Day 40 - Baisha To South Bay To Kenting, and Thoughts About Modern Medicine, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
Day 40 - Baisha To South Bay To Kenting, and Thoughts About Modern Medicine, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
This morning, during a yummy breakfast in our resort, I mentioned to Jules that I was feeling so grateful that we are so healthy and strong, with no pain or health issues of any kind.
He said: “Yes, you are right, and I haven’t even needed to see a doctor in so many years!”
His answer surprised me.
The idea that we have to visit doctors in order to get a clean bill of health, is not natural.
It has been drilled into our collective consciousness by the medical profession.
There was a time when people only went to the doctor when they were sick.
The idea that we should get checked regularly and aim for early detection, is very new in the span of human history.
Not long ago, modern medicine didn’t exist.
Hospitals, if they existed at all, were places for the poor to die.
Hospitals were warehouses to house destitute, sick and poverty stricken patients.
The rich could afford to have private doctors, but those doctors were often quacks and charlatans.
One mid-western physician in the USA kept a daily diary of his visits to patients.
In it, he confessed that he only had two things in his black medicine bag that worked. The rest were snake oils under different names, and did nothing but give hope to the rich.
The two things that worked were a saw to cut off injured or diseased limbs, and morphine, to dull the pain while he cut off limbs.
Needless to say, the average age of mortality was 49 years.
The low age of mortality was a result of poor sanitation, and lack of any real medical treatment or vaccines.
Years later, sanitary conditions improved, refuse centers started to collect trash instead of it festering in the streets, and clean water was piped into homes.
The sanitary improvements added 15 years to the average mortality (making it 64).
The invention of certain medicines and vaccines that actually work, added another 10 years to the average mortality, making the average age 74.
And that is about it in our day and age.
Shocking to see how little we have improved.
New research has proven that caloric restriction in animals worked in every species.
Animals who ate 30% less calories, lived 30% longer.
No exceptions.
It worked for every species, from monkeys to mice.
Just yesterday, we met an adventurous couple who were cycling around Taiwan.
They told us that they have cycled around many places for years now.
Yet this man, who is capable of cycling around the world, said to us that he couldn’t walk long distances like us, without going through an operation to replace his right knee.
This was a shock to me.
He really believed that his knee was not good enough for walking, yet he is able to cycle thousands of miles across the Americas…
I told him that when we started walking more than ten years ago, we had much more pain in our backs, knees, hips, neck, shoulders and feet.
But years of practice have healed us, and we have no pain or discomfort in our bodies.
He was a gentle, intelligent person, but I don’t think that he understood what I meant.
We make our own life-scripts by the ideas we hold and believe in, and being powerful gods, we make them into our reality.
We packed up our backpacks, thanked the resort for their hospitality and comfort, and continued our walk south.
The weather was hot and humid, with a nice breeze, and it didn’t rain.
It was a pleasant walk south along the coast.
We visited several cool little beach towns that seemed to draw a lot of scuba divers.
Some of these towns had great little cafes and small restaurants.
I was so tempted to stop multiple times.
Because we didn’t have a long walk ahead of us, and the weather was not stormy, we walked slowly, taking in the vibes of the area.
Our first stop of the day was for lunch, in a cool divers’ town called South Bay.
Many shops offered diving trips, rental gear, and there were a few people getting into or out of the water in their diving suits.
We had an excellent matcha latte and a very good oat milk latte, and then we split a vegetable sandwich for lunch at an excellent cafe called “Innside Coffee.”
The vibe was very laid back, and we spent some time catching up on our writing.
We then continued walking further south on the coast.
It was fun to look at the busy beachfront panoramas, seeing standup paddleboarders, surfers, jet ski riders and banana boat rides, all crowding onto this stretch of bay.
As we walked south, we noticed that almost every building was a hotel or a guest house.
I really liked the vibes of this area.
By late afternoon, we reached our accommodation, in the center of Kenting town, located on the same street as the night market.
The guesthouse was locked, and the shopkeeper next door told me to call the owner.
We called the owner, who said that she would send someone to open the door for us.
It took about half an hour, and multiple phone calls, until a woman came over.
She spoke no English and couldn’t understand our names.
She took us to a different location, and showed us a room that had no similarity to what we had reserved.
When we refused to accept the depressing room she had offered, she called the owner, who had another woman who actually spoke English call me back.
The woman explained that the owner thought that our reservation was fake, and that she had already rented our room to someone else.
She was offering us another room in a newly renovated building, which she claimed was a more expensive room.
We didn’t accept her offer, and insisted on canceling our reservation, which was non-cancellable.
She agreed to do that.
I looked at my map and saw that there were many charming guesthouses along the beach road.
We walked over to the ocean, and asked the first place that looked nice if they had any rooms.
They had only one small room on the street side.
I thanked them and kept going.
The second place we entered had a lovely room with an ocean view at the same reasonable price as the place we had just canceled.
After showering and then going to do our laundry, we went out for dinner at a Mexican-Italian restaurant, then walked along the main road with thousands of other people to see the lively night market.
With love,
Tali
Today’s Stats:
Steps - 25,900
Daily Distance - 17 km
Total Distance To Date - 632 km
