Day 36 - Donggang To Fangliao, And A Bit About Recovery, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
Day 36 - Donggang To Fangliao, And A Bit About Recovery, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
Some of the guesthouses that we stayed at on this pilgrimage offered breakfast, which meant that we see the owner or his caretaker before we leave, and say goodbye.
Other guesthouses do not offer breakfast, so we just leave the keys in the room or by the entrance when we leave.
Today we had vouchers for breakfast, so we walked over to a clean-looking breakfast restaurant to eat our breakfast.
Some of the breakfast restaurants in Taiwan start serving breakfast at 4 AM and close down by 10:00 or 11:00 AM.
The menu of these breakfast restaurants is simple and good.
They offer hot soy milk, flat bread scallion pancakes, steamed buns, egg omelets or sandwiches.
With the help of an elderly woman who came over to help after she saw me trying to figure out my Chinese map, we found the busy little restaurant listed on my voucher.
The two friendly women who ran the restaurant took our coupons, and offered us a seat next to their parrot who was sitting in its cage, eating sunflower seeds and sprinkling the shells on the floor.
We ordered vegetable pancakes, plus they packed some vegetable sushi for us to eat later.
We passed by a small family owned incense factory, where they shaped and laid out the rolled incense to dry right by the main street.
We walked over the main bridge, and stopped to watch the ferry boats leaving for their early trips to the island, already full of tourists and busy.
We stopped again in the same Starbucks we sat at yesterday, and had our morning matcha lattes.
After a short break we left Starbucks and began walking on the main national route 17 going south.
The busy business route had convenience stores every once in a while, repair shops, stalls selling iced tea, snacks, noodles, banks, dental offices, Chinese medicine shops, pharmacies, scooter shops selling helmets and everything else that makes up the typical urban landscape.
The weather was mostly sunny with occasional clouds which we appreciated for their shade.
The temperature today was 33 celsius (92 Fahrenheit ) with an effective temperature of 38 Celsius (100.4 Fahrenheit). Needless to say, it was a challenging day of walking.
Later in the day, we came across another couple who were also walking south, carrying much bigger backpacks than the ones we were carrying.
They seemed to be Taiwanese, and if at all possible, they seemed even more tired than we were and not interested in chatting.
They flopped into the seats at the convenience store and took out their phones, wiping the sweat from their foreheads and hair.
The next time we saw them, they entered the same convenience store that we were just leaving, and they smiled at us with fatigued smiles.
We were cheered on as we walked by many cyclists passing by us and their support vehicles.
Some stopped to chat with us, and they told us that they were cycling in a group of 150 Taiwanese cyclists, who had started out from Tainan, circumnavigating the island in 9 hot days.
They were divided into smaller groups of about twenty or thirty, and they had colorful ribbons attached to their helmets, to identify who was in their group.
There was always a group leader at the front leading the way, and a leader at the back, cycling last, to make sure that everyone was ok.
The support vehicles offered them drinks and snacks, as there were too many of them to enter convenience stores.
We posed for pictures and exchanged greetings with all of the cyclists, cheering them on, just as they cheered us.
In our hearts, we wished Good Luck and a safe journey to all of them!
In the hopes of a more scenic road, we walked away from the main road in the direction of the sea.
On the map, it looked like there was a narrow road paralleling the national road, that was going right by the ocean.
We hoped for sea views and maybe a sea breeze or even a boardwalk.
But we were soon surrounded by big fish farms with murky ponds, all of which were being fed by chaotic systems of pipes taking ocean water and pumping it back into the fish ponds.
When we finally did reach the shore, there was a protective sea wall preventing us from even getting a glimpse of the water.
We walked along the grey seawall, through miles of fish farms.
But even worse were the aggressive barking dogs, that came in groups out of nowhere, and surrounded us for most of our route.
We did stop at a small temple that had shaded benches, and ate our lunch of the vegetarian sushi that the breakfast restaurant had packed for us.
The dogs were trailing behind us most of the way, growling and barking.
I visualized a protective shield of light energy around us, and I sent the dogs love energy.
After all, these wild dogs were unloved or abandoned, needing to scrape for their food, and many were mangy and full of sores.
We were not bitten, but it wasn’t a pleasant walk and I wished that we had stayed on the main road.
Finally we reached our hotel a little after 4 pm.
The hotel felt like a haven.
It was clean and beautiful with well designed rooms, a lovely seating area and a laundry room right on our floor.
We showered, did our laundry and by dinnertime, we went to eat dinner at a local vegan restaurant.
But it was closed with no explanation why.
We walked around town and chose a busy place that is a chain restaurant in Taiwan, which serves veg dumplings that were very tasty.
In the supermarket next to our hotel, I bought dragon fruit.
I read that this area of Taiwan is a major growing region of dragon fruit, and on our walk today, we did see many houses with dragon fruit vines growing on trellises.
When we reflected on the day, we concluded that our new backpacks were easier to carry than our old ones, and that we felt less achy after a long day of walking in the heat.
The shower and the comfortable bed revived me, and I fell asleep feeling well rested.
I once talked to a young man who hiked the Camino to Santiago with his dad.
The man was in his twenties and his dad was only 50 years old.
The man said that both of them experienced hardships on the walk, like muscle pain, back pain and fatigue, but the biggest difference between him and his dad was that in the mornings he was fresh and pain free, while his dad was still carrying all of the pain, accumulated from past days.
His dad wasn’t recovering fast enough from the pain, so he had a much harder time.
He attributed it to age.
I tried to explain that it wasn’t age related.
Like all sports, the ability to walk long distances is acquired by practice.
You can’t be a person who drives everywhere and only walks 5 km per day, and not experience hardships on a long distance journey.
But what I didn’t explain, because I didn’t understand it back then, is that the speed of our muscle recovery is also related to our internal process.
If we carry anger, fears, grouchiness, resentments, self-hate, beliefs in our littleness and bodily limitations, recovery is slow.
If you carry less of those and have high expectations of your energy body, you will also recover overnight.
We are living proof of this…
With love,
Tali
Today’s Stats:
Steps - 33,164
Daily Distance - 24 km.
Total Distance To Date - 569 km
