#177 My first sulfur springs, Taipei

Transcript

Oh, you hear that rumble? So today my plan was to go north on the red line in Taipei. See how close I could get to the shore? And I saw a stop not all the way to the north, but one that stops near the mouth of a river, pretty close to the ocean. And there's some kind of like ecological trail, you know, nice big green spot on the map. It is fun to just look at Google Maps and just see stuff that looks cool and head toward it. But as I was heading toward that stop, I kept looking at the window and seeing all of these mountains. Because there's this national park here that I don't quite know how to approach or how, you know, the trails and stuff work. But the mountains are so fucking close. I was like, that's just crazy. I mean, they're just right there. And I just kept looking at them and it's like, that's just the tug that I feel way more. You know, I'm sure it's very pretty to walk along by the water. But the fucking mountains, they just like, I feel that pull way more like mountains. Like, what's up with that? I just want to go check it out. So instead I got off at the stop nearest the mountains. This is I think about as close as I can get. And yeah, I'm looking right at some mountains right there. But again, with mountains, it's like you really need the right entry point. You know, if you can find the official little gate ways that say like, this is the beginning of a hike and stuff, then you're all set. If you just randomly go try to hike up a giant fucking forested mountain, it's not going to work.

But I just figure I'll go explore, experiment a bit. Because yeah, it took me many tries to figure out what was going on in Seoul. Oh, however, I think this is definitely, this is probably an ill-fated journey no matter which one of these I chose to do. Because as I got off the subway and I was leaving, I saw a little text scroll go by on the LCD screen about a thunderstorm warning. But I just caught the end of it. And I stood there for a minute, just waiting to see if the English would loop around. But two other languages looped around and then a third thing that wasn't in English. It's just like, oh, I never mind, whatever. But it is really overcast, not too hot out, which is nice. But yeah, as soon as I left the subway, I walked across the street and started heading towards the mountain. I heard the first, like, thunder roll. And just now I saw a little bit of lightning. So yeah, this is not fucking happening. I'm sure the sky is going to open up any fucking second now. But I got an umbrella, so whatever, dude, I'm just going to approach. I'm just going to see if I can find any way into the mountains. Although here's just some kid at a playground just playing around. You know, it's just normal, normal day, normal neighborhood, normal, whatever. It's not a big deal. But at the same time, it feels weirdly like just exciting. I'm like, I'm head into these looming mountains, these big fucking, and they're all like, misty at the top. The sky is all dark and foreboding, and the occasional thunder and super occasional lightning just feels cool. I mean, I know this whole podcast is just about me doing very tiny things, having little teeny tiny adventures. But it really does feel like an adventure. It just feels awesome. I stopped in at a family mart, got a bottle of water, got a coffee, some little snacks to cram in my pockets, and just walking into the storm toward the fucking mountains. Yeah, the mountains are right there, like right there. They are pushed up directly against the city.

I mean, assuming I can figure out where the trails and stuff start, this might be easier than I thought to get to this national park. I thought for sure I'd need to at least learn how to take buses and stuff. And I guess if I want to approach for many other part of the mountain, I probably will. But this one particular part, man, it's so close.

For the sake of bookkeeping, I got off at Bay 2 station, B-E-I-T-O-U. Man, I'm just walking by a water park with a water slide and stuff. But outside is a drum with a fire going in it. And I saw one of those earlier today, too. And I've run into it 5:00 like quite a bit. The first time I saw one of these was at night at one of the night markets near Shimen. And it just seemed really cool because it was nighttime. And it made the whole thing feel like a weird 70s movie or something. I don't know, just like the Warriors. But I've been noticing these random bonfires quite a bit during the day. And I don't know what they're for. I don't know what's being burned or why it's being burned. But like it really can kind of fuck up the neighborhood, like the whole block. Today's windy, so I don't smell it. I'm probably not downwind.

But the other day, I was by one of those. And yeah, not only did that whole block smell like smoke, but even the convenience store near there, just from the door opening periodically. It smelled like smoke inside. I can't imagine that there's a good reason to start random bonfires like that's worth it. You know, you're already a land of pollution Taiwan, the same helping. What is this? Oh, there we go. I can smell it now. And yeah, I'm like, away from it now. What is that all about? That is weird. Yeah. And again, if it just happened like once or twice, I'd be like, oh, what a strange thing. But it's like semi-common, you know? Just strange, just strange. Who knows? Maybe it's the kind of thing I can look up later and there'll be an obvious answer, or maybe I'll just look it up and nothing will come of it. Because that happens sometimes, where you search something and the internet doesn't seem to know what the fuck you're talking about.

But anyway, yeah, just walking toward the mountains, but I'm ready to bail out. I'm ready to pull out the umbrella and head back to the subway at any time. Man, though, the land of sweat. Where I had to wash my fucking umbrella yesterday. I didn't even use the umbrella much, but I had it in my back pocket all day. And just my umbrella picked up enough sweat from being in my back pocket that like my umbrella smelled bad. And like, that's fucking crazy. That's never happened to me before. I had to get some soap and fucking give my umbrella a little scrub. What the fuck? It's pretty neat having air conditioning now, or even though I only turn it on a little bit. You know, usually wake up once in the night because my room is kind of the heat has built up, so I just turn on the air conditioner for 10 minutes. And then head back to bed. That's enough, but even that is just weird to wake up in the morning and not feel like the grossest person of all time. I'm like, oh yeah, this is fine. But yeah, besides the occasional like ridiculous day, I'm just surprised that I'm basically able to sally forth. You know, it just kind of hasn't, I don't know, maybe it's just because I've grown up in Canada. You know, I just haven't had enough experience with this kind of weather. So I just assumed that I couldn't take it or that I wasn't built for it or that I couldn't tolerate it. When really, probably the truth is, I'm not built for Canadian cold. I can't tolerate Canadian cold because it's true. I mean, that shit will literally kill you. It's just that I, you know, really, my Canadian training is not at all to survive cold. I mean, there's a certain mental aspect to it that if it gets cold, I do just kind of block it out. I'm just used to not thinking about it. But the reality is it's just wearing lots of layers. It's just knowing what you need to wear to survive the cold. You know, I can't actually deal with the cold at all. I would just die. So I don't know, when you look at it that way, like I'm probably better equipped just as a human being to deal with this temperature, than the crazy shit that I grew up with. But yeah, I don't know, I just really assumed, like, I can't do that. I'm a northern person. I can't survive constant heat, constant humidity, constant sweating. But it turns out I can't. It's just gross. That's all. That's the part that you can't get away from, especially as a non-Asian. I mean, I just spuck in my sweat, don't smell good. Bro, my sweat smells like fucking sweat. It sucks. But that's in some ways the worst part, you know, like the heat. The heat's miserable, but also kind of like, hey, you know, like I was saying last episode, it's like a sauna. It's like you're just in a sauna all day. You want to do hot yoga? You want to take a fucking sauna break? You just got to live life out here and that happens. But smelling like a grossy old gross man, I don't think there's any solution to that coming. I mean, I guess maybe it's a similar thing. Maybe it's just getting used to it, but that's not a good thing. It's good to get used to heat. It's good to get used to humidity. It's not good to get used to smelling terrible, because then you just won't care. So I don't know. I mean, I'll keep trying, 10:00 keep trying to find, I mean, again, I don't know. I don't know what solution there could even be. There is none. All right, I'm at kind of a nice little park, but I think I'm kind of at the area now where I'm kind of at the edge of the mountain. There's pretty distinct fences, and there is one more row of properties, and then just mountain. So I guess all I can do now is circle around. I guess I'll just circle around the mountain and see, you know, presumably, if there's a way up there, it'll be pretty obvious. Especially if that trail I was on last episode is anything to go by. That thing was super well marked and extremely well delineated. There are a couple of, you know, the little hiking path dotted green line trails on Google Maps. So there are some like official enough entrances to the mountains to make it onto the map, but I don't think there's any of those around here. But yeah, this is so close to the train. I feel like there has to be something.

There has to be some way, and it is starting to rain now.

So yeah, I guess we'll just see what logger heads crash into each other first. The weather, the trail or lack thereof. Who knows, man, just exploring. Just the joy of exploring.

Oh, all right. Well, this is kind of cool now that I'm here, sort of. But today definitely, there was definitely some learning, but the learning was that I can't do this again. You can't just wander toward the mountains and see what's going to happen, because it's just not, it ain't set up for that. And in fact, now that I'm here too, it's like, how am I going to get out of here? I think my fuckingness is not over.

But yeah, I was walking around. Things were getting pretty confusing. A lot of valleys and gorges and dead ends and stuff. So then I saw on the map, lover waterfall. It's like, all right, that's not too close, but if I just keep following along this road, I'll get there eventually. I was down by the Baytou Hot Spring Museum, although I didn't actually see it, but in that vicinity. And yeah, you just can't be out foot around here. Absolutely not.

It's these really narrow mountain roads, and they have gutters on the side. I ran into some of those particularly in Fukuoka. And yeah, there's just no room for a person. You know, they're literally can't be because the mountains are on either side. So during this walk, basically, it wasn't a ton of traffic, but it's still just, you know, it's just dangerous, little teeny roads, cars going by. Said to keep checking behind my shoulder, and just whenever a car came, or even a scooter, just kind of stop, step carefully over the gutter onto whatever little spaces on the other side.

Wait for them to go by. Rinse and repeat over and over. I don't know if it was really that long of a walk, 40 minutes maybe, but it felt, you know, way longer, because you just can't relax at all the whole time. I even got to like a fork, and I was like, maybe I should just bail out. Like, it's so super obvious I'm not supposed to be here on foot. But the way out is the same thing. You know, it's just more of that kind of road. So I never made it to this waterfall, but I saw a little, the nice little dotted walking path coming up ahead of me. So I was like, oh, cool, that's fine. I'll take that. But now that I'm there, I don't know. I don't know. I'll keep looking around. Maybe there's a walking path here somewhere. But basically, I'm at the Sulphur Springs Valley Feet Pool.

And I could tell before I got here, I've always heard of that, you know, or Sulfur Valley viewpoint, I guess, is where I met. It doesn't smell like that to me, but it does smell exactly like eggs. So here I am. I've never seen one of these types of things before, but it's all fenced off and it just kind of looks like a rock quarry. It's actually really fucking ugly, but it has steam coming out of it. I don't know. I guess it's all right. 15:00 But whatever this little dotted line is, I don't see it anywhere. On the plus side, it rained a bit, but it's stopped right now, and there's been constant thunder, but no more lightning. So I mean, it could be worse. My shirt, though, is just soaking wet, and not from the rain, because I had my umbrella out. It is just from sweat. I'm exactly like I went in a pool. Oh, maybe. Okay, there's a walkway. Thank God. Okay, so at least I can take this walkway to somewhere, and then hopefully I can escape relatively easily. I don't know, though. Fuck. I think it might be time to learn how to take a bus, because there is a road, but if it's more of that fucking mountain road shit, I'm not doing that fucking shit. It's so uncomfortable. It's the worst. I mean, again, it's my fault. I'm not supposed to be there. There's a nice parking lot here. Everybody else drove here. So, you know, give myself a pass the first time, because I just didn't know. But now I do know. I can't go back into that situation. It's way too dangerous and weird.

But apparently in the other end of this walking trail, there appears to be a bus stop, a some kind. I don't know where any of the buses go, but they all seem to have little digital readouts, you know, that just show what a bus is coming or whatever. So I'll just get on a bus. I don't fucking care. I don't care where it's going. Just away from here, please. Oh, here we go. Yeah, here's the foot pool. It's just people with their feet in the sulfur water. I'm sure that's very nice, but I'm good. So, yeah, I guess I'll just keep on exploring, but yeah, I would say this on the pass fail. I'd call this a fail. Listen, go so good. This is not so comfortable. But now I know. Now I know that if I'm going to go for a mountain approach, yeah, I'm going to have to research ahead of time, because just walking at random, super duper, duper doesn't work.

Because yeah, these roads feel like a video game level in a bad way, you know, just a narrow little passageway. Definitely not a place where you're supposed to be on foot. And my reward is an ugly gravel pit that smells like sulfur. Awesome. It's funny, because it is. I mean, now that I'm out of the view of the gross gravel pit, it is actually beautiful here. I mean, it's just tons of mountains and, you know, it's beautiful. It's fucking Asia, it's wicked, but yeah, I don't know. It'll probably feel cooler in hindsight, but just in the moment, it's been such a miserable track to get here. I'm struggling to be outwardly exuberant about this situation.

Alright, well, this turned out pretty good. I did get to the end of the walking trail next to the sulfur zone. It was a little nicer once I got up higher, and I could actually see that there was water. It was a bit of a lake. It wasn't just a rock quarry. And the sulfur smell is definitely strongest at the bottom. Once you got up a little bit, it helped a lot, because yeah, just that little bit of sulfur smell on the air, I mean, it's not pleasant. But it's like, oh, you know, I could see this. Maybe I guess if there's health benefits or yada, yada, yada, maybe it's worth it.

But when it's like full on sulfur mode, it's like, no way, man, the fuck this sucks.

And I did find a bus stop, which even way out here had a nice LCD readout. So in about 20 minutes, a bus would have come to take me back to Beto Station, back where I started, would have been alright. But I saw that there's basically only one road major enough to just go directly down the mountain. A lot of options, but they all kind of twist around and disappear, and would all be dead ends, I'm sure. Because the Google Maps seems pretty damn accurate so far. If it looks like a dead end on Google Maps, it is in fact a dead end. But this road is major enough that it also has buses, so I can bail out any time, just passing a bus stop right now, in fact, with a couple of people waiting. And importantly, this road is big enough that there's a sidewalk, like a pretty wide one, a very comfortable sidewalk. I can just walk down the sidewalk. So I probably got a ways to go, but every time there's a, and I'm kind of walking next to a big, big gorge, whenever there is a break in the trees, and I can see out across and see city and stuff, it looks pretty, it looks pretty pretty.

So this is a nice walk, and I'm not in some kind of big hurry, especially now that the weather cleared up, so this is perfect. 20:00 And if I follow this road, it actually goes almost exactly to my Airbnb eventually. So yeah, it seems like I think the main takeaway is don't walk to the foothills on foot, just don't do it, it ain't worth it. Not meant for that, but at least the very most major arteries do have a sidewalk, you can't actually walk, it's not a big problem. But anything smaller than the biggest road you're not supposed to be on. That is vehicles only, so yeah, won't make that mistake twice, because that part of the journey was super not fun. But there seem to be lots of bus stops up here, so that's obviously the way forward. And there's a lot of hot spring steam here too, not just where I was, but across this other valley, there's more steam rising up.

Yeah, the other thing where this feels like a good time to be gradually bailing out, you know, that even though I got a walk ahead of me, I'm on the way out of here, is that things got dark a lot faster than I expected. Like last episode when I was hiking and it was like five o'clock and I thought I had two or three hours, I did not have two or three hours.

Because I knew that, you know, just the way the time zones are here, it gets the sun rises crazy early in the morning. And it does set quite early as well, but I thought like eight o'clock, but I forgot that I'm actually in a different time zone now. The only reason I'm even aware of that is just from calling home, you know, it's like, oh, we're an hour off now. It used to be that when it was seven p.m. for me, it was seven a.m. back home. Now six p.m. for me is seven a.m. back home. So yeah, we're an hour off, so it actually got dark. I mean, it was almost pitch black by seven o'clock. By like quarter to seven, it was getting very dusky. So yeah, that's just a weird thing. I just never really knew that about this part of the world. It's one of those pretty obvious things, but you know, just being closer to the equator, I'm used to the Canadian way of, in the winter, it gets dark early, but in the summer, I mean, it can be like quarter to ten at night, and it's still like surprisingly light out. That just never happens around here. That's never, like if you lived your whole life in Asia, you'd never have that experience, you know? It's always dark by seven or eight at night, no matter what time of year it is. I just think that's kind of interesting that that must just be like, that's just in your mind. Like in your head, there's no such thing as it's light out at eight thirty at night. It's light out at nine at night. You know, it just never happens ever. It's like that's so interesting, because yeah, it's like in Canada, it only is that way half of the time, but it is that way half of the time. And again, you know, it's like I technically knew all this stuff, but it's just until it becomes relevant in your life, I find none of these things really stick in my mind until I'm experiencing them firsthand, and then they stick mighty good.

But yeah, the point is, although it's not as severe as during the winter, I mean in the winter time now that it's like four thirty quarter to five, I would be in serious trouble right now. I'd be like, holy fuck, I got to get off the mountain. What's happening? This time of year, I still got a couple hours, but it is literally only a couple hours. It still gets dark like very early to my mind in the way that I grew up in what my mind expects to happen. There is no evening basically. There is only night. What would be just like, oh, it's getting on in the evening around here, that is night, that is full on 100% night.

And as I've been walking, it has gotten a little less sidewalky. Up where I was, I did actually see the official entrance sign to the National Park. So technically, I got to the entrance of it anyway. I didn't go in though, but up there it was like a really wide, dedicated sidewalk. As I've been walking now, it is just a, it's like a thing on the side of the road that I've seen around where they just paint it green. And they just have symbols of a man and a kid, little cartoon men. The man is wearing a jaunty cap as though he's from the 1940s, 1940s America, like a little business suit and a hat, like Brooks from Shawshank.

But yeah, the pedestrian thing, it is just, just a color on the road, but it's wide enough to be basically comfortable. This is all right, I don't mind this walk at all. Yeah, that ship before, it was like, I don't know. I guess I wouldn't go so far as to call it scary, but it was just never comfortable, eternally uncomfortable. 25:00 And it just wears the out after a while. It's like, oh jeez, walking shouldn't be this much work.

Hey, I was just mentioning last episode how my shoes didn't squeak anymore, I guess, because it was raining today. You can hear them a little bit.

But at least now I'm confident that that will go away.

I have a little squeak in, but then it'll go away. It really was. I mean, that was an insane day on Jeju, where I was just like being pelted by fucking sideways rain for the whole day. Why did I? What was I doing? Why did I go walking? Although I was thinking that just today that I do miss the Jeju walk a little bit, because it was so, so super directed. You know, the bus rides weren't fun. I really did not, I really did not enjoy the motion sickness bus rides to get to the previous spot. But then once I got there, it always felt so good, and it was so exciting just to keep doing the circumnavigation. Even though I could, you know, as far as like, really memorable parts, like, oh you got to see this, this and this, I could probably count them on one hand. Most of it was just general shoreline, but the whole overall thing was just so cool and it felt so neat and was so just fun. It's fun to just experiment at random and just wander around, but that really was neat to just have a goal. And to have the Ola trail as backup, you know, to know it wasn't just a goal I was making up, that it was a goal you could do, that other people have done before and have set up. That was a lot of fun, I do kind of miss that.

Oh man, yeah, the sun is fully out now, nice, not bad, not bad. If the sun had been out all day, it would suck, but because it's been so overcast, now it's nice.

I can cook in the sun for a little bit, and then just as I'm getting real hot, I can get home into my nice air conditioning.

Man, it is still wild feeling since my little room is so tiny, just this tiny little room, that it's so easy to keep it cool. Just the tiniest bit of air conditioning, and then I go out into the common area and I'm still just shocked every time. Like how can it be this fucking hot in here, it's insane. So I guess I wouldn't be using the common area anyway, even if they had a PlayStation. Which would be fucking wild, if the Airbnb just had a PlayStation. I'm not really sure where to go from here, you know what I think I do know. So my plan was to go do the ecological walk, heading toward the ocean. But I just got pulled away by the siren song of the mountain, the mountain was so close and it looked so cool. And then I was taught a harsh lesson of make a plan, idiot, it's a fucking, it's not a mountain. It's a national park, it's the entire northern tip of the damn country, it's nothing but mountains.

For me to think I could access that on foot is frankly just stupid, it's just dumb. I don't even have an excuse really. I should have known that this would not work so well.

So let's pick this up again next time, which will likely be tomorrow. Where I'll go do the original plan, I'll go do the ecological walk toward the ocean. Yeah, I'm really quickly heading into the city. It's becoming more and more city-like, but still a lot of really beautiful mountain views. But I met a high life convenience store and I don't know when the next convenience store is coming. It could be around the next van, it could be around the next van, it could be far away. So I'm going to turn this fucking recorder off because I'm going to stop in here and get some fucking popsicles.