BAISHAWAN (白沙灣, BAISHA BAY)

Situated north of Taibei City is Baishawan (or Baisha Bay). It is one of the few beaches in Taiwan to feature white sand, most others sporting their versions of black and golden sands. It's considered a great destination spot by people wanting to get away from the crowds and spend a peaceful day out of the city.

Step 1: Getting to Baishawan

This part is relatively simple. Get yourself to an MRT station, work your way onto the red line and head north to Danshui (or Tamsui), the last stop on the northern end.

Exit the station and turn right. At the station there is a bus terminal. The bus you need (either 862 or 863 if I remember correctly) begins its route there. You may want to double check those numbers when you get there. To make this simple there is a tourist information section between the MRT exit and the bus terminal. Their English is fantastic!

You'll travel for a fair amount of time. Depending on traffic it can be as long as an hour and a half. There'll come a time when you see the coastline and think you're close, but then you'll deviate away through a small town for another twenty minutes. Don't panic - you're on the right track. Just keep your ears open and your eyes on the screen displaying for Baishawan to appear.

When you alight you'll be confronted by this. Simply cross the road and manœuvre around the buildings. You'll emerge alongside these shops on the far side.

Though usually less crowded, we arrived on the day they were having a kite competition. So we encountered a few interesting diversions.

There's a reason this is such a popular kite-flying area.

Now, that was that reason again? I forget...

A little tired of carrying the cooler box, I decided setting up camp would be our priority. We found a few rocks to hold down our picnic rug and set to work.

Chicken from yesterday's braai (BBQ) and a cold drink were the perfect appetisers, especially after carrying them the whole way there.

A word of advice - don't pack more liquids than are reasonably comfortable to carry. They weigh a lot.

Also keep an eye out. Occasionally the sea will offer up a painful obstacle.

Exploration further down the beach turned up two things. The first is a second entrance access to the beach via a staircase, the top of which offers a spectacular view of the beach. It ends by the road, offering another way out for those with cars.

The second thing I discovered was a pathway winding itself along the coastline. Between a hill and a great, dark rock a path meandered in and out of sight.

(The pillars flanking the top of the stairs. They can be seen in the previous picture.)

Being me, my first action was to climb the rock. As an afterthought, I drew my camera and took pictures of the beach I had just come from.

This was followed up by a picture of my new course.

Enough driftwood to shake a stick at.... sort of. Well, enough to find a decent walking stick. I hope I'm not the only one who played with driftwood on rocks at the beach as a child.

For those of you who would be put off by the idea of scrambling across rocks, there is the easier, tamer course in the form of a pathway. It's not as exciting, but it'll still get you there.

Baisha Bay also has its quirks. There's the swing sitting atop a mini waterfall.

Odd, personal artworks left by previous rock-scamps.

Squatting in shelters left by others.

(Safe as Houses)

It's enough to inspire you to exercise your own levels of creativity (or potential lack there of.)

(The two Chinese symbols on my shirt together mean "natural". They can also be used to stand for "science" or "biology" at school, though not for chemistry.)

What do you leave behind you?

Variety and New Skills

 It appears there are yellow watermelons in Taiwan. I've never seen one before, but they taste about the same. The only difference besides colour is that they are slightly less sweet than the pink variety.

A good friend of mine is currently in France with her cast and crew. They are putting on a puppet show in a beautiful theatre in Saint Andres, Champagne. The company is called The Space Behind The Couch and they are not the only ones taking part. There is a festival taking place specifically for puppet plays. The play they are doing is a rendition of the sad, true tale of  Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.

I acquired a copy of the book and, after the short read that it is, I tried my hand at making a paper crane.

This proved successful, so I attempted a large one.

And then a few more.

I began making them in my spare time at work between lessons. I know have about fifty of them, some strewn around my desk while others have been stuffed into a small bag which is spilling out in one of the desk's drawers.

But amateur origami isn't the only thing I have taken up with relish of late. Last weekend my girlfriend raised the level of my sewing from that of attaching wayward buttons to the use of a sewing machine. I have completed my first item - a dice bag.

The material in question is a remnant from an old pillow case, but as tutorial material it worked adequately. My next one shall be made of finer material of my own choosing.

Faithful

During break time at school at the end of this past week two of my students approached me and handed me an invitation at an event. The details of the event were slightly unclear, but I got the impression that there was going to be a concert or show with various people playing music and/or performing short skits. I accepted it and finding myself with free time on the day in question (today) I headed to the address.
Imagine my surprise after arriving at my destination and climbing four flights of stairs to find myself in a kind of Sunday School. It was a Christian gathering, no questions there, with people singing praise and worship songs on stage while the audience - largely children - sang along. The songs were all in Chinese, though I recognised various ones through their melodies. Being an atheist I felt a little out of place. One of the students found me and after a short while I was introduced to his mother and we proceeded to chat until the songs ended.

What happened next was apparently what the invitation was all about. We were presented with a short play involving five actors and aimed at presenting a moral, as you would expect from a religious gathering. This was followed by a ten minute break and then another play, this time with four actors. I only understood bits of the Chinese, but as it was a play and aimed at a young audience I could guess just about everything that was said.

Looking around the room I saw something both alien and very familiar. The alien sense came from me being a foreigner viewing an aspect of a culture which has adopted a foreign religion. The familiar part was seeing a group of people gathered for religious matters. I once followed a religion, back in the day before I began forming my own questions and understanding of reality, and I know the comfort that people get from being dictated to and being relieved of the stress of individual thought.
But there was also something else I noticed. As I could not understand enough of the language, all the talking around me was reduced to white noise and I found myself analysing the situation. What I found compelling was the sense of community created by a group of people coming together to socialise through the medium of a common interest. Though I could fault them for choosing a religion as that medium, I cannot fault them on the joy and excitement they all shared in connecting to one another. It's a bit like gaming, in a way; a group of people getting together to have fun and to play around with some fantasy.

Rooftop Gaming

Nanshijiao, in the south of Taibei City and close to the mountains, is an area home to a wildly popular sport. This sport is non other than racing homing pigeons. It is a highly competitive sport with rivals constantly trying to steal each others prize birds. People sometimes set up nets across treelines during races in order to try and catch birds. Then, if they catch an especially fast flyer, they can ransom it back to the owners for absurd prices. I've been informed that ransoms can be as high as hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Enter into this calm picture the presence of six bemused foreigners equipped with pencils, paper and enough dice to choke a horse. We ascended to a rooftop flat, though flat may be a generous word. Put simply, it's a box - a box on the ninth floor.

The larger structure is the frame surrounding the stairwell and lift shaft. The "flat" is the smaller square on the right.

This friend doesn't live alone, though. He shares this glorified lookout point with two adorable overgrown-rats.

Unlike most "rats" (tiny dogs) these ones were good natured and I took a shine to them. I believe it was partly to do with them being sweet natured, and heavily influenced by their lack of yapping. I don't recall a single bark all afternoon.

Of course it wasn't long before our minds began drifting to practical matters. Dogs are, after all, tamed animals and many of the other animals we've tamed have been put to use pulling plows or providing us with milk. What could dogs do?

A military application soon presented itself.

Behold, the half-breed chihuahua improvised semi-automatic.

It wasn't long before everyone had gathered. We released the hounds to enjoy an evening of freedom while we brought out the real weapons.

As you can see my weapons have gone native on me.

We set out our things upon one of the tables visible in the picture earlier, gathering around it on bar stools. Playing commenced in the late afternoon, after a lively encounter with the wind which left us chasing paper around the rooftop and requiring us to flank one rather unruly sheet before it could be snagged and returned to a folder.

Rooftop gaming is an experience. Being that high up we were enjoyed the novelty of actually feeling the breeze and welcomed it after the heat. Luckily our day of gaming wasn't as hot as the week prior. But all things come to an end and for us that meant daylight. The sun lowered itself to the horizon and then gleefully sank beyond our reach. It wasn't, however, time for gaming to end.

'n Boer maak a plan. So did we. The host whipped out a lamp at sunset and gaming continued into the night. We eventually packed it up at twenty minutes to midnight.

PS: We found Batman.