Giant drums on Lion Head Mountain

Walker, Megan, and Nathan are back home safe and sound after a VERY long but mostly uneventful flight from Bangkok via Taipei, LA, and Cincinnati. The dogs were glad to see them again, but I miss them. I have a week's work in Taiwan, and a long weekend before my training starts on Monday, so I took busses out to a place called Shihtoushan that I've wanted to go since my work in Taiwan began, but have never had the chance to.

Travel in the countryside is an interesting affair, since very few people speak English, and my Chinese functionality is limited to friendliness, and doesn't extend to actual information gathering. Having people write out explanatory notes and destinations in Chinese goes a long way, as does sign language, pointing, smiling, and occasionally matching a Chinese character on a sign to my map. At any rate, I reassured the anxious clerk at the hotel that I would manage and would, in fact, return alive on Sunday. Sure enough, I negotiated three busses and innumerable forks as I walked along trails and roads to get to Chuanhua Temple, a large Taoist temple in a complex of Taoist/Buddhist temples on a lovely mountain....

3/15... Sitting in a pagoda overlooking the moutainside of Lion Head Mountain, in Shihtoushan. The temple complex is huge, with four floors of what appear to be sleeping quarters, two major temples, and a number of sitting areas, gardens, and terraces overlooking the valley. Three other temples and pagodas are barely visible when the fog lifts a bit.

It's raining lightly as I sit and write. The mist thickens and thins, but doesn't lift entirely, increasing the mystique of this remarkable place. Occasional bells sound from one of the many temples on this mountainside; birds sing back and forth, rain drips from the tiled decorated roofs, and soft voices in Chinese sometimes float up out of the mist. This is exactly what I had hoped fo, a quiet, inspirational place to digest, rest, and prepare myself for Monday's resumption of professional activity....

3/17 Typically Alice-in-Wonderland morning in Asia... one never quite knows what to expect! Woke at 5AM to the big drum and bell announcing the morning ceremonies, but went back to sleep. Breakfast at 6:30 was much like all the meals I've had here: white rice with a variety of simple vegetarian dishes: fried tofu, eggplant slices, wheat gluten, steamed greens with ginger, soup of some root vegetable, peanuts. I'm getting better at holding my bowl to my face and rapidly shovelling rice into my mouth, but don't quite have the loud belch down yet. I sit at a small round table with about 5 or 6 septagenarian monks who talk and joke in Chinese and who shuffle from the rice table to the table. They always greet me with a smile and 'Tsau', and usher me to my stool and chopsticks. I begin each meal with a small bow, and conclude with a 'How tzu, xie xie' ('good food, thank you!') Communication doesn't go much beyond that, because they speak even less English than I do Chinese, which says a lot! We all like each other, though.

... Left this morning feeling a bit wistful at leaving this incredibly beautiful sanctuary behind, walking out past a very old man sweeping the back entrance with a Stone Age broom, and feeling as if I were leaving a precious visit to the past. Climbed the thousand or so steps to Yuan Kuang temple (a Zen temple at the top of the mountain, which I'd visited several times over the past couple of days) one last time, and meditated for a while. I asked the nun how to get to Shuilien Cave, and she pointed the exact opposite direction of where I had gone looking yesterday, indicating that the map I've been using is a total joke. Sure enough, the nun was right and the map wrong.

At the Haihui Nunnery, I was invited to tea and snacks with a very happy family with young kids. Kids are always easy to bond with because they don't need language to communicate so we hit it off right away.

Weekends at Shihtoushan are an interesting affair. On the one hand are these extraordinary temples right out of National Geographic, bizarre Taoist rites that begin with huge drums at 5AM, and Zen monks who eat in silence. On the other hand, half of Taipei empties out on weekends, and this is one of the places people go to escape the modern pace of life and the pollution of a big Asian city. Tour busses, souvenir stands, lots of kids, occasional bursts of extremely loud firecrackers, and a generally festive atmosphere prevail. To limited Western mind, they seem like two disparate worlds clashing. Here, they are seamless. The ancient rites continue in the temples, but it's all sort of an open house as well. At Haihui, the nuns and staff were serving huge kettles of nice gingery tea; lots of the visitors (including PhD engineers from the high-tech industry) offer incense, ask for the advice of an oracle, or leave fruit at altars. When I can let the circus atmosphere just be part of the scene rather than an intrusion into what I think the scene should be, it's a pretty entertaining mix of two ancient religions and modern Taiwanese culture in a lovely natural environment. What inconsistency?

That's about it for travelogues for this site. Tomorrow I go to work. When I return home, I'll post photos to all these pages, and it will reside here until the Airtreks folks take it off.

I'll be back home next Sunday 3/24. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Doug