“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.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS