“Hey, I’ve seen you before,” an elderly gent yelled. I was hiking past him on Bishanyan in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) and decided to stop and say hello. It turned out he thought I was someone else, someone almost a foot shorter than me and also not bald, but why get bogged down in details?
We had a nice, albeit strange, chat; he provided intimate details — details I neither asked for nor wanted to know — about how he did not feel his age.
Anyway, it was entertaining, and these surprising, random and overwhelmingly positive moments are regular experiences on Taipei’s hiking trails.
Whether it is solo hikers playing music out of loudspeakers for all the world to hear, middle-aged men yelling: “Hoooo” as loud as they can for no apparent reason, or just folks stopping you to overshare personal information, people — and the noise they make — are a big part of almost any hike you go on in the Taipei area.
This point has been made before in this newspaper, but where the writer of that other article found frustration, I generally only find pleasure (“A-holes on Taiwan’s mountains,” Sept. 3 last year, page 13).
I had reason to remember that article recently while I was out on a side trail leading off from the gorgeous Jinmianshan (Goldface Mountain). This peak, the main trailhead of which is near Xihu MRT Station, attracts large numbers of hikers, presumably most of them drawn by the picturesque rocky outcrops at the top of the walk.
Out on the side trails, things are a bit quieter, and I was walking in silence until my calm was pierced by the velvet tones of Michael Bolton. The song? When a Man Loves a Woman. It is a classic — of sorts.
Everyone knows it, but it is Michael Bolton, so it is rubbish. Hearing it out there on a muddy path, surrounded by trees in East Asia, was just plain weird.
When you consider the vast wealth of music that has been made over the course of human history, why would anyone ever choose to play the greatest hits of Michael Bolton while out on a weekend ramble? It defies logic.
Yet that is the thing about Taipei hiking: Much like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.
I have heard an old woman playing Latin-based hip-hop. I have passed a young guy puffing and panting his way up Elephant Mountain while also singing along to Elvis Presley.
By Xindian’s Yinhe Cave Temple, I heard Le Nozze di Figaro. You might not know the name, but it was the music Andy Dufresne played from the warden’s office at Shawshank Prison, and it was beautiful.
Clearly, not all the music you hear is beautiful, but it is always so incongruous with its surroundings and the people playing it that I do not know how it can fail to entertain.
The incongruity does not end with the music. On any given day in Taipei’s hills, you could see drunk people singing KTV, a young guy inexplicably going up the path backward on all fours, the oldest person you have ever seen or an old man with no shirt on using a hula hoop as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Taipei’s hiking paths are varied, vibrant and picturesque, and the people you meet on them add color and surprise to any trek you take.
I do not know if it is always true that “people are the best scenery” — for one thing, there are simply too many truly beautiful landscapes to enjoy — but there is no doubt that people are the most interesting scenery.
Andy Crosthwaite is a technical writer and editor working in the information technology sector.
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