Taoyuan | Catherine Lee

Yes, 3 more busy days out in the last 2 weeks visiting some wonderful places around northern Taiwan with our 18 lovely friends from Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, who are here at St. John’s University as part of the “2019 Latin American and Caribbean Countries Vocational Training Project: Electrical and Electronic Engineering 拉丁美洲及加勒比海地區友邦技職訓練計畫-電機工程實務技術英語班”, in association with ‘TaiwanICDF‘.

Last Saturday off we went through the Xueshan Tunnel, Taiwan’s longest at 12.9 km ~ it runs through the mountains from Taipei to the east coast at Yilan. Since opening in 2006, it’s really changed Taiwan’s east coast, with lots of development, tourism and business opportunities opening up. There’s lots of traffic too, especially on a Saturday when everyone is in that tunnel trying to get out of the big city, escaping for the day or weekend to breathe in some fresh sea air and relax….

And so we joined them, but it took us 3 hours (yes, 3 whole hours!) from St. John’s University to get to our first main stop at Lanyang Museum 蘭陽博物館. The museum has really good displays about the local area, and gave us distant views through the haze over towards Guishan Island. Guishan Island (Turtle Island) is actually the protruding top of Taiwan’s only active volcano. Our friends from Latin America and Caribbean have plenty of active volcanoes in their own countries, so it’s good that Taiwan has one to show to visitors too! This is us at the museum…

Lanyang Museum building was “designed by a team led by Kris Yao those design was inspired by the ‘cuestas’ commonly seen along Beiguan Coast. The museum adopts the geometric shapes of the cuestas where the roof protrudes from the ground at an angle of 20 degrees meeting a wall which rises from the ground at an angle of 70 degrees.” Really impressive. I liked it. Not sure about that big apartment building right behind it, but hey, at least the residents must have a good view!

We spent the day driving around Yilan, enjoying local foods and restaurants and seeing the countryside. At lunchtime, the rain started – and poured down for the next 3 hours, so we spent the afternoon visiting the famous Kavalan Whisky Distillery ~ which also houses Mr. Brown coffee. A little secret ~ the Kavalan Sweet Coffee Liqueur is really delicious, and there was plenty of it to sample ~ but shhh, don’t tell anyone. Ah, but it was a fun day!

Then last Monday, we went to the National Palace Museum, Taipei – it is Taipei’s ‘must-go, must-see’ museum on every visitor’s itinerary, but it’s impossible to see it all on one trip. We had 2 hours and saw but a fraction of the displays, though we did have a detailed tour in English about the bronzes in the museum…

In the afternoon we paid a quick visit to Xiaoyoukeng in Yangmingshan National Park to see the smoking – and very smelly – fumaroles in the mist. Not, apparently, as magnificent or as smelly (thank goodness!) as the ones in St. Lucia, but hey, these ones are smelly enough!

And today (part of the 3-day Mid-Autumn Moon Festival), we spent the day south-west of Taipei. Our first stop was the Yingge Ceramics Museum – which may look kind of grim and brutalist on the outside, but inside the museum, the displays are really creatively presented, reflecting its past as Taiwan’s ceramic town – due to its special clay.

We had a short guided tour in English and then I rushed around taking some photos. Even the luggage lockers are ceramic…

We also visited Sanxia Old Street, built in the Japanese era in baroque style and restored a few years ago. We tried all the local delicacies, including pig’s blood cake and stinky tofu – some of which, well, let’s put it this way, didn’t go down too well with some of us! The croissants and ice-cream though were delicious!

After lunch, we went to Daxi Old Tea Factory…..

And then to Cihu Mausoleum 慈湖陵寢 , “the temporary resting place of President Chiang Kai-shek. When Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, he was not buried in the traditional Chinese fashion but entombed in a black marble sarcophagus since he expressed the wish to be eventually buried in his native Fenghua in Zhejiang province once the Kuomintang (KMT) recovered mainland China from the Communists.” We went to see the changing of the guard ceremony that takes place every hour on the hour ~ we were there for the one at 3:00 pm. Wow, it was so hot, bees were buzzing around and we were directly facing into the afternoon sun. But then the honor guard must have been even hotter, after standing for an hour in their heavy uniforms without moving….

There’s also the Cihu Lake and the surrounding sculpture park where all the ‘removed’ statues of Chiang Kai-Shek are on display….

Our Latin America and Caribbean group of students are so lively and fun, and we’re making the most of their time in Taiwan to take them out and about, showing them the sights and introducing them to Taiwan’s rich culture and history. We enjoy all the delicious (and let’s face it, some not so delicious!) foods on offer at each place, and of course we take a few photos too ~ and I’m grateful that they all think really creatively when I request a pose!

Thanks to St. John’s University for planning all these great trips. Already looking forward to the next one ~ coming soon!

It’s the Year of the Monkey and monkeys lanterns are everywhere!

The 15th day of the first lunar month is the Lantern Festival, and this year the 2016 Lantern Festival is at Taoyuan, on a site covering 20 hectares right at the High-Speed Rail Station ~ just so convenient for us all! It lasts from February 22 – March 6. Yesterday was a national holiday in Taiwan and the weather was great, so what better day to go?! YES!

Taoyuan is 20 minutes by high-speed rail from Taipei, and costs NT$ 155 one way on a non-reserved ticket – a bargain! So near and so convenient to Taipei, but Taoyuan is significantly cheaper as a place to live, and it’s also home to the Taoyuan International Airport and on the HSR link, so it’s booming! Taoyuan County stretches from the coast right up to the high central mountains, and includes large numbers of Hakka people and indigenous people. All these different groups are well-represented at the lantern festival. In fact it seems like every school, community group, company, temple, town and district of Taoyuan County have their own lantern displays, plus the outlying islands of Matsu (the blue tears are there in a cave!), Kinmen, Hong Kong and Macau too. The ‘Lamigo Monkeys‘ are Taoyuan’s baseball team, hence the baseball lanterns everywhere. Each section has a different theme, and all are linked by miles of walkways lined with lanterns – there’s displays, shows, performances, food, craft activities and things to see and photograph going on all over the place. There’s 1000 or so lanterns, and some even move, all are stunning!

In fact, there’s so much to see and it stretches for so far that it’s worth going in the mid-afternoon to check it all out. Then as the sun sets and it gets dark, so the lights and lanterns come on and the main monkey lantern (holding his baseball and bat!) lights up, changes colour and does one complete turn every 30 minutes in the evening, to the accompaniment of specially-composed music. All very spectacular!

And then there’s a whole section devoted to ‘Religious Blessings’. Really quite amazing. Every temple in Taoyuan has their own display, and many have brought in their actual deities for worship and for offering blessings. One temple even had transformers. So there’s wishing ponds – you throw coins to hit a notice with the blessing of your choice, there’s lucky charms and gongs and bells to ring, and all sorts of actions to do to help you gain blessings. There’s huge temples full of incense and people lining up all over to ask for blessings of the different gods. And just across from from the noisiest and busiest temple, there’s a section for the Christians – the Roman Catholics have a large lantern of Jesus in a boat, and the Protestant churches have come together with a cross, and Jesus as the Good Shepherd with some sheep, they’re offering free Bibles in different languages, plus a DVD on a big screen.

Millions of people have visited the Lantern Festival so far. In fact almost 3.7 million on Sunday alone. That caused some major traffic jams and crowd control problems, and a lot of criticism in the press. But yesterday was fine. A credit to the organizers, who had everything covered. Really quite incredible. Anywhere else in the world, an evening event in the darkness, attracting huge crowds, would be a logistical nightmare ~ imagine the worries about personal safety, drugs and alcohol, anti-social behavior, crowd rage. Yet it was fantastic! No worries!

And in the middle of all those zillions of people, I came across a family of friends who I’ve known for years, and who I never expected to meet selling sausages in the Lantern Festival! After all, there must have been many hundreds of food stalls all grouped into about 6 main food areas, and yet there they were – the whole family, 4 gorgeous children and their parents. They’re members of the indigenous people of Taiwan, A-Mei and Bei-Nan tribes, living in Taoyuan County ~ how great to see them again, even if the youngest boy hid behind his mother the whole time! And their sausages were delicious!

Discovery Channel reckons that Taiwan’s Lantern Festival is one of the best festivals in the whole world, one of those things you just must see! There’s only a few days left until it closes this coming weekend, so if you have a chance, do go! It’s GREAT!

Yes to God, Yes to Mission, Yes to Taiwan!