Taroko is a pretty famous place for tourists, and this skate spot summed it all up for me. It was a weird and probably decent spot, at the bottom of a half km deep canyon, that was only about 100m wide at the top. The sun never shines at the bottom. There is an internet spot in utah or something that's really famous that is a painted rock canyon thing. It used to be on a lot of screen savers. Taroko is somehwere in the middle of that and the Grand Canyon.
Megalophobia is the fear of big things. Taroko is not a place for the megalophobic. I was frightened most of the time I was there, but the tiers of beauty disoriented me enough that I only vomited once from fear, and that was at the top of the Death Path.
I don't know how long the canyon is, but I'm guessing at least a few hours drive, winding up and around and into the mountains until it peters out into a regular old mountainside. In Taiwan, the regular old mountainsides are like the regular old skatespots - better than anything I've ever seen.
The river at the bottom of the gorge is so small that at regular flow, it's probably not navigable by a raft even. 30m above the house-sized boulders is the first sign of a flood line. This was creepy in the way that finding glass in the desert after a nuclear blast is creepy; I can't imagine that energy at this spot when the event happens. The cliff sides are scoured totally clean up to that point, throughout the canyon.
Above that, the walls stay at 89 degrees for hudnreds of meters, but shrubbery starts to appear, and at about 100m above the chalky white water, stubbly weak trees are growing. This doesn't change for hundreds of meters. The sky is only visible for about a handwidth across the sky, form the bottom of the canyon. It's not unlike another planet, or at least, it's more like another planet than it is like the earth.
THe walls are pink and white and the material that ledges in Taipei are made out of. One day, homeies will be grinding on stone that I looked at on those canyon walls.
The top of the moutnains look like Macchu Picchu. My brain isnt calibrated to deal with looking at ground 600m below and 1000m above at the same time, but it tried to make sense of that as I clung to the side of a cliff, ignoring warning sings about venemous snakes and dangerous bees, and shoving my fists into the shrubbery to try and grab onto life-saving earth as I tip-toed down the hell path on the side of the sheer cliff.
The japanese apparently punished the locals by making them make this path across the cliff face, about 108 years ago. We climbed up to their abandoned village, which was like a Taiwanese Tintagel. The squared off bases of what appear to have been a tiny place, high high high up in the mountains quickly dissolved back into the verdant and terrifyingly steep mountain. I can't believe anyone used to live here. Tourists used to hike up there to visit, 100 years ago.
By that piont in the hike, I was already so afraid of the cliffs that my entire body was shaking. I'm an old man now, and I'm not afraid to say that. Twenty years ago, I was a pussy, so I would say it was rad adn awesome and I lovedit and I got a rush, and more bullshit. Not anymore. This sucked so much that after it was over, I vomited for about 30 minutes.
Before it was over, we rounded a corner and got onto the cliff face proper. SOmetimes, there was a cable or rope to hold onto. You have to heel and toe it for a ways, because on your right is a vertical cliff, and on your left is a vertical drop. Not actually that far across the valley, is a mountainside out of film. It looked fake, like I was tripping. Maybe the fear heightened my sense of color, but that still didn't explain the sense of scale of the place. English doesn't have a word for it, but huge is the best thing that comes to mind. I could crane my neck all the way down and look at the river, and all the way up and look at the mountainside, which disappeared into a grey cloud.
My appereciation of the beauty was like the appreciation of the beauty of a ferrari when some poseur dickhead rents one in taipei and runs a redlight and lamost kills you as you skate across the intersection at 03:00. It was beautifyl, but so what? I hated this experience so much that I can't even begin to describe it. I heard Taiwanese is a poetic language; mabye if I learn it, it'll have a way to describe how I feel about that plcae.
Anyway, we also went to the best beach and river playing placei n taiwan. I jumped off a stone thing and redeemed my manhood. We took many, many selfies. Afterall, that's what taiwanese vacations are for.
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