Taiwan trip 2011

Hello Everyone,

After Thailand we met back up with Tom in Taiwan. We arrived by plane and followed Tom's directions to take a bus to Tainan. When we got on the bus there was actually only one seat left for the both of us but a local actually gave up his seat for me. The guy ended up having a child on his lap for the 4 hour bus trip. So, it was a pretty friendly first impression!

Lots of neat things happened in Taiwan, so I think I will do this blog in point form also (and in no order).

* Stinky tofu is a traditional dish in Taiwan. It looks and tastes like deep fried tofu. However, it is fermented and as a result it smells like something between shit and rotten meat. Julie & I both tried some. It tasted all right but the smell is such a turn off. Taiwanese people don't think it's weird, but they think that eating stinky western cheese is weird! Different strokes for different folks.

* We also had flavored desert tofu. This was amazing. I would eat this often. It's a very soft tofu flavored with things like strawberry and/or chocolate. Some of it was very similar to pudding and others were more similar to a snow cone.


* Tea & fruit juice seems to be also very popular in Taiwan. We had tea nearly every day. There are entire restaurants dedicated to tea and they have dozens of different tea's to choose from. At one place, I had this amazing fruit tea where they put actual chunks of orange and other fruits in the cup. The flavor from that fruit tea was so powerful & fresh. The hot tea water really pulled all the taste out of the fruit in the cup. They have cool take away cups that they seal for you on the spot with plastic. You could easily hold this cup upside down after they seal it.

* We decided to take a surfing trip to the south in Kenting. Tom has a friend who has an old van loaded with 2 surf boards. One of the boards was a short nimble board and the other was a long board (ideal for beginners). When I first saw the van I really wasn't particularly confident it could travel hundreds of kilometers but Tom was enthusiastically confident in its worth.


The van performed amazingly both there and back.

* The night before surfing we examined the beach in the dark and the waves looked quite good. That night I had visions in bed of me flawlessly executing on a surf board on my very first attempt. The next morning I was very confident I would excel at surfing. We went down to the beach and saw that most surfers were concentrated in a small area. We didn't want to interfere with them so we chose a different section of the ocean. I took this massive board into the water and started to paddle out. For nearly half an hour I could not even get out to where I needed to be. The waves kept beating me and pushing me back to shore. The massive surf board I was holding was far more awkward than I had anticipated. After 30 minutes, I was exausted and came back to shore. I didn't even make it out far enough to catch a wave at that point. I felt extremely defeated. I gave the board to Julie who tried her luck with the ocean. While standing on the beach I had a better vantage point. I saw exactly the problem from the beach. The place I entered originally had many frequent waves but there were other places along the beach that had less frequent waves that would give you more time to paddle out between waves. I noticed that surfers would walk up and down the beach before getting into the water. They were looking for good places to enter. Next time I got the board back, I was able to quickly find a good place to enter and quickly get out far enough into the water. Then I had a whole different set of problems - catching a wave. Anyhow, long story short, I tried many times unsuccessfully to catch a wave and I left the beach slightly disappointed with myself. I think that my high initial expectations may have ruined my first surfing experience.

* Kenting was a very beautiful seaside town. I really love some of the pictures we got there:



* I was very impressed with Tom's Chinese. He seems to understand people and people seem to understand him. We didn't have any problems with language when we were around Tom.

* We went to a few vegetarian restaurants in Taiwan. All of them were amazing. The one pictured below offered a hotpot where the meal comes out with a flame underneath and cooks in front of you. They give you a large tray of uncooked vegetables and you can add the ones you want to your dish.

* Tom has a temple right next door to him!

* We used scooters to get around in most of Tainan. Tom has his own and we borrowed his roommate's scooter as well. It's really enjoyable having the freedom to just scoot around town. Traffic for scooters is quite good and it seems like no where is more than 20 minutes away (often more like 5).

* Tom & I decided one day to go for a hot towel shave. We walked by one place where we saw a man getting one so we figured we'd stop by and get one ourselves. The atmosphere in the barber shop was not what you might expect. The barber was watching the stock channel intensely while listening to the radio at the same time. The shop was basically a converted garage that still looked very much like a garage. The barber did not even seem interested in our business. Tom went first. When Tom was finished he didn't seem too happy but recommended I do it regardless. The shave was good & bad. It was good because he got very close and it only cost me 1 euro. It was bad because the barber was more interested in giving the closest possible shave than how my sensitive skin would feel afterward. He often went over and over the same spot if he wasn't happy with it. This left us both only partially happy with the ordeal. Here is a picture of his shop:



* We went to a hot spring one night near Kenting. Tom says that often each hot spring will be famous for various oils and/or minerals in the water which are believed to have therapeutic properties. This particular spring was a co-ed place with many indoor bath tubs which were at different temperatures depending on your threshold. It also had a bunch of water jets and falls all throughout it for extra entertainment. It was very relaxing and I was ready for bed after it. Here are a few videos of the place.





* Taipei 101 is the tallest building in Taiwan. We went to the top of it and it only took 30 seconds in the elevator (worlds fastest elevator). My ears popped on the way up and the way down.

The building itself is pretty amazing. I recommend reading the Wikipedia article about it. It has a huge 660 ton damper at the top of it which helps keep it stable during typhoon winds by moving in the opposite direction of the building sway. Here is a picture of me being silly with the damper:


And here is a picture of the the building itself.



* We spent a lot of time with Tom's friends, most of which are English teachers. I enjoyed seeing how Tom lives, works, and plays. He has a good group of friends. We also went to see some of his students at the English school. Most of the kids are typical kids, laughing, playing, causing trouble, and generally not doing 100% of what they are told.

* I was somewhat surprised by how much lawlessness I saw in Taiwan. Many of the English teachers were working entirely under the table and had no working visas. Many of the drivers will come up a red light, look for police, then drive through the light. Many people drove scooters without a drivers license. Somehow though, the city seems to run perfectly.

* In Taipei, we visited this cool "silk market" where the sold lots of traditional Chinese clothing. Julie bought a red dress here.

* Tom insisted that we try Betel nut which is a nut that if you chew it gives you a mild sensation much like that of taking a single shot of alcohol. The nut is perfectly legal in Taiwan and its pretty much only consumed there as well. It has a red coloring inside and if you chew it enough your mouth goes red. It's fairly common to see taxi drivers & truck drivers with very red mouths.

I think I'll leave it at that.
All of the pictures from the trip can be found here.

Cya

Thailand adventures

Hello,

Before I get to Thailand, the big news is that Julie got accepted to Oxford university under prof Stargardt. Prof Stargardt wrote a book that was very infulentual to Julie's earlier thesis called Witnesses of war. So we will be moving to England! There are still 1001 details to work out which will all come in due time. I will post these details as I figure them out.

Thailand has been a crazy adventure and there were so many interesting things all independent of eachother so I think I will do this blog mostly in bullet form.

Bangkok

• Traffic on the streets for cars was ridiculous! For motorbikes it's not so bad because they can weave through traffic. They are starting to put in skytrain lines which are amazing but there just aren't enough lines to cover the city.
• Many things were ridiculously cheap. I got a delicious pad Thai from a street vendor for 70 cents. The 1 hour taxi from the airport was about 4 euros. We both got 30 minute foot massages that totaled to 4 euros!
• Originally we scheduled to spend 2 days at the start of our trip and then 3 more days at the end of our trip in Bangkok. However, the traffic in that city is just too bad to make it enjoyable. We cancelled our last 3 days in bangkok and opted for 3 more beach days in Phuket.
• I got a barber shop, straight razor, shave for the first time in my life for 2 euros! It's an interesting experience to have a foreigner who doesn's speak any English have a 6 inch blade to your throat. The end result was a good shave but not quite the "smooth as a baby's ass" I was going for.

Phuket

• We got a fantastic hotel in Kata beach area for an amazing price. Tom got one just down the road.
• Met up with Tom and Sayana! Tom had a scooter and eventually got a hotel just down the road from us.
• I went parasailing on the beach. It was a bit more expensive than everything else but still only about $25 CAD. It was still very worth it though. You can't see it from this video, but there is a small Thai man up there with me and he is not strapped in at all. He is holding the ropes behind me controlling our flight and landing.
  

• Kata beach was beautiful and not too crowded. It had all the amenities you could possibly want (food, shopping, pharmacies, etc). It even has things you wouldn't expect like botox and teeth whitening services.
• Tom and I went on an adventure without our sandals. We were walking on rocks and gravel. We eventually got very far away from that start and decided to head back but our feet were very sore from walking on all the rocks along the way. We decided to make our own shoes out of broken coconuts and vines. After many failed techniques we discovered the best vines and best wrapping techniques. It was key to have several wrapping points including around the middle of your foot, your ankle, and your big toe. The shoes were actually not bad and they saved our feet from the tough gravel for the rest of the walk home. When we were making the shoes, Tom & I couldn't help but wonder "What would Mark Davis do?". I'm sure Mark could have made even better shoes.
  

• On my first day I applied 30 sunscreen once. I did not reapply and as a result, I got burned on my shoulders and feet. The next day I stayed out of the sun and wore a tshirt. It wasn't too bad though. I didn't burn again for the rest of the trip.
• I specifically chose Kata beach because it was supposedly the best beach for waves. However, there we no waves while we were there. The biggest waves come in the summer time. So we didn't get to try surfing like I wanted to :(
• We all went on an elephant trek which was amazing! They even let you ride bare back on the elephants neck. At the end you can buy sliced pineapples to feed to the elephants. This was a highlight of my trip. I love elephants! We later played with a small elephant on the streets (captured in the video below).
  

Koh Phi Phi

• After 5 days in Phuket, we got on a ferry to Koh Phi Phi. This is the island made famous by the movie "The beach". When we got close to the island on the ferry, the view looked like this. I was hoping to see these sheer rock faces sometime on my trip, but I had no idea I would see them nearly every day! (click image to see larger).
  

• We stayed 1 night in Koh Phi Phi in a terrible hotel with thousands of ants and probably bed bugs. I accidentally left two food items in the room only to come back to thousands of ants crawling all over them. I suffered many bug bites from this trip but many of them were probably due to sleeping 1 night in this room.
• The 4 of us rented two kayaks to explore the island by water. This idea seemed great at first but after a few kilometers of paddling combined with 30 degree heat, my arm muscles nearly collapsed while in the middle of the ocean. We went to one section of the water that was famous for coral and tropical fish. I brought a tube of crackers to feed this fish. Once I got into the water, the crackers turned into more like a tube of cookie dough. I would squeeze the tube out a bit and the fish would come from all over to eat the soggy crackers. Here is a video of this.
  

• After a bit of snorkelling with the fish, we went to the closest shore (near the corals). This shoreline had no hotels so it was much more natural. It also had small wild monkeys. Unfortunately these monkeys were very used to taking things from humans. Anyone who left things on the beach risked having their things stolen by monkeys. Here is a picture of a monkey trying to drink someone's suntan lotion. The owner of that suntan lotion tried to rush the monkey and take it back, but then many other monkeys agressivly turned the situation around and started chasing the girl. Eventually a man started kicking beach sand at the monkeys and they dropped the suntan lotion and ran away. BAD monkeys!

• Koh Phi Phi is known as the young, party island of Thailand. They are famous for their "Thai buckets" which are basically a small bucket that comes with a full bottle of booze, a coke, and some straws.

• When the sun went down, the bars along the beach started setting up quick assemble dance floors on the sand and turned the music up loud. Many of the bars offered fire shows where performers would spin staffs that were lit on fire. They often threw the lit staffs spinning into the air and then caught them. It was hard to capture on camera, but it looked something like this. The show was pretty amazing. The safety rules were pretty lax because the audience was quite close to the performers and the performers often dropped their fire. Someone else on youtube uploaded this video which might be more descriptive.
  

• The party on the sandy beach after the fire show was good too. If you were on a tight budget, you could easily just bring your own beer to the beach and no one would say a thing.
  

Koh Jum

• After the crazyness and bugs of Koh Phi Phi we took a longtail boat for about 1 hour to a nearly deserted island called "Koh Jum". This was very off the beaten track and there were probably only a few hundred inhabitants on this island. The beaches weren't as nice but the atmosphere was perfect!

• We each stayed in reasonably priced bungalows. The were quite basic (no AC, no hot water), but they were clean and had mosquito nets to keep the bugs out (the net is raised in the picture below).
  

• I was quite worried that we would be lured there by inexpensive rooms but then burned by very expensive food from the hotel restaurant... but that was not the case. The restaurant food was amazing and reasonably priced.
• Julie & I would often sit down by the water with a freshly blended fruit smoothy. It felt like paradise. I think the hotel tried very hard to give you the "paradise island" feel. They put little flowers on the top of your drink every time, they set out hammocks, etc. I appreciated their efforts!
  

• There were small monkeys on this island too but they were much better behaved. The hotel had signs up saying not to feed the monkeys and I think this made all the difference.
• On the first day we took a trip into the "town" on the island. There is really just one road so its impossible to get lost but the road is several kilometers long. We walked for the first few kilometers then my sandals broke. We needed to find a taxi of some kind into town or back because I didn't fancy walking 2 kms on gravel back. We found a small village who helped us get a taxi. While we waited for the taxi, we watched the locals live out their lives. It must be an incredibly simple live (relative to mine) they seemed to live. We got the taxi into town and I found some new sandals. Tom and I joined a soccer practice game with some locals. The pitch they played on was very bumpy and as a result I tweaked my ankle slightly. After that we went further into town, had dinner, and then watched the local Chinese new year festivities which included some basic fireworks and some singing and dancing. At this point, it was dark and we took a taxi home. This taxi was just a motorcycle with a sidecar on it. The sidecar had a bench big enough for 3 and so Tom sat on the motorcycle seat behind the driver. We had 5 people on this tiny motorcycle. The driver insisted we get a flashlight because the last section of road before our hotel was washed out and he couldn't take us that far. We argued that we could manage without one but he insisted. So we bought one. It's a damn good thing we got that light because I'm sure we would not have made it back without it. The last 500 meters of road that we had to walk was about as pitch black as pitch black gets. Not to mention the road had huge ruts that we would have tripped over every step.
• The next few days were just a whole lot of nothing. Laying in hammocks and reading.
  
• One night after playing some cards and jenga, we went down to the beach while it was dark with some flashlights. There were thousands of crabs all over this beach... it was pretty incredible. Also, there was some kind of "firefly" like algae that was washing up on the shore. It would wash up, stay bright for about 4 seconds and then fade to black. It was hard to capture on camera but the best picture we got was this. It also appeared in your footsteps in the sand. When you walked along the beach you could look back and see the sand where you stepped lit up by this algae. It was very cool!
  

• The trip back from Koh Jum was an interesting experience. You need to understand that "everything always works out in Thailand". So we buy our tickets to get from A to B and are given very few instructions on what to do. First we get in the hotels own longboat who drives straight out into the ocean for about 1 km and then just stops. Three more longboats come out and stop right beside us. We all just sit there in the middle of the ocean with our luggage wondering what were are doing. Then a small ferry comes and everyone walks across the longboats with their luggage and boards this ferry (in the middle of the ocean). This best picture I have is this:

• From the ferry they take us to the mainland with no instruction. There are Thai people offering taxi services all over the place and you are not sure which one you are supposed to take. Then someone shows up 30 minutes after you land holding up a sign with your last name on it. Then they take you to another area with hundreds of tourists and dozens of vans. Somehow you get in the right van and the organized chaos continues. These transfers continued to happen 2 more times before we reached our destination. The Thai people know exactly what is going on but the tourists have no idea. You just need to accept that it will all work out (even if they drop you off in the middle of a field with goats). It always worked out despite a fair bit of stress on our part.
• At this point, Tom & Sayana went on to the airport to go back to Taiwan... and Julie and I stayed in Patong for 4 more days.
  

Patong

• Julie and I proceded to Patong which is quite close to Kata beach. Patong is more known for a bit more nightlife, drinking, and prostitution.
  
• We got to our hotel after a very long ferry & van ride only to find the hotel we reserved had a problem with our reservation and we had no room. Luckily it was the hotels fault and they felt very bad about it. They put us up in one of their sister hotels that actually turned out to be a much nicer place! This was very good because we desperately wanted a clean room with no bugs! We got it, the new room was clean with AC and we were happy.
• We rented a scooter every day we were there. it was only about 4 euros per day. I got pretty good at driving the scooter near the end. One day the police was pulling everyone over to check for drivers licenses. I only have an expired Canadian license, so I showed him that. The officer looked at it for about 1/2 second and then waved us on. Phew!
  
• Julie & I went bowling and watched a movie. The movie theater had an option to pay more to get a couch. We opted for the couch and it was cool!
• On the last day of our trip, we did a cooking class. We made green curry, tom yum soup, and tom kha soup. Everything turned out amazing.
• I think in the whole trip, we must have got about 7 massages. All but 1 were foot massages and one was a thai oil massage. The full body massages aren't always that relaxing because they are really pressing very hard, so we tended to opt for the more relaxing foot massages.
  

I think that's about all I have for now. We then got on a plane and headed to Taiwan. I will write a new blog about Taiwan soon.

Pictures of the trip can all be found here:

Thailand part 1
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=270324&id=502577840&l=5f33a3bf47

Thailand part 2
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=270351&id=502577840&l=28842c5311