Day 43 - Manzuhou And Meeting Up With The Group, The Long Walk South In Taiwan

 

Day 43 - Manzuhou And Meeting Up With The Group, The Long Walk South In Taiwan 

The guesthouse we stayed in last night delivered breakfast for us in the morning, just as we had finished packing up our backpacks and getting ready for the walk.

It was a simple breakfast of vegetable sandwiches and tea, and we just put them in our backpacks to eat later.

Today we had a strange plan for our walk.

The distance between our guesthouse of last night and our next destination is over forty kilometers, which is too much to cover in one day.

So we booked a guesthouse only eight kilometers away, with the idea that we would walk there, drop off our backpacks and continue walking north, and make arrangements with the guesthouse owner to pick us up later in the day and bring us back to the guesthouse, and then drop us off again the next day at the same spot we walked to today.

The walking group that our friend Wendy arranged to walk with us for the last few days will meet us at the same guesthouse, and all of us will start walking together from the same spot we will reach today.

We walked about eight kilometers to the town of Manzhou where our guesthouse for tonight is located.

At a convenience store in Manzhou, we sat to drink tea and eat our breakfast.

We also bought some food for lunch and dinner, because we were not sure what the group had planned or arranged for dinner.

I bought two salads, roasted sweet potatoes and boiled corn for dinner, and some Onigiri rice balls for our lunch.

As we were eating, I checked my map and saw that there was a bus going north to the same indigenous community center that we planned to walk to today.

If we forget about dropping the backpacks at the guesthouse, we could just take the bus there and walk back to the guesthouse, covering the same distance backwards.

This was a great idea, because the walk there was up a mountain pass, while walking backwards meant that we would be going down the mountain pass.

No doubt it would be much easier to walk down with our full backpacks, including the food that we had just bought. 

We sent a message to our guesthouse, saying that we didn’t need to be picked up at the end of the day because we would be walking there.

We estimated that we would arrive in the late afternoon.

We spent a little more time sitting in the cafe inside the convenience store, because the bus was not scheduled to arrive for another forty minutes.

At the time when the bus was scheduled to arrive, we left and walked over to where the bus stop was supposed to be, next to the Seven-Eleven convenience store.

There was no sign of a bus stop anywhere on the side of the street that was going north.

I asked a local lady, who was sitting next to a scooter parking lot and seemed to be the parking attendant, where the bus stop was.

I was sure that she must know.

She didn’t know.

Clearly the locals never take the local bus.

They either have cars or scooters to get around.

But she wasn’t about to leave me not knowing what to do.

She literally grabbed my hand and walked me over to the town hall across the street.

It was a big hall, similar to that of a big bank, with many desks and many clerks.

In a loud voice, she demanded to know who can speak English and many hands pointed to one tall young man who was eating his lunch.

He finished chewing, wiped off his mouth and hurried over.

His English was very basic, almost non-existent, but the lady explained that I wanted to take the bus north to the community centre.

The man grabbed a thick file which turned out to be the bus schedule, and after careful examination, declared that there was no bus going north soon.

The next bus was two hours away.

Google Maps was wrong yet again.

I asked where the bus stop was, and he confirmed that it was in front of the Seven-Eleven Convenience Store, and that we just have to wave at the bus and the driver would stop.

I returned to the convenience store, and the lady grabbed my hand again and walked me to the front of the line, demanding that the clerk confirmed that indeed there was a bus stop there.

I thanked her deeply and she dismissed my gratitude as if it were the most natural thing in the world to help travelers who ask for help.

I wasn’t sure what to do.

Waiting two hours was not an option.

We could change our plans and walk there and get picked up by the guesthouse.

We could wait another five minutes until the scheduled time, according to Google maps, because locals who never take the bus anyway could be wrong.

I have so many memories of locals giving us the wrong information during our many pilgrimages.

Jules reminded me of the time we asked a garage owner in Kyushu, Japan, if the bus to the nearest city stopped by his garage, as shown on my map.

He said no, it didn’t, and pointed to the other side of the street.

Since I can communicate in Japanese, I explained that we were going in the opposite direction to where the bus stop was located, but he insisted that the bus only stopped there.

It was a bus that only came once every three hours, in an area with no taxis or other transportation.

My guts told me to do what I thought was right, and ignore his advice,

It wasn’t easy to do in Japan, a culture where “losing face”, or making another person wrong, is a very big ‘faux pas’, even an embarrassment or an insult.

But we were tired, wet from the rain and exhausted, and I figured that it was better that his feelings would get hurt, than us missing the only bus before sunset.

The bus came just as I thought it would and stopped just in front of his garage, and we boarded the bus to the man’s amazement, as he bowed repeatedly to us, expressing his apologies.

This was not the only memory we had of ignoring locals’ advise or even taking wrong advice from the locals.

During the Chugoku pilgrimage in Japan, we once asked a local woman who was carrying several shopping bags, if there was a shorter way to climb up a mountain to get to a mountain top hermitage temple that was part of our pilgrimage.

She said that the only way up the mountain was to walk along the steep car road that goes there.

The temple has been there for hundreds of years and the town has sprouted around it, so I had no reason to suspect that she would not know what she was saying.

The temple was the heart of the town.

It hosted yearly festivals and events and it was a major tourist destination in the area.

She expressed her opinion with such confidence, that I had no reason to doubt her.

She even apologized to us for the fact that we had to climb up the mountain.

The reason I was looking for a direct forest route to the temple was that it was getting very late in the day, and walking for more than two hours up the very steep mountain road meant that we would get there so  close to closing time, that we might not be able to get a stamp in our book and on our scroll.

I also worried about the way down, which meant we would have to do it in the complete darkness of the countryside.

We almost ran up the mountain, rushing to get there before closing time.

We were exhausted when we arrived, just before they closed at 4:30 PM.

We made it in less than two hours, instead of the two and a half hours it would have taken us, if we had walked at a normal pace.

The priest took pity on us and kept the temple open a bit longer, allowing us to take photos and visit the beautiful grounds.

He also gave us drinks and snacks to revive us.

When it was time for us to walk back down, we turned towards the road, and he looked puzzled.

He explained that he was sure that we had come by way of the forest road, which takes only thirty minutes and goes directly to town.

He said that the temple even has a rope gondola, that takes visitors from mid mountain to the very top.

We looked at one another and I almost burst into tears.

We walked down the forest path and reached town well before sunset.

We vowed that this would be the last time we took advice from the locals without carefully examining its validity.

So here in the town of Manzhou in southern Taiwan, we stood thinking about how to get north.

A local man came over to us.

He asked if we could speak Chinese,

I indicated with my fingers that we could speak very little. 

He said that he couldn’t speak any English, but he would like to give us a gift.

He gave us two wooden owl keychains that he had carved himself.

I said in my rudimentary Chinese: “Wǒ xǐhuān nǐ de lǐwù”, which translates to:

“I like your gift!”

When I studied those words in Chinese, I thought to myself that they were not very useful to us in our pilgrimage.

After all, who will give us gifts? Better to learn words like “east, west, right, left, up, down, breakfast, lunch, dinner,” etc.

But here I was, using a sentence that I thought was not necessary to learn…

There was a betel nut chewing shop near where we stood.

The owner was chewing betel nut and had almost no teeth left in his mouth.

I asked him about the bus and he said that there was no bus coming.

We decided that we had now asked three locals, the clerk at the town hall, the clerk at the convenience store, and this betel nut shop owner.

They all agreed that no bus was coming. We decided that they must be right.

I asked him if there was a taxi we could take.

He walked with us a bit farther into town, but no taxis were available.

Finally he signaled for us to follow him back to his shop, where he found a business card for a taxi and called for us.

A spacious taxi for eight people arrived within minutes.

I showed the address of the community centre to the driver who recognized the place, quoted a tiny price of less than ten US dollars and took us there.

Along the drive up the mountain pass, I noted the steep elevation, and felt happy that we would be walking it downhill .

We got off the taxi at the community center, and joined the local aboriginal ladies who were dancing to pop music as a form of exercise.

Their dance moves were well choreographed, which clearly indicated that they had been practicing their routine many times.

The walk down the mountain was beautiful.

Both sides of the mountain had green vegetation and fertile valleys.

We didn’t pass by any stores, but we didn’t need anything.  We had enough water and plenty of food, which we didn’t even eat.

I was communicating with a member of the walking group called Shuyun, and told her about our walking plan for the day.

I told her that we had taken a taxi to the community center and that now we were walking south to the guesthouse.

Suddenly, two yellow taxis stopped in the middle of the road, and six friendly people, dressed in hiking clothes, got out of the cabs and surrounded us.

They were the walking group, friends of our friends Wendy and Joseph, who had come to walk with us.

They suggested that we hop in the taxi and drive up to the community center and walk down together with them.

We were feeling too hot to do the walk all over again, especially since we were only two kilometers away from the guesthouse.

They got into the taxis and drove north.

Their empty taxis passed us on their way back down, and the friendly drivers honked their horns in encouragement.

We arrived at the guesthouse earlier than expected, and I called the owner to let her know we had arrived.

She said that the door to the guesthouse was open and that she had left breakfast items in the fridge for us, to cook our own breakfast.

We had 3 double bedrooms in the house which was a really nice little villa with a nice living room space and a big dining area to seat eight people.

I was told that the group would stay in the same guesthouse that we had booked, so we could be together and eat together.

But this guesthouse was clearly set up for us alone.

The owner had left only two towels in the bathroom, and only enough breakfast items for two people.

l called the owner and she said that nobody else but us had booked a night’s stay with her.

I remembered that when I booked this guesthouse, I saw that it had three bedrooms and a big outdoor space with a ping pong table, and that we thought that we didn’t need such a big space.

But it was the only guesthouse available before the mountain pass, and the price was so reasonable, that it didn’t matter that we had extra rooms.

I was sure that something was wrong.

We were eight people and the house only had room for six people.

I sent a message to Shuyun, telling her that I was convinced that they were walking to another guesthouse, up the mountain pass.

I gave her the phone number of the owner and asked her to call her to clarify.

About an hour later, Shuyun walked in, looking like the strong hiker she is.

Following her, came the group of wonderful and funny people, all in good spirits, although happy to drink water and relax.

The evening was friendly and wonderful.

We chatted and laughed and learned a lot about each group member and their experiences.

Shuyun, who is Taiwanese but lives in California, did a lot of translating for us.

We were in awe of all the adventures they had had.

Shuyun has walked many famous routes and pilgrimages around the world, including some really difficult ones like the Pacific Crest Trail, from Mexico to the Canadian border, which required camping most of the way and shipping of supplies along the way.

She only missed a small portion, which was closed due to forest fires.

I asked many questions and wrote down her ideas for future walks around England and Switzerland.

For dinner, we placed an order with the owner of the guesthouse who went to a local restaurant in town and then delivered the food to us.

We ate and laughed and had a great time.

Then one of the members of the group, a woman who is fondly called “Beautiful Water-Mother,” who is indeed a mountain woman from the town of Hualien in the mountains of Taiwan, announced that she just had a call from the guesthouse that we will stay at tomorrow night.

They said that due to an approaching typhoon called Kong-Rey, it would be unsafe to walk there.

They suggested we cancel our reservations at no cost to us and that we should consider not walking at all.

The section of our walk along the Alangyi Historic Trail, which requires a local guide to hike through, was now closed because of the high swells and the approaching typhoon.

It no longer made sense to walk north, because without being able to hike the Alangyi Historic Trail, we could not get to the Dawu train station to get back to Taipei.

The bad news was accepted in good spirits.

We were laughing so hard and having such a good time, (without drinking any alcohol) that we just started to think about what we should do instead.

The leader of the group, a man nicknamed 007, after the James Bond movies, and because he is such a strong hiker that his leg muscles bulge out like a bionic man, called his friend, who is a hiking guide.

This hiking guide has walked every inch of the island, and he offered his advice.

He plainly said that we shouldn’t walk tomorrow, as this area was in the direct path of the typhoon,

We would be getting the worst winds and rain.

The government issued evacuation orders and closures in our area.

So it was decided.

Tomorrow we will be going back to the town of Hengchun, where we will catch the bus to Kaohsuing, and then take the high speed train back to Taipei.

The group was disappointed.

Yes, we can’t argue with the weather, but still, they made plans, and some took time off from work and made arrangements to be away from home.  They paid for the high speed rail and took buses to get here, only to have to go back to Taipei.

I was sad.

They are such lovely people and I was looking forward to walking with them.

I booked us in a luxurious hotel in the hot springs town of Beitou, just north of Taipei.

I really felt like I needed some pampering and a daily soak in the hot springs.

The group had arranged the sleeping arrangements with no problems. 

Jules and I got one bedroom with a big bed, Shuyun will sleep in another bedroom with Pony, who has been her friend since both girls were in high school, and the two other married couples will sleep in the third bedroom that has two queen beds.

The little villa had only one bathroom with one shower and one toilet, yet everyone was so polite and clean, that I never had to wait to use the bathroom.

I couldn’t help but think that in America, a three bedroom villa would probably have at least three bathrooms and that nobody would feel comfortable sleeping two couples in one room, after they had graduated from college.

Grown up Americans are spoiled and addicted to their comfort and space… perhaps they should learn from this lovely group how to be happy, and coexist in a group….

With love and friendship,

Tali

Today’s Stats:

Steps - 20,564

Daily Distance - 14 km

Total Distance To Date - 669 km