“Sun is shining, the weather is sweet, make you want to move, your dancing feet.” – Bob Marley, Sun Is Shining
I had forgotten a pillow and the track-jacket stuffed with t-shirts, socks and boxers wasn’t working too well; I found myself waking up every-so-often with a terrible zipper imprint across my face, like a set of gruesome stitches. When the sun finally began to rise, I decided to do the same.
Our Campsite
It’s rare that Nick and I get a Saturday off, so my friends and I wanted to make the best of a full weekend. We rented a car Saturday morning and set out on a road trip to Hualien to go camping. With no real plan aside from finding a place to camp, we packed in all the provisions we needed and took off. We were winging it, but we had high-spirits and all the momentum we needed to carry us across the winding roads of Taiwan’s Eastern coast.
After much deliberation at an aboriginal village, putting Grant’s nacent Chinese skills to the test, a helpful native pointed us in the right direction. When we arrived at the campsite he suggested, we found the grounds deserted, just as I had hoped; part of the purpose of the trip was to flee the kinetic streets of Taipei.
We spent the day exploring the mouth of the Sanjan river, which meanders through a place dubbed, “Little Taroko.” This neighbor to the famous Taroko Gorge doesn’t have a road inside, so it has to be explored on foot. Only the intrepid “river-tracers,” equipped with special water boots, helmets, wetsuits and life jackets passed us while we lounged around one of the clear, blue lagoons on the river. Lean, tanned, aboriginal river-kids flipped off the rocks at a deep lagoon down stream from us. Yearning to escape my job in the capital city and become a river-kid myself, I followed their example, scaling the rocks and leaping from cliffs into the cool, pure lagoons, letting out battle-cries in mid-air.
Blue Lagoon
When the sun began to get low and the heat died down, we returned to our camp by the ocean and set up the tents. Grant and I collected drift wood for the fire while Nick and Emma handled dinner duty, or as Grant put it, the Italians & women in the kitchen while the Irish guys do the manual labor.
Emma is picky with her hotdogs, so I bought Hebrew Nationals from the foreigner market in Tien Mu. We cooked up “the Heebs,” along with canned-corn and some sweet potatoes we bought at a road-side stand in Hualien. Then we had some beers around the campfire and watched the fishermen out by the water. I used to joke about “night fishing” with my friends back in Massachusetts, but these Taiwanese fishermen went out at dusk with blue lights at the ends of their fishing poles and took it seriously.
I played a few songs on the guitar while we drank, then wandered down to the water and played Chicken with the breakers for a while. We poked at a thoroughly cooked sweet potato and ate it off pieces of driftwood for dessert, then got sleepy. After a long day on the river and a few six packs of Kirin, we retired to the tents and passed out.
The Sunrises In The East
I quietly crawled out of my tent with a zipper imprint across my face, rubbed my eyes and looked at the rising sun. I found my flip-flops, slipped them on and wandered down to the beach to watch the sun come up over the Pacific. The waves were calm and the fishermen were already beginning the day’s work. I sat on a rock by the cooling campfire and took it all in.
I sat facing West, greeting the sun as it rose; China was not out there beyond the horizon, the sun had set somewhere over L.A. hours before I awoke. Looking out at the wide expanse of the Pacific, watching the sun rise from the water, I figured I was probably one of the first people to see the dawn, and no one else would ever see that particular sunrise again. In some way it was special, sitting there on that quiet beach, feeling the warmth on my face as the sun got higher. Before that moment, I had always held the belief that seeing a sunrise was wrong: it meant I was up too early or had stayed up too late. But this wasn’t the dirty, shameful feeling that comes with stumbling out of a club at dawn and seeing that judgmental sun peeking out from behind the skyline; this was Sunday, this was somehow holy, or at the very least, natural. It felt right.
After a while, I wandered back to the tent and laid down again, waiting for my friends to wake up. We made coffee with Grant’s beloved French Press, packed up camp and then set out, heading into Taroko Gorge. We decided to drive straight across the mountain range that runs down the East coast of Taiwan, making for a long and winding journey across the geographical-backbone of the island. In our Ford Escape, we traversed the vertebrae of those mountains, exiting somewhere near Yilan. Then it was a simply a straight-shot down the express-way aorta, back into frantic, pumping heart that is Taipei.
