Tomb Sweeping Weekend

Can I just start by saying, I am absolutely exhausted, vacations are fun, but they often lack the element of relaxation which is planned into them.  This week was a short work week, followed by a 4-day weekend due to Tomb Sweeping Day and Children's Day.  Tomb Sweeping Day is, exactly as it sounds, a day in which people go to sweep out their family tombs.  During the celebration families will gather outside to worship their ancestors with food and money offerings, and clean, though, with the increased popularity of cremation it appears the prominence of cleaning has lessened with younger generations.

For the holiday several friends and I made the ambitious plan to visit the mountains and the beaches.  Thursday morning we caught a train to Chiayi, a relatively small city (which takes 30-minutes to walk across) in south-western Taiwan known for wind music (though we didn't see anything musical while we were there).  There is honestly not much to be seen in the city, but regardless, we spent an enjoyable day sightseeing and geocaching.  My favorite place in Chiayi was the sun-shooting temple which is a 62 meter high round tower which represents the aboriginal myth of the moon's creation.  Many years ago there were two suns in our sky, one much bigger than the one which lights our sky today.  The suns rotated around the earth at all hours of the day, and therefore was never in darkness.  The plants dried out, and food was scarce, and the people decided that one sun must be killed in order for the people to continue living, so three men set out on a journey to the sun, and each man brought with him a baby boy and a bag of seeds.  The seeds were to plant trees along the way to provide food for the journey back, and the babies were because it was destined to be a long journey which the men would not complete in their lifespan.  As predicted, the men died of old age along the journey, but by this time the babies had grown into young men, and came to the cave of the sun (the bigger of the two suns), and they shot it.  The sun began to bleed and its molten blood killed one of the men, but the other two survived and journeyed back to their village.  Both suns can still be seen today, but so much size and light has left the attacked sun that it is now no more than a faint light in the night sky which we now refer to as the moon.  After assuring the sun had been properly taken care of we continued on with our journeying by walking around the Lantan Reservoir, grabbing dinner at a Szechuan restaurant (where we started the longest running meme of the trip, which involved repeatedly informing each other about the location of the Kung Pao Squid), and finishing the night with a youthful trip to the arcade where I showed off my lack of video game prowess.  

The group at the Sun-Shooting Tower

I have mixed feelings about the next three days of the trip, because overall I have a positive recollection of most of the things that happened, but experiencing them wasn't as much fun as it could have been.  Friday morning we took a bus trip to the top of Alishan (Ali Mountain) for a nature walk in the pouring rain.  Ali Mountain is best known as a location to watch the sunrise, but our timing didn't allow us to be there, so I will need to return to the mountain top on another weekend.  We slid around like fools in our rain ponchos and booties on a steam train, walked through the woods (and got lost temporarily), and froze in our soaked clothes for the rest of the trip back to Chiayi.  The start of the rain on Friday was the start of a cold, soggy weekend.  That night we caught a local (slow) train to Kaohsiung which is about two hours south of Chiayi so we could catch a bus to the southern tip of the island (Kenting).  Unfortunately for us, a lying taxi driver told us we had missed the last bus south and we would have to take a group shuttle to get there (which was, in all fairness, our alternative plan and was estimated to be the same price).  After two hours of stop-and-go price negotiations between us and the driver (that includes the time we took to go get dinner, and the time he made us wait until the final train had arrived and left so he could attempt to gain more passengers) we got into the shuttle and began our two-hour drive to Kenting.  Kenting is best known for its beaches, and due to the music festival being hosted this weekend, it is the Taiwanese equivalent of a Spring Break location (loud music, alcohol, counting swimsuits as entire outfits, the works.  Unfortunately, after having spent a day soaked on a mountain, and ruffled on trains and shuttles, walking through a Spring Break crowd carrying all of our luggage was less than ideal.  Eventually we settled down in a campground near Baishawan (which is a white sand beach featured in the movie Life of Pi near the end of the movie).  We put our tents up literally minutes before it began raining, soon we found ourselves sitting in our tents, waiting out the heavy rain.  The rain protection on my tent began to slip, and soon tent started taking in water, so I decided to go out (half-dressed, in a combination of tank top and swimsuit bottoms) to re-peg the tent, which inspired my tent mate to join me in the rain and to run to the campsite bar, where, low-and-behold, we discovered the majority of our group had already gone to wait-out the storm.  So there we sat, almost until sunrise, (me in a state of relative undress, which was the most comical aspect of the day), until the rain finally slowed and I was able to dry out the tent a bit and finally sleep.  Looking back on it, I would say we overbooked this day in our schedules, that was a crazy (and long) day.

Saturday was meant to be a day of relaxation.  We all slept in then spent the day swimming (and getting tossed around by) the beach.  I love a good day on the beach, but I'd say the sea did not love our company this day.  She (being the waves) stole several important (and not-recovered) items from us which, affected the overall mood of the group.  One thing that I learned about Taiwanese culture during this is that the Taiwanese people believe when you undergo a material loss, it allows you to not undergo an accident (so at least our group should be healthy for a while). 

Lastly, we come to Sunday, the travel day.  We spent about 9 hours in transit today, which has left me uninterested in sitting in a train again anytime soon.  The first two hours of travel were spent in a 16-person karaoke shuttle bus which was half-filled with Taiwanese girls.  The girls, after realizing the karaoke selection did not include English songs, silenced the TV, played all of the English songs on their smart phones and passed us the microphones to serenade them.  It was the most unique travel experience I've ever had.  Then, after a subway journey, two entertaining local train journeys, and 7 hours of sitting, we finally arrived back in Changhua, were I sat down at the computer, and proceeded to spill my memories of the weekend (but I suppose you already knew that part of my day).

The end of the first leg of our journey, with our karaoke buddies

I love adventures, I love holidays, I love my friends, and I love Taiwan, but right now I love my bed and the inside of my eyelids.  Goodnight!