Silence is Golden

Two weekends past, I traveled to Alishan with a rather large entourage.  Fonda, four visitors from the States, and five ETAs definitely qualifies as a large group, if you ask me.  Alishan, by the way, is a mountain in central Taiwan (elevation 2700 meters, or something like that).  I recount highlights of the voyage here in adages that you may or may not be familiar with (especially since most of them are not adages in the strictest sense, as I made them up).

Silence is golden.

One of the myriad wonderful things about Americans is that they understand when a moment should be appreciated in silence.  On Saturday morning, we awoke bright and early (or dark and in the middle of the night) to go on a hike and watch the sun rise.  In other words, we all woke up at three in the morning.

What followed was an hour-and-a-half-long hike that lasted 40 minutes.  When you’ve got a deadline to meet (like the rising of the sun, which compromises for no one), I suppose, you tend to hustle.  We reached an outlook with a perfect view eastward.  We were poised, ready, with a perfect spot to observe the blessed event.  And then the Taiwanese tour group arrived.

In what was so ironically typical of Taiwan, I spent the next half-hour (the one centered around five in the morning, when rational people would be asleep) with a tour guide screaming into a megaphone right into my ear.  And once he was done with the megaphone, he just shouted at everyone for another fifteen minutes.  Suffice to say, I was ready to knock him off his podium and watch him roll down the mountain.  Compound this with the minuscule Asian woman behind me who kept pushing up against me, and I was very cranky at five in the morning.  In America, I am certain, the moment would have been accompanied by a respectable, awed hush.

In spite of the disturbances, the sunrise, at the very least, was still lovely.  Alas, my camera fails at adequately capturing the moment.  What a surprise.

 Sunrise: Pre-, During, Post-, and me.

Let ‘em glow and let ‘em go.

We were promised thousands of lightning bugs putting on a show for us the evening following the cacophonous sunrise.  Unfortunately, there were about four.  (Regardless, there were umpteen Taiwanese tourists waiting with bated breath, cameras at the ready should one of the four fireflies grace us with a flash.)  This platitude reflects my personal philosophy regarding lighting bugs, which was markedly at odds with that of some of the other people’s (which was more along the lines of “Come, see, squash”).

Happiness is crickets and an unpaved path.

Unpaved paths are highly undervalued, or at the very least, taken for granted in America.  There is something so much more real and natural about a hike in which you are walking on uneven, unpaved earth.  Asia either hasn’t caught on to this, or chooses to disagree.  It is my opinion that Taiwanese people love nature, but only in theory and when kept at arm’s length.  They want their paths paved in sturdy, solid asphalt, and they want pictures of nature, but they only want to spend five minutes surrounded by nature.  Then they want to get back on their tour bus and go to the next scenic spot.  Not hiker-friendly, that’s for sure.

In any case, the point of this is that there were a couple unpaved paths at Alishan, for which I was exceptionally grateful.  There were also innumerable crickets serenading us on our hike, which was magnificent.  Thus, happiness is crickets and an unpaved path.

 

(Happiness.)

To close, I leave you with a puzzling query to ponder, one which we were unable to resolve on our trip: Which situation involves less oxygen getting to your lungs – intense pollution, or high altitude?