Finally, the path leads to the visitor’s center, where families with babes in arms, young women in mini skirts and high heels, and young men in trendy city duds walk the few meters from the parking lot to admire the giant stinking and steaming Hsiaoyukeng fumarole.
The water here is apparently hot enough to boil an egg. There is no need for that, though. After our brisk hike, we head back to Taipei, with its big-city action and the world’s best Chinese food, just a half-hour taxi ride away.
Great Gorge
Far below us, jade-green waters froth over smooth marble rocks like lime juice poured over opaque ice cubes. The sheer walls of Taroko Gorge rise steep and high on either side, while the road clings to the cliff and punches through the solid marble in a series of tunnels. For sheer physical drama, this massive chunk of jagged marble, a deep split in the earth’s surface, rates right up with the world’s great natural wonders.
The Taroko Gorge in central Taiwan is one of this scenic island’s major tourist attractions. Yet until this summer, it had been a one-day excursion for most foreigners, who flew into Hualien on the east coast, toured the nearby gorge by car, then flew back the same evening. With the opening in mid-1997 of the Grand Formosa Taroko Gorge, the first international-standard hotel in Taroko National Park, longer visits are now easily arranged.
So, at 8:20 one morning, we board an express train at Taipei’s cavernous railway station and rattle through the city. We are the only Westerners on board. Beyond the urban sprawl, we are treated to scenes of age-old China. Scalloped Chinese graves are cut into the hillsides, brown rivers flow down from the green hills through rice paddies where brightly colored rectangular flags snap and flutter in the breeze. Fantastic, orange-roofed temples with ornate, dragon-shaped ridges and overwrought, Sino-psychedelic embellishments glitter in the sun. An hour out, we reach the coast and run alongside the Pacific Ocean, with ancient, bare wooden boats hauled up on stony beaches.
At Hualien, there is a mass rush off the train and on to waiting tour buses. (Outside of Taipei, there is little English spoken, so it is best to have everything pre-arranged.) A driver in a Grand Formosa hotel vest waits in front of a van with a large, handprinted sign saying “Harchant” in the window.
The stretch of rural land between mountain and sea that we now drive through appears to have two major crops: vegetables and stone. Roadside stalls display piles of produce such as sweet potatoes, potatoes, squash, corn and jumbo-sized yellow bananas. Others sell locally quarried and hand-crafted polished boulders and stones, marbleware and dark green Taiwan jade.
A half-hour after leaving the station, we reach a long lineup of ponderous double-decker tour buses at the park entrance. Our driver blithely sails past, waving his ID card at the park officer, and we beat the crowd into the gorge. Soon afterwards, we pass the Eternal Spring Shrine, with a waterfall pouring out the front like a tongue lapping out of a red and white mask. A trail winds up the steep mountain face to a small Zen monastery, Kuanyin Cave (for the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy), a jade tower and a bell tower.
For 12 miles, the road clings to the cliffside and burrows through a series of tunnels cut into the solid white marble. With the jagged rocks and tunnels with huge round windows cut out of the walls to provide light and ventilation, it is like driving through immense chunks of Swiss cheese. Some cliff walls are bare, with swirly marble cake patterns, others blanketed with vegetation.
Double-decker buses squeeze through impossibly narrow spaces of the Tunnel of Nine Turns, and the canyon closes in so much in places it seems like the opposite walls are almost close enough to touch. At the Swallow Grotto, we stop to walk along and peer though the rock “windows” down the heart-stopping sheer drop of the crevice of jagged marble and granite. Far below, the Liwu River cascades over boulders on the river bottom like variegated blobs of melted wax. It is as though Salvador Dali designed Taroko. Further on, marble lions guard the entrance to the Bridge of Motherly Devotion with, of course, white marble railings. Atop a rocky outcrop here, a green-tile-roofed gazebo built for contemplating the wonders of nature is now a photo prop for tourists.
Tienhsiang, at the end of the gorge, is a mini hamlet of a few snack shops selling ominous-looking bubbling stews, a cubbyhole of a bus station office, some homes and several churches with hostel accommodation. A half-dozen souvenir stores display mainly tasteless marble lamp stands, paper weights, bookends, vases, tableware and chessboards, as well as plastic toys, Chinese back-scratchers and other garish souvenirs.
The spanking new hotel Grand Formosa Taroko Gorge is tastefully set next to the Liwu River, not far from the hillside Hsiang-Te Buddhist Temple. Just three stories, the hotel blends harmoniously into the background. Rooms are comfortable, with the best overlooking the river. Desk clerks speak little English here, but with prebooking this presents no real problem.
Of seven hikes in the Taroko Gorge National Park, to natural wonders or to isolated aboriginal villages, the most accessible from the hotel is the 1.3-mile walk to Paiyang Falls. It is already late afternoon, so we set off up the main road where, about 300 yards away, a tunnel cuts straight through the big mountain. It is long and dark, except for the light at the end, but paved and easy walking. On the other side, we enter what seems a new, unexplored world. A broad path leads across a bridge, a sensational but easy, walk high above a rushing river and through a series of dark, twisting tunnels (one nearly 1,250 feet long) where a small flashlight proves useful. After about 20 minutes, we can hear the roar of falls ahead, like the distant rumble of ocean surf.
Finally, exiting a last long tunnel, we see it - a long silver stream running through lush foliage down the opposite mountainside. Crossing a small suspension bridge over the roaring rapids to a viewing platform is like walking on a long and particularly bouncy trampoline. Two young Chinese girls from Toronto studying Chinese in Taipei, ask us take to take their pictures as they stick their heads through the struts of the suspension bridge. When they leave, we have the entire river valley to ourselves. After savoring the solitude and the views, we walk back to the hotel, making it easily before dark.
By the time we are ready for dinner, the dining room is closed, so we settle in the lobby lounge, overlooking the interior courtyard with its ornamental pool, fountains and flowers. In this new hotel, the service is cheerful, friendly and strikingly inefficient, but the lounge is the only action in town. The electronically operated, computer-programmed piano goes through a cycle of Moon River, Baby Elephant Walk, the theme from the Sting, Lara’s Theme from Dr. Zhivago and Tie a Yellow Ribbon.
But don’t shoot the player piano. It is the only entertainment here, outside of watching satellite TV in your room or sitting out on your private balcony listening to the soothing sound of the river running through the gorge.
Short Hops, Subway Stops
The spring, 1997, opening of a MRT new subway line to the north brought a number of intriguing getaways to within easy reach of Taipei.
Gates of Hell: The Japanese, great connoisseurs of hot springs and medicinal waters, built resorts around Peitou, eight miles north of central Taipei, during their occupation until the end of World War II. Japanese military officers and businessmen once used the resorts to entertain temporary lady friends. Now, public sulfur pools such as Hell’s Valley are more family-oriented, with locals gathering to observe the huge, steaming pools, and boil eggs in the 200-degree Fahrenheit sulfurous waters.
Taipei has swallowed up Peitou, which is on the newest subway line, but the area retains an air of a Japanese holiday resort with public saunas, hotels and inns, some dating back to the occupation.
The best of these, the In-Son-Ger (the Whispering Pine Inn), is an authentic rural Japanese-style inn, although high buildings now tower over it. Entrance to the low, unobtrusive tile-roof building is past pools of golden carp, splashing waterfalls, stone lanterns and bonsai trees. Simple, traditional rooms with wood paneling, shoji (rice paper) screens and tatami (woven mat) floors are made more c
omfortable with Western beds and chairs with backs. The inn has its own steaming, sulfuric sunken pool for soaking away all your cares.
Old China
When Hollywood wanted a typical Chinese seaside setting for Steve McQueen’s The Sand Pebbles (1966), they used Tamsui, a fishing village on the north coast of Taiwan. The village is now the last stop on the new MRT subway line, just over a half-hour from Taipei.
This authentic Chinese port, with its busy narrow streets and all signs in Chinese script is more functional than merely recreational. A riverside promenade lined with ancient broad-beamed wooden boats with the traditional good luck eyes painted on the prows leads to a ferry pier, with its carnival atmosphere. Food stalls sell snacks such as grilled octopus and candied plum tomatoes. A trio of shiny tomatoes, like snooker balls skewered on a bamboo stick, is less than $1. The coating tastes remarkably like a North American county-fair candy apple. However, the fruit is not quite to Western tastes.
The town’s historical attractions include a kind of Anglo-English college campus, with red-brick buildings and students in school uniforms. Nearby, the Spanish-built Fort Santo Domingo (Fort of the Red-haired Barbarians to the locals), built in 1629, recalls the glory days when Tamsui was the main link between Taiwan and the West.
Queen Nefertiti for a Day
Bizarre lava and sandstone shapes sprouting from the beach form a kind of natural sculpture exhibition at Yehliu (Wild Willows), near the northern harbor city of Keelung. A long hawker alley selling every imaginable kind of pressed, diced, cubed, sliced, shredded, raw, salted and preserved fish and seaweed leads to the weird geological formations.
Time and tides, and wind and rain, have shaped the formations into Mushroom Rock, Cinderella’s Shoe, Beehive Rock and, the most famous, Queen’s Rock, a natural bust of the ancient Egyptian monarch Nefertiti.
Few visitors venture beyond the beach. They miss the best part, a flat stone path leading through sea grasses and windswept trees to the end of the promontory, with expansive views of the ocean and freighters lying at anchor waiting to get into Keelung harbor.
From a pagoda there, you can see the sun go down like thunder over the Republic of China ‘cross the bay.
TIBET
LHASA
Yak Butter and Tea on the Roof of the World
November 1994
IN the 17th century, the first outsiders to reach Lhasa, Tibet’s Forbidden City, observed pious pilgrims with spinning prayer wheels prostrating themselves full-length before temples, thousands of red-robed, red-cowled lamas, and yak-butter-greased peasants who “eat their meat raw and never wash their hands or face.”
When I first deplaned from a Civil Aviation Authority of China (CAAC) Boeing in Lhasa in the early 1980s, I saw the same lamas, pilgrims and peasants who eat raw yak and spin prayer wheels for salvation. Only the few battered green Chinese army trucks, the four-wheel drives and the air strip seemed new.
Visitors who now arrive at a new terminal see a large city with entire suburbs of new concrete buildings and an extensive Chinese influence. Tibet has changed more in the past decade than in the previous thousand years. Yet in important ways it is the same exotic place those 17th-century explorers observed.
With an average altitude of more than 5,000 meters, the Roof of the World is the world’s highest region, and among the most isolated, boxed in by immense mountain ranges on three sides. Flying in from Chengdu, China, or Kathmandu, Nepal, it is obvious why this country remained isolated for so long. Jagged, snow-capped peaks of the immense Himalayas poke through the clouds, as though tearing at the aircraft’s underbelly.
Tibetans are still cheerful, humorous people open to foreigners. Tibet’s’ Tantric Buddhism, or Lamaism, is a sometimes ghoulish, bizarre religion of human-skull cups and skull-encrusted crowns, human-bone trumpets, copulating icons and rumored cannibalism.
Until the British invaded Lhasa under Colonel Francis Younghusband in 1904, the only wheel seen in the country was the prayer wheel. Now, jetliners arrive regularly, and satellite dishes receive international television broadcasts -- when not banned by the Chinese government.
Tibet’s harsh, stunning scenery seen on the new 68 mile (96 kilometer) highway from Gonggar airport to Lhasa is age-old. Prayer flags flap from all corners of low, square, mud-brick huts, herdsmen drive skittish, shaggy yaks which look and move like musk oxen, and fields of brilliant yellow mustard ripen in the crisp air. Women winnowing barley in the fields toss the golden grain into the air from woven baskets and sing to summon the wind to blow the husks away.
A yak-skin coracle (small, round boat) twirls in the eddies of the cloudy, jade-green Tsangpo River, which thousands of miles downriver becomes the Brahmaputra, India’s largest waterway, emptying into the Bay of Bengal.
On my first visit, it was a grueling bone-jarring, head-bashing, four-hour, four-wheel-drive ride over a bumpy dirt road by Chinese jeep. Now, our modern minibus zips along a paved highway, getting us to Lhasa in an easy hour-and-a half.
This mysterious Holy City that eluded outside travelers for centuries opened to tourism in the 1980s. Each year, only a few thousand adventurous tourists come, attracted by the Tibetan lamaist form of Buddhism and the dramatic mountain setting.
The biggest change for tourists has been the improved accommodation. On my last visit, we stayed in the aptly named Number 3 Guest House, a grubby barracks-like place with lumpy, dirty beds and no hot water. The government was building the city’s first real hotel that would vastly improve life in Lhasa for visitors. On that early trip, a gracious, elderly American Chinese lady joked that the coffee shop in the new hotel would be called “Yak in the Box” (a parody on the U.S. fast food chain, Jack in the Box). After the greasy, almost unpalatable food we had been eating the whole trip (at that time, the worst Chinese food in Asia was in China), she sounded almost wistful.
Now, the Holiday Inn Lhasa’s coffee shop, the Hard Yak Cafe, serves giant yak burgers; its bar, Altitudes (the world’s highest), stocks local and imported drinks; and the hotel offers the comforts of an international establishment.
Despite the rapid changes, Tibetans remain friendly, although still given to staring, especially outside Lhasa. These ardent Buddhists are decidedly pious. As we drive through the broad streets of New Lhasa, a dozy grandma, seeing our bus bearing down on her, gives her prayer wheel a few quick extra spins as she scrambles to safety.
Everywhere, in the temples and the streets, we hear the murmured chant, “Om mani padme hom.” Frequent recitation of the incantation, “Hail, Jewel in the Lotus,” helps the faithful achieve enlightenment and reach the Western Paradise of Great Bliss. The words are carved in stones, written on prayer flags and inscribed on prayer wheels. In this Tibetan dial-a-prayer, the wielder gains spiritual merit with each clockwise twirl.
Ten years ago, Lhasa was a mud hut city with only a few small Tibetan shops offering basic goods or plates of tasty momo (dumplings stuffed with ground pork) with chili sauce. Now it is like a shabby, modern Chinese city with straight, paved streets and shops and restaurants with large Chinese script signs.
Karaoke bars and discos are also new. Riding a pedicab one afternoon, I spot The Bar of West. It is a garish place with flocked red velvet wallpaper rubbed smooth, a three-foot-high blowup Coca-Cola bottle, fake plastic dart boards hung on a purple curtain, green globe bulbs glowing against purple plastic wall brackets and a green patterned linoleum floor. The battered pool table is worn to a shiny moldy green, and dusty tins of Five Star Beijing China beer and Pabst Blue Ribbon are stacked behind the bar, tended by bored, sullen girls.
The square in front of the 1,200-year-old Jokhang Temple in the heart of old Lhasa, which was a muddy rubble when I last visited, has been paved over. However, the streets around this Holy See of Tibetan Buddhism are as lively and chaotic as ever, with locals in heavy regional costumes and unusual headgear buying and selling everything from religious articles to food and kitchenware.
A strange swishing soun
d comes from pilgrims slowly making the inner circuit clockwise around the temple. Along Barkhor Bazaar, or Free Market Street, these devout people wearing crude shoes or pieces of cardboard on their hands stand, clap, stretch out full-length, foreheads touching the ground, stand up and repeat the action. Slowly they slide along the road, like giant snails in their bulky leather overcoats.
Inside the ancient temple, rustics with matted hair, wild-looking women with turquoise beads woven into their hair, ancient ladies with faces leathery as sheep-skin coats, twirl small silver prayer wheels or giant, yak-sized golden ones.
A solid line of devotees shuffles down steep stone steps and through the crowded warren of dark winding corridors, the blackened, uneven stone floors sticky with yak butter spilled over the centuries. At each of the 24 shrines to various Buddhist deities, they pour yak butter from brass goblets, tin tea kettles, plastic jars or thermoses into basin-like lamps with dozens of flickering wicks. The lamps throw a dim yellow light on fantastic, bizarre murals and statues. Chanting and clutching prayer beads, the flock pushes forward to throw ceremonial silk or gauze scarves on the gilded Buddhas and to receive blessings. The musty atmosphere here in the nether regions of the temple is eerie, otherworldly, the cloying air pungent with the smoke of yak butter candles, burning juniper, incense and unwashed bodies.
From the roof of the temple overlooking the square we can see a stark new reality of Tibet. Even here in the old city, office and apartment blocks are replacing the traditional Tibetan low-rise stone buildings with elaborately-carved wooden eaves, as China colonizes and modernizes the country.
The Peace Correspondent Page 11