- Wulai, Taiwan
Sometimes it’s good to talk to strangers. Sometimes, talking to strangers brings you new friends and Aboriginal Taiwanese men singing covers of John Denver’s Country Roads.
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Skim Time: 3 mins
Read Time: 5 mins
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Here’s how you do it.
Transportation
From Taipei, you hop on the MRT and go to Xindian, a beautiful grassy hiking spot where people sell fruit out of the backs of trucks and paddle around a lake in duck boats.
From Xindian you take a bus approximately 40 minutes, trying to balance while the driver throttles around serpentine mountain passes at full speed, passing little tea shops, hydro electric dams, and foggy mountain vistas the entire way.
You get off at the last stop – where water pipes criss cross over the top of a blue-gray river to feed the biggest industry in the town: hot spring hotels. 500 NTD (about USD $16) for two hours in a swanky hotel room with a double hot spring and river view.
Two hours? You have to wonder if people really come for the double hot spring, or if they make use of the swanky hot spring hotel rooms to indulge other corporeal appetites.
The outdated aboriginal museum on the other side of the bridge, just as you enter into the town, is free for students, and sleepy for everyone. The main street is dotted with people selling moonshine millet booze, peanut mochi, and pungent stinky tofu.
This is Wulai.
Last week I went to Wulai to work remotely. I sat in an awesome little cafe overlooking the river. I sipped on my dry cappuccino and shuddered at the massive creepy cross that stands atop the mountain there, modeling itself after Rio Jesus.
I ate wild mountain boar and fresh vegetable stir fry for lunch, and took the log cart with my friend Drew up to see the famous waterfall (瀑布) at Wulai.
- The Waterfall at Wulai after the rains
There were at least two hundred spindly white harry millipede monsters dotting all of the handrails, trying to escape the torrential downpour that had completely soaked through my clothes and shoes.
I usually work from cafes and bookstores, and don’t take advantage of the remote nature of online work often enough. I did a little emailing, did a little brainstorming, then just sat back and talked about life and everything with Drew. We walked around and ate street food, and got wet in the rain.
Just When You’re Ready to Head Home
When we were ready to head back we stopped in a store to pick up some Wulai mochi. A guy was there chatting up the store owner, and offered us a glass of Taiwan Beer if we had the time.
I generally don’t take strangers up on their offers to drink beer. I think they’re probably trying to sell me something, or that something fishy is going on.
Drew on the other hand, agreed immediately, and into the back of the store front we went. Adventurous friends are good friends.
The man’s family had just finished up a massive lunch. Chicken bones, greasy soup stains, and a bunch of empty Taiwan Beer bottles littered the top of the dining table. There were yellow and red and blue striped aboriginal tapestries hung on the wall. Right next to family pictures with twenty people in the frame doing the awkward family portrait smile thing.
That’s a big family.
Everyone sitting around the table was Aboriginal, the man said. That meant that they were all extremely friendly and weren’t trying to trick us or anything. They would cover the cost of all the beer and snacks, and we should just sit there, relax, and talk with them and have a good time. They weren’t like the big city folks.
They sat Drew and I down and brought us out two white cardboard boxes of fried fish and fried shrimp. They set us up with little glasses and filled them up with watery Taiwan Beer. Which always seems to taste better after it rains.
Falsetto John Denver
They asked us about our homes and our families. They sat around and drank beers with us for four hours. Our new native friends told us about their backgrounds, their families, and then mentioned that they had daughters around our age that they wanted to introduce us to.
They even showed us pictures.
And then, the Seediq Aboriginal dude busted into a falsetto cover of Country Roads by John Denver. He nailed it.
Then he sang aboriginal folk music for us, and we had a dish of raw pork, iced and salted. An aboriginal delicacy that has a surprisingly sweet twang to it even though it’s salted. Not at all like Country Ham from southern USA.
And then, the Xinzhu aboriginal lady who insisted that I call her “mom,” and who insisted that I was her child after our fourth beer, she busted out into You Are My Sunshine.
And she really jazzed it up.
She did a great job.
Sometimes it’s a good idea to talk to strangers, and to take them up on their offer for a beer even if you’re already almost on the way home.
And it’s always a good idea to drink with the Aboriginal Taiwanese.
