Campage Rampage

Trigger Warning: There will no mention of skating in this post.

One mystifying aspect of Taipei culture is that sort of like New Yorkers, they view anything outside the city limits as impossibly distant places. Hualian is two hours away by train. It's a tropical paradise with white and black sand beaches, crystal clear rivers, baby blue ocean, towering green jungle mountains with deep gorges and billowing rain clouds. This time of year, it's not particularly hot or cold. But no one goes there. The total cost was about $600, but we didn't even use the cheapest travel option. I'm glad that the millions of people who live next door in Taipei don't seem interested in Taiwan's beaches. We were the only people on the beach for miles and miles and miles.

We rode out on puyuma in the atrium, because they weren't selling seats anymore. It was drizzly when we got there, and we ended up marching with too much liquid for about an hour up the road (4.2L of water, 8 tall boys, and a bottle of soju). We got to the river bridge, where I planned to cut down to the river bed and walk out to the beach. To my dismay, there was thick jungle and a 10m drop to the path below. We milled around for a bit, like a pair of ants who have lost the scent trail, but decided on a hail mary and crossed the busy five lane hwy and were immediately rewarded with a hidden path entrance down to the river. As we trundled through the undergrowth, RMJ lept to one side and spooked, I looked up to see what was the cause. It was a water buffalo the size of a dinosaur. Triceratops didn't have such big, thick horns. This meat mountain had polished bronze bridles, with well-oiled leather. I wish he hadn't been so scary, it would have been cool to pet him. The snakes in the undergrowth were scary too, but we only passed close to them, never seeing them.

It wasn't apparent that we could stomp through the chest high snake grass to get down to the river until the very last moment when we found a thin stretch to cut through. From there, we were greeted with the surreal sight of a literal mountain of rocks and pebbles, blocking the route to the ocean. The river apparently flows under it into the salt water. We climbed up and over it to two toned blue ocean, either end of the massive beach obscured in the drizzle. We set up camp on the exposed beach near some kind of weather radar station, with a stiff northerly breeze nearly taking my tent with it several times. Because we were the first people to ever visit this desolate beauty, drift wood was everywhere, and within twenty mnutes, we had stacked up about six hours worth of firewood. It was about 14:30.

By 15:30, we were relocating up into the transitional biome between jungle and beach. This was because RMJ realized that the stunted pines offered shelter from the drizzle, and more importantly, the wind. It also had a certain je ne sais quoi, an instinctive feeling that we were safer and cozier there. And we were. From everything but terrible, terrible insect bites, of which I am still suffering severely. More of my arms and legs are covered with thick, itchy welts than isn't. I didn't notice any mosquitos, so maybe it's come culicoides. Ignorant of the horrible itching that would arrive in my future, we grilled kebabs and steak and drank beer and talked. Four hours turned into six, then eight, then I passed out.

I woke up at dawn, talked around, tried to make a fire out of boredom, gave up. I went to sit on the steep rocky beach and watch the waves. The surf is so fierce here that it flings stones up into the air as the wave rushes in, and then sucks the fist sized rocks back towards the depths on the way out, with an uncanny roar that I had never heard before. I wandered back to my tent and read Dune until I feel asleep. Then I was rudely awoken by the scream and gut rumbling roar of our war planes as they ripped across the sky and banked up into the clouds to intercept the feints of the enemy. Or maybe they were just practicing. It looked fun as fuck, to be honest. This went on for about 20 planes.

I ate some sardines (camping breakfast staple) and poked around the sawtoothed cactuses and pine straw and massive amount of humanity's detritus. The whole fucking beach was covered in garbage. I'm not a fan of China by any means, but it's infuriating to hear Taiwanese people bleating about how all the trash washes over from China. None of this trash had labels in simplified mandarin. Taiwan is like a weirdo in an adult diaper shitting all over himself and insisting that it's someone else's fault. Stop throwing your trash everywhere, you trashy trash-throwers. Have some pride in your country. On the walk back, we passed a few farms, one of which was buried under heaps of plastic garbage bags, or at least the other side of the road was. Who could bear to live like that? I never thought I would say this, but I'm a little proud of my redneck childhood, because at least we burned our garbage and never just dumped it literally twenty steps away from our front door on the other side of the fucking street. The train back easy and pleasant. We hung around the apparently abandoned platform for a while, the station once had a ticket counter and waiting area, but it was gutted. The train stopped though. We got on and I scratched my arms and legs all the way back to Taipei. Skate tonight?