Ticky Ticky Tembin

The size of Taiwan is demonstrated to me in the fact that this is going on down south, while up here in Taipei City it would feel like any other slightly cloudy day, if not for all of the chairs being chained up, the typhoon warnings on every public display in convenience stores, and our concluding EAPSI banquet down in Hsinchu very sadly being cancelled. I just checked the weather stations down south, and found this as the 1:15 a.m. observation from the top of the mountain on Lanyu, where we stood two weeks ago: sustained winds of 37 m/s (83 mph), with gusts to 55 m/s (123 mph). I don't know how accurate the wind observations are in conditions like that, but it's conditions like that, so it doesn't really matter.

It's crazy to think that the islanders down there are used to such things. Hoping for the best for friends and everyone down south.

The Wind Down

We stayed near the corner on the central-
southwest coast

Quite a few deadlines caught us all off guard over the last few weeks, as has our looming return to State-side. While being busy, we've made sure to squeeze in some last minute trips that were high on our priority list. Through way too few pictures and way too many words, I'll take you through one of these trips, which undoubtedly goes down as my favorite throughout this extended vacation.

So Lanyu is this tiny, desolate volcanic island just southeast of Taiwan. While being bigger than the more famous Green Island just north, fewer tourists go there, so it is a favorite to people like me who are enamored more by the serenity and traditionalism in a place than what it has to offer in artificial entertainment. We managed to catch a tiny little plane ride there, which lasted all of 20 minutes, after maybe 8 hours of desperation on standby in Taidong. We were beside ourselves with excitement to finally have a flight, and to be on the tiniest airplane any of us had ever ridden in (roughly 5 feet window to window).

Leaving Taidong

The ferry port in Lanyu

Once in Lanyu, you depend heavily on what Chinese you know or the help of any Chinese speakers along for the ride with you. We had lots of help from our good friend Jay-Wen (J-Wow), who works in a lab with one of our EAPSI buddies. It was a big step back in time. Most of its 4,000 inhabitants are of the Tao aboriginal community, and once in a while you'd even come across someone wearing nothing but a wrap to cover the goods. They had these beautifully painted canoes they use to fish from. We'd sometimes pass by guys hanging out along the road constructing them rib by rib. We were told not to take pictures of any of the aboriginals or their way of life, but there's plenty online (someone's gotta break the rules).

 

Outside of our hostel

The majority of the people you interact with are actually Taiwanese, who either own or work at a hostel, restaurant, etc. on the island. We received incredible hospitality on the island. Our wonderful host - the owner of the hostel we stayed in - was our tour guide, our cook, and by the end of the trip, a great friend (even though we couldn't directly communicate with her). She saw to it that we experienced the local sights, like these really cool nocturnal blooming flowers that looked like fiber optics when you shined a light on them, as well as Lanyu traditional food (flying fish, cooked in a variety of ways, and some items made from taro and yams).

(courtesy of Shala)

Spiced flying fish (it was very tasty)

A major attraction in Lanyu is the world-renowned diving/snorkeling. It's in what our marine bio friends call the coral triangle, which extends from the islands around southern Taiwan across Indo down to the famous reefs in Australia. One thing that has been really cool about being in this EAPSI program is that I am always surrounded by experts on some topic, here to study something very different from me, and that was definitely the case in Lanyu. We were very fortunate to have with us our good friends Cammie and Julia, who study coral and lion fish (they dive reefs for a living...rough life).

On our second day, after a couple of us snorkelers explored on our own, the master divers Cammie, Julia, and Jay-Wen took us to the real deal spot. I must describe...

So you get in the water, and have to delicately float your way out along the surface for a while, keeping all of 3-4 ft of water between you and the jagged, urchin-ridden reef floor. You follow along these narrow, slightly deeper channels in the reef to make your way out. You get to a location maybe 60 feet from the shore, where the shallow reef floor gives way to a nebulous underwater city of coral-covered towers and bowls of reef, contoured by deep pools 20 ft across that go down in some cases to 20-30 ft.

We spent the next several hours bobbing up and down beneath the surface, testing our lung capacity in order to explore a surreal world that most of us had never seen. Certainly a coral lover's dream, as Julia and Cammie reassured us, but I think us less marine-educated folks were also able to appreciate the abundance of clownfish, lionfish, nudibranchs, sea snakes (those were a bit scary), and a handful of fancy marine bio terms that I've already forgotten. I'm throwing in a bunch of photos in at the bottom from the snorkeling, which I've taken from a couple friends albums (thanks Julia and Sarah!).

On the traverse road looking northwest

Coming over the traverse road towards the east

The arch at Lover's Cave

Posing at the weather station

While I'll miss the crap out of the incredible snorkeling, hospitality, and delicious dan-bing (think Asian egg sandwich), I think I'll miss cruising around the island by scooter the most. It takes about an hour 30 to make it all the way around, and it's eerily quite the entire way (leave the five or so small villages), which reminds you of how preserved and natural such a beautiful place can be if not overrun by tourism. Climbing the cross-mountain traverse road, rounding the southern point to Battleship Rock, and the arch near Lover's Cave stand out in my mind. Also striking gold on a meteor shower while there. I've never seen the Milky Way so vividly. And then we have Alex LeBaron astrophysicist to explain it's dark patches, the origin of the meteors we were watching burn so brightly, and many other things that all us geeks love to ponder.

Sharp reef juts out of the water all along the coastline

Battleship Rock in the distance

The ferry ride out

Underwater Mecca (thanks Julia and Sarah!)

 

Peter giving his stamp of approval

If you look closely, you can see the sea snake in center photo

Just a bunch of sea urchins doing their thing

 

Standing guard on their anemone

Saola: It begins

Today began with Zack and I coming out of comatose around 1pm. This resulted both from a lack of sufficient sleep all week and from a fun night out in celebration of a good friend's birthday. We both got in around the same time last night from different happenings, running around giddy from a good night's fun, and soaked and ecstatic like dogs just getting out of a bath. Heavy rain has been on and off around here the last few days, getting a bit more intense and a bit more windy with each day, but we are finally seeing a turn for the typhoonier.

The real excitement is apparently going to come a few hours after nightfall, but just as I type this, we're finally beginning to see some quite impressive wind and rain, all from the sturdy comforts of our mango-stocked bedroom (we though an impending typhoon was a sufficient excuse to "work" from our side of campus for the day).

The radar images I've thrown in here show what appears to be some intensification, with heavier rainfall in and surrounding the eye of the typhoon. The national centers have been forecasting some intensification because of more favorable atmospheric conditions, though it might not make a whole lot of difference for us. It's not making a direct landfall (the eye is passing north of Taiwan), but we're going to see heavy rain either way. This, as the locals describe, is the trouble that typhoons cause around this mountainous island.

I'll be doing my best to get some video/pictures of the action from our place. No worries form the west though - the wind isn't going to get that intense, and buildings are plenty sturdy. As for rain, we're well outside of the mountains, so quite out of harm's way. Just a guy enjoying some weather.