Lone Locust Productions

Day: June 15, 2007

  • Rushing through Chiayi

    Looking back through my previous adventures, I now realize that rushing through Chiayi and the train station is more the rule than the exception.

    On our return trip this time, though, we made certain that wasn’t going to happen.

    The train arrives Chiayi station at 5:00PM, the high speed train leaves at 7:36 PM. Even given that it might take us 30-40 minutes to catch the bus and travel the distance, we had plenty of time.

    So we had to make a decision: Eat near the train station (my vote would have gone to MOS, and I would have had a good chance of winning) or catch the bus and eat at the High Speed Rail (HSR) station – which is only MOS.

    We decided to eat at the HSR station and went to the bus stop immediately. The bus was pulling up as we arrived. The weather we perfect, the traffic not bad and we arrived at the station at 5:20.

    The trains run every hour, so my father-in-law went to see if we could exchange our tickets for an earlier train. I went to the restroom.

    5:24.
    Irene,standing with her father, asks me, “Do you want to take the 5:36 train?”
    I say, “We still have 10 minutes to get food at MOS to go?”
    “Yes”
    “OK, let’s do it.”

    5:26
    Irene heads to MOS, the line is long, she starts explaining that we don’t have time. The gates close at 5:34, and we don’t have the tickets yet.
    Dammit, no food again!

    5:30
    Back at the ticket counter, my father-in-law is still exchanging the tickets. They pull out one of those ridiculously complicated official Chinese-language forms (lots of boxes) and hand it to him to fill out.

    What the hell were they thinking? Why would they even offer to exchange the tickets for someone to train that leaves before you have time to fill out their stupid paperwork!?

    5:32
    Irene and I have tickets in hand, her father is still doing paperwork. We run for the platform without him. Wrangling the kids is tough enough. We could only hope that he made it, but if he didn’t there’s be a train in an hour and he’d have good cause the chew out the ticket agent for that entire length of time.

    5:34
    Gates closed, but everybody made it.
    Train arrives on time. I’m not taking pictures, but getting video instead.

    Interesting little side story. Back in 2001 when were we in Taiwan, I used to have a Sony Hi8 camcorder, which I purchased immediately prior to my first trip to Taiwan in 1998. (To say that Taiwan seems to drive my camera purchased would be an understatement.)

    I really liked that camcorder (and still have it), on a trip around the island it began to behave badly. You’d click the record button, and it would “beep” accordingly to tell you that it was recording and stop instantly. You had to be extra diligent to make sure the record light was always on. I lost many a good shot because of it.

    The digital age was upon us and I used that chance, and camera discounts in Taipei, to replace it with my current (also Sony) Mini-DV camcorder.

    The “new” camcorder started exhibiting exactly the same problem at the HSR platform this day. I completely missed the train arriving. I was hungry and therefore not in the best of moods to begin with, but that clinched it for the day.

    5:36
    Train departs on time for uneventful trip back to Taipei. One problem, apparently my father-in-law didn’t do enough paperwork because they failed to refund his 7:36PM tickets. He was engaged in long conversations with a train staff member during the journey and then had to stay at the station to do more when we arrived.

    7:00
    Taipei – we headed to MOS Burger (my insistence), then home.

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  • The old zen master chef

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    Here’s the old man, thinking of food in his own contemplative way in one of his glossy adverts.

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    And here’s his food, in actuality.

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  • Fenchihu, the definitive collection

    Fenchihu 1

    This trip to Alishan and Fenchihu happened to be about the same duration as our 1998 trip. We arrived at Alishan late on the first day, took the train down to Fenchihu mid-day the next, returned to Chiayi mid-day the next. On our trip in 2005, we really took the time to explore the Alishan completely, but bypassed Fenchihu.

    Fenchihu is a small town, but due to tourism, has more than one hotel. We decided to stay in the same hotel we stayed in last time, but this time we upgraded from a “wood” room to a Japanese tatami room. (In Taiwan, which gets most of its tourists from Japan, it’s not uncommon to have hotel rooms designed specifically for them.) I’ve just always wanted to try a tatami room.

    It was a nice room, with a full computer-controlled environment system and 42“ wide-screen hi-definition TV. On that 37” TV we have over 60 channels of the worst reception I’ve ever seen in my life. If nothing else, at least I got to watch an episode of Primeval.

    Being in the middle of the week, there were no other guests in the hotel at all.

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    Apart from being a pleasant escape from the city, we didn’t find much of anything in Fenchihu the first time, but we also felt like we must have missed something. In preparation, I did a flickr search for all photos tagged with “fenchihu.” (I also searched for those tagged with the proper name in Chinese and a couple alternate romanized spellings. What I found were a lot of pictures of the same four or fice things: The railroad tracks, the old steam engines, bian dan, the ticket station, some landmark. There were other things, but the majority of people posting pictures didn’t get beyond 100m from the train station.

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    This time I decided I was going to make a photo collection of the “real” fenchihu.

    Up before anyone else, even most of the locals, I was out on the streets taking pictures. One of the things I like about Taiwan is, when you get to these small towns, if you can get past the broken-down garbage dump nature of a lot of the places is that everything looks so lived in and make do. (I think it’s the look they’re going for with the inside of the Doctor’s TARDIS, although perhaps without so many old plastic bags.)

    I personally wouldn’t want to live this way, but I find it fascinating to observe.

    As with most things along the Alishan Forest Railway, Fenchihu owes its existence to the lumber industry and the train that brought the lumber down from the mountains. In the old days, Fenchihu was the spot where the trains would switch engines. The next leg of the journey required more powerful engines and when the train arrived in Fenchihu, the stronger engine was up to steam and ready to go.

    More recently, the town has erected a museum, of sorts, to bring more railway tourism. The museum, which costs nothing, contains a couple on the old steam engines, a few pieces of the machinery used to work on the engines and lots of pictures. Our hotel provided us with a free tour (Chinese only) which included a lecture on the background of the trains.

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    Once a year or so, they trot out the old steam engines, which were used from 1912 up until the 1980’s, for the railway buffs. This might or might not be a secret: none of the steam engines work, so they’re retrofitted the inside of one with a diesel engine so it can move around.

    The second thing that apparently brings people to Fenchihu is the bian dan. One place in particular is the most famous. As it happens, this also happens to be the hotel we stayed in. The owner is wily old bird. His picture can be spotted in several places around town. Not just his photograph, but professionally done advertisements of the old man, sitting like some old zen master chef contemplating his creation.

    Too bad the food didn’t live up to the expectation. The bian dan I got the day before on the train was better.

    There are also some (typically) quite steep hills with trails (read: mountain staircases) in the area. The tour guide took Irene and me up a short on the evening we arrived, and I explored another before breakfast.

    After we left our room we tried another path that was equally as vertical, this time with the kids. By the time we returned to the train, I was really feeling the pain in my calves.

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  • A (partial) day at Alishan

    Alishan 5

    Cold and miserable, I went to sleep very early. As a consequence, I woke up very early also. The sun wasn’t quite up, but the sky had lightened and everyone else was asleep. While not cloudless, it was clear and pleasant, so I got out for a walk before the others awoke.

    Recently, I upgraded to Photoshop CS3, which has a dramatically improved photomerge capability. Most of the time it produces excellent panoramas, and today I planned to give it a real workout. One of the problems with Taiwan’s mountains is that everything is so dense and the hills so steep that everything is “in your face.” With the widest lens I’ve got, I can’t take pictures of most of the “sights.”

    This time, I’ve burned through a massive number of photos designed to be stitched together, which I’ll do before I post them to flickr. I’ve put together a flickr set of my panoramas. I’ve put this together partially because Flickr’s thumbnails are cropped to fit, so it’s not always possible to tell the photo is a panorama unless you look at it.

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    Not all of the “panoramas” are really left-right widescreen affairs, either. They’re technically “photomerges.” Sometimes I used to capture vertical scale, such as towering trees, and others just to compose a fairly ordinary photograph that I couldn’t capture with a single shot.

    After my walk, I returned for the all-you-can eat breakfast which is included with the price of the room. At the hotel’s coffee shop, a cup of hot black tea costs NT$ 100 (over US$ 3), but at breakfast, it’s included free. I made sure I got US$ 20 of tea with my breakfast.

    Our checkout was at 11:00, but the train to our next destination wasn’t until after 1:00PM. We walked around the hills in the morning, checked out and went into town to have lunch and caught the train to our next stop, Fenchihu.

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    This was a very short trip to Alishan, cut even shorter by the rain when we arrived. It’s such a pleasant place, but there’s not a lot to do once you’ve seen the sights, which are just in a very small area. I’m actually more jazzed to explore Fenchihu more completely. Our first trip there was very short and confusing, so I’m hoping to get a better chance to explore.

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