in Xinbeitou which seemed exactly right.
So off we went through the park by the MRT stop. Of course it was uphill – in Taiwan seeming all strolls are uphill – but then when the actual walk began it was not just uphill, it was up a short cliff that I had to crawl up. THe GF, being more athletic, was able to run up, staying upright through sheer momentum. Then up and on through the trees, very quickly feeling as though we were no longer in a city, though every now and then the canopy would break, revealing the densely packed rooftops of Taipei. The next point of interest was a shelter, uassuming but quite attractive white art deco with three moon windows and outside it a sundial. Behind it, over a low wall, the walk continued along a narrow path which snaked past a derelict Chinese graveyard, with their curved gravestones overgrown with weeds and some almost hidden beneath bushes and trees.
The landscape varied a great deal, from hard shrubs and bare earth to lush ferns, and the glimpses of the city came and went. Aside from those we could have been far away from other people. Then this changed: on one side, a slope fell away steeply to university playing grounds, and on the other side to lush forest. Up ahead another cliff face with a rope hanging down, sheer drops on either side. I tend to think that any walk which requires the use of ropes is at least a 5 out of 10, but clambered up to the very top of the stone ridge overlooking the tennis courts of Yangmin universty and the forest. Eventually the hill curled away from the tennis court and plunged nearly straight down, a narrow snaking way just wide enough for a foot at a time, the bare striped clay soapy and and quite slippery. So we made our way down very carefully, I doing my usual thing of reenacting every possible misstep and tumble, all the ways my feet could get tangled up or slide from under me.
At the foot was a very narrow, dark valley with high ferny sides. A path led straight up from it, to the battleship rock. Although it wasn’t on our walk, we decided to take the detour and scrambled up till we met broad stone stairs with scores of people of all ages going up and down. Taiwan is admirable in how all, young and old, seem to value exercise and the outdoors.
Battleship rock was pleasant enough, with a nice view of the city, but now it was feeling like tale afternoon with much of the walk still to go, so we returned swiftly to the valley and continued. Again, it was completely quiet, indeed we didn’t see another person till we arrived in Xinbeitou. The path was nevertheless maintained, with haphazard stone and tiles places where a foot step was needed, an occasional car mat for very muddy bits, and a couple of boulders with characters carved into them. It was getting a little dark, though still golden, and the fear of tripping over roots made us hurry.
Then we arrived at the point marked in the blog post as possibly 6 out of 10. This turned out to be a steep mudslide straight down, with a rope at the end hanging down into a gap in a cliff face and disappearing straight down into what was basically a vertical cave shaft. At the far end we could see some light. The GF went first, finding his way down to see if it was indeed something we could do given that it was getting dark. I followed eventually, opting to just slide on my bottom through the mud, moving from tree to tree, until I was at the cave shaft. I took the rope and lowered myself down and of course my legs were too short, I couldn’t reach a foothold and instead was left dangling. After a moment’s panic I climbed back up. The GF directed me to one side where the ledged moved up a bit, I gave him my backpack to hold and lowered myself down, finding a toehold and a few finger holds that I could then use to climb down through the shaft.
We emerged at the side of a rockface clearly used by climbers and continued and, as full darkness fell, arrived in Xinbeitou. My hiking trousers, which are offwhite, had an inglorious layer of mud extending from my waist to the back of my knees, but I decided to brave a restaurant for some noodles, and then we went back to the cafe. Here there was a private event going on but they agreed to sell us some strawberry cake, and so we returned. The others were not back from their day’s expeditions, so we showered thoroughly, I soaked my trousers to get the mud out, and we settled down with cake and tea to watch Us, which we had been looking forward to for a very long time.
It was very good, though not as good at Get Out, Peele’s previous film. It suffered from a little too much exposition, but had a couple of funny moments, a lot of frightening moments, and a superb performance by Lupita Nyong’o. Meanwhile the others returned and we discovered that the hot water had stopped working, so I privately thanked the lord that I’d had my shower though the morning’s was a delayed till someone came to fix it.