Dajia, TW

Dajia, TW

Saturday, 08. February 2014

Roaming through Taiwan with four words in Chinese: Hello, Thank you, Happy New Year and Germany. These four words are very helpful as they make communication more fun for everybody, as we can understand one another better. Every now and then a few words of English were thrown in and with good deal of guesswork, everyone was happy. This way we made it up along the coast and through the misty mountains, from the drizzly weather at the coast across to the sunny side of the mountains and via Puli to the Sun Moon Lake. Somewhat shocked by the masses of tourists there, we made our way to the usual police station. But this time it didn’t go quite so smoothly with pitching the tent, as they sent us off to the local Temple. A bit bewildered, we stood in front of the temple, which apparently should help us find a good husband.

As backpacking Europeans are really popular here and Franca had sent up a prayer for somewhere to pitch the tent, we were instantly approached by a gay couple. They acted as interpreters for us and together with temple staff, helped us find a good place for the tent. The Taiwanese have a particular love for concrete as tent bases. As we have never quite warmed to this concept, we once again continued our search and ended up at the home of the Temple staff. Here we found a nice piece of grass, complete with dog poo, and a very cute museum full of models and stories in bottles and excellent local tea and coffee. Very spoilt, we said our goodbyes to our lovely host in the early afternoon and made our way to Tsai. Remember? We met Tsai at the Sydney College of Arts and are now staying with her big family, where in the evenings grandma, aunt, uncle and cousin gather from all over town. And so we expand our Chinese vocabulary to include ‘grandma’, ‘nice to see you’ and ‘can I have a piece of cake please’.