By Madeline Lau
While I love working as a park ranger some aspects of my job, like living in a remote area, makes it hard to communicate and maintain relationships with the outside world.
To remedy this I was thrilled to plan a escapade through Asia and the Pacific during my off season to catch up with old chums. With a government worker budget and my good-as-gold American passport I hit the road at the end of October for my first stop, Taiwan.
Wild, emotional and at times downright dangerous, Taiwan is one of the happiest countries I’ve ever visited, filled with the resilient charm of people who just don’t give a hoot about regulations.
Living there is one of my best Stayton friends, Mike Etzel, who is teaching English to school children in an industrial city outside of Taipei called Taoyuan or “The Detroit of Asia” as he lovingly refers to it. For my visit we had about eight days together that revolved primarily around riding a scooter and avoiding death by traffic accident, but also soaking up Taiwanese culture which is a mix of expatriate Han Chinese from the mainland and indigenous Taiwanese people who love chewing a scary red quasi-tobacco called betel nut and loudly cackling. From the start I found the whole place wildly endearing and as Mike set out to show me the best of Taiwan, quoting their ridiculous tourism slogans along the way (“Come taste the vast!”) I decided to throw away any expectations and see Taiwan for what it really was: a beautiful, independent, and slightly deranged country filled with lovely, charming, sometimes crazy people.
We spent one day in Taoyuan eating at a bizarre Western cowboy restaurant with a tiny waitress in a 10-gallon hat, visiting city hall to try to meet with the mayor, and checking out Mike’s schools which were adorable and highly organized. Day two led us to a coastal city called Hualien where your favorite park ranger got to experience one of Taiwan’s most famous national parks, Taroko Gorge, a sweeping deeply verdant vista you can hike through and gape at the gorgeous rock formations while shuffling around giant tour groups of tiny Chinese grandparents.
Mike and I rode the scooter through the park’s winding highways, navigating caves and narrow rock corridors, not to mention serpentine tunnels, to eventually reach a breathtaking and intensely serene Buddhist monastery set high in the mountains crowning the gorge. A small and scarily steep stairway led brave trekkers up the mountainside through dripping forest canopy to a beautifully simple bell tower, several hundred meters above sea level. Panting and seriously sweaty, Mike and I agreed that moment was some of the best vast we’d ever tasted, and with shaky legs made our way back to the scooter, still in awe of Taiwan’s wild and unexpected beauty.
From Hualien we continued to Taipei, a stark contrast to rural and industrial Taiwan, and a pretty cosmopolitan metropolis if I’ve ever seen one. Here our number one priority was taking care of business… on the dance floor. Mike and I had always been kind of ambivalent towards each other in our friend group until the day we realized we both love to kill it on the dance floor. We’ve been super close ever since and with the need to groove headed to Room 18, a strangely multi-ethnic, multi-age group, exclusive dance club in one of Taiepei’s trendier districts. When we arrived the room was packed, hazy (it must have been one of the last places in the world people can still smoke inside) and the crowd refused to bust a move. We headed straight for the floor and as true dance ambassadors, convinced the club to get down, dancing solidly for a good five hours. At one point I looked around me, separated from Mike on another dance floor, and saw I was surrounded by middle aged Taiwanese ladies, bankers from Hong Kong, and one particularly exuberant French guy who was matching me move for move. I crowned myself, humbly, Queen of the International Dance Floor, and dragged myself back to the hostel around 2 a.m., exhausted but exhilarated.
Next, we explored Taipei’s cultural monuments, including former leader Sun Yat-Sen’s massive museum complete with his many Cadillacs, a famous hot spring stolen by the Japanese for R&R during World War II, and a seriously cool museum of contemporary art featuring an enormous bicycle installation piece by controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Taipei has a feeling of progress, like it’s still getting to where it wants to be, but to me it’s already reminiscent of major international cities like Seoul and Paris, and to Mike, anywhere in Taiwan can pretty much do no wrong—he adores it. I was thrilled to visit and check up on him, and completely exhausted when I left, partly due to the level of activity and partly due to the exhaustion of being stared at everywhere I went, as the only pale, Anglo girl with huge hair, seemingly, in Taiwan.
I heaved myself on a plane to a quick stop in Korea, where hopefully I’d blend in a little more, but already missing Taiwan’s lovable wackiness.
