Late last night, I decided to get out of the cabin to do some uninterrupted writing. I had noticed a coffee shop in the lobby of thee resort, and while I didn’t have any desire to go there, coffee shops often have wireless internet access.
There is a picnic area with tables near the lobby, so I sat up shop there. I was immediately rewarded with internet access. It was the same mysterious network identifier as at Sun Moon Lake, CHT. I had assumed it was a hotel, but apparently not. Usually a common name like that means the default name on a particular brand of hardware. I’ve not heard of CHT and equally strange, it followed the same weird pattern as at Sun moon Lake, I could get a connection, but it would only last a few minutes, then disappear for several minutes, then reappear.
Here it disappeared a lot faster and stayed gone a lot longer, so that all I could do was one check of my e-mail to download my spam for the last couple of days. It’s very curious and I wonder what’s up with these connections. If anyone knows anything about CHT, let me know.
There was no milk bread at the Family Mart this morning to my disappointment and the breakfast buffet was the same. In fact, I’m convinced that the bowl of lettuce, now slightly brown, was exactly the same bowl of lettuce they served yesterday.
We checked out and loaded the luggage in the car, then walked into the Shitou Bamboo Forest. At this point, I’m going to stop called it the Shitou bamboo Forest. As soon as we were inside bamboo was still not in evidence.
I thought because we’d packed up the car and Mr. Huang and Irene knew what to expect of this place, Irene was hauling James in the stroller. In most forest places, the stroller isn’t very efficient as the number of stairs is prohibitive. We weren’t far into the park and Michelle spied the first bridge and she was off. It was at the bottom of steps, and the other side had steps rising up from it.
There’s a funny thing about Michelle’s behavior lately: She’s speaking Chinese quite effectively, and she’ll often say something to strangers in Chinese. When she’s with me, they’re amazed she speaks Chinese and then they just have to talk to her, and she clams up completely as they try desperately to get her to talk.
When she’s with her mom, they’re impressed that she speaks English, and she won’t talk to them, either.
Parents here are so desperate for this children to be able to speak English and the results are apparently mediocre. They probably don’t realize that kids are in their own way very practical. Michelle is constantly exposed to Chinese by her mother, but she knows that English communicates more effectively with her and me and everyone else back home. But all the while, she was obviously still learning.
Once she got here, she learned she had speak Chinese to be understood and after she watched 48 hours straight of the Disney channel in Chinese a little bit flipped in her head and she started using it. I suspect that with no matter how much studying these kids do, without a practical application, it just won’t be very effective.
I mention that at this part of the story because the bridge was busy and Michelle was weaving in and out of people’s legs and, at one point, apologized to an elderly gentleman for falling on his feet. She apologized in Chinese and headed off, but he was clearly impressed and followed her the rest of the way across the bridge talking to her, but she treated him as if he didn’t exist.
We went back across the bridge to Irene and I asked why she brought the stroller. Clearly she was more than a little annoyed, apparently her dad insisted that they use the stroller rather than carry him.
Michelle took off across the bridge and I followed. There was a fork in the trail one leading to a “University Pond” the other a “Giant Tree”. I asked Michelle which she wanted and we were off to the giant tree. Irene and grandpa were left far behind. The trail was nothing but steps and the signposts indicated that the giant tree was 2.4 km away.
When we were long out o sight of them, Irene called to tell me that she had gone back to the car to get the carrier and put the stroller away and that grandpa was waiting with James. Meanwhile Michelle and I had finally found some bamboo. She was busy looking for pandas when a panicked call from Irene came in saying her father and James were missing. She said her father had mentioned he wanted to see the University Pond and she was going to look for them there. Michelle and I headed back the way we came to meet her there.
I wasn’t worried at all at this point, but clearly Irene was. Grandpa wasn’t going anywhere without us, and she had the keys to his car. Unfortunately, he is one of the only two people in Taiwan without a cell phone.
Michelle wasn’t happy to leave without seeing a panda but she came. As we left, we passed a group of young teenagers, obviously a school outing. As we approached down the path, one of them said to the others, “Lao Wai!” (a slang term for foreigner) and they all lined up on the side of the trail and sang a song to us as we passed.
Their reaction was a mixture of surprise and embarrassment when were were just about past them all, I turned to Michelle and said to her, “xiao lao wai, lai la” (Little foreigner, come on.) They hadn’t considered the possibility that I might understand a word they said. That was fun.
The trail from the bridge is another .6 km to the University Pond – that’s .6 km of stairs. When we were about 3/4 of the way there, Michelle stopped in her tracks declaring, “It’s too hard, daddy. Carry me, please.”
Carrying her wasn’t an option, but luckily the top was right in sight and Irene, grandpa and James were all there.
The pond has a really interesting bamboo bridge, but it was closed for repairs, so our next destination was the “Sky Walk”. The Sky Walk is a new attraction at the park. According to Irene it’s a walkway high in the bamboo.
We left University Pond along the road. The signpost pointed to the left for the Sky Walk, so Mr. Huang headed right. When questioned, he showed us a map of the area. If we followed the road we were going, we’d come to a trail which would lead us to the Sky Walk. Because it followed a more direct route, it looked (on paper) like a shorter walk.
When we got on the trail, it was immediately obvious this was no shortcut. Unlike the road which sensibly went around the mountains, the trail headed over them. Eventually we sent Mr. Huang and James back by road while the rest of us continued on the trail. Michelle wanted to see the top of the hill, even though we told her it would be tough and no one would carry her.
Although this trail was nothing like the track that I tried yesterday, it was still difficult trail. The floor was mostly roots or muddy rocks and it switch-backed up the hill. We later learned that this trail was classified as the most difficult in the park, a “Category 3” or “Endurance” trail. We were all glad to see the end of it.
The Sky Walk is an interesting construct, it runs about 100 yards in a loop, about 40 feet in the air. It’s among the pines, not bamboo, though. Apart from that one small area Michelle and I went to there was no bamboo anywhere else that we could see in the park. As the Sky Walk looked like a bridge, Michelle was eager to go on it, although at its highest, she was a little nervous. I hate heights, but this thing looked so well built it should withstand a pretty earthquake, so I wasn’t concerned about it.
At the Sky Walk we encountered another group of school kids, this time younger than the last. They were commenting on me and so again as I passed, I spoke in Chinese to Michelle. The impact was equally dramatic. They just couldn’t believe I spoke Chinese. It’s so easy to impress around this place.
Before we left, I took Irene over to the bamboo. This time, Michelle wouldn’t leave and sat down near a “cave” waiting for the pandas to come back. I just didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d never see the pandas.
The trip back to Taipei was uneventful, in fact I slept through most of it.