Our Trip to Yilan

Getting There

Anita was picking absently at her face and I was clutching my head in my hands and beginning to rock back and forth when we both realized that we hadn’t been out of Taipei for the last three months.
“Let’s go,” said Anita, grasping her LV bag as if it was the only thing that could stop her spinning off into the ether.
“Where?” I asked.
“Somewhere,” she said. “Just somewhere.”
“How about the High Speed Rail? We could take it to Tainan,” I improvised.
She reluctantly put down the bag and started to search through that Sunday’s tome-like edition of Apple Daily. I considered flicking through the Taipei Times, but as it was only three and a half pages long, I’d already committed most of it to memory.
“No,” she said an hour or so later. “No, we can’t go. The ticket discount ended yesterday.”
I know her too well to ask how much the discount was worth – it didn’t really matter whether it was 1 NT or 1000, the concept of paying full price in the vicinity of any kind of price reduction is as foreign to her as…well. As foreign to her as me. Which is pretty damn foreign.
“But,” she continued, “there’s a bus!”
“To Tainan?”
“No – to Yilan. But it’s very frequent.”
“Right then.”
I quickly checked Yilan in my Lonely Planet. It rated four sentences, all of which implied that even as somewhere to stop off in on your way to somewhere more worthy, it was sadly lacking.
“Ooooh, I don’t know about Yilan,” I said. “Four sentences.”
She gave a sniff and her hand hovered alarmingly close to a burgeoning redness between her eyebrows.
“On the other hand,” I managed, “I lived in Hartlepool for eighteen years and that doesn’t have any sentences.”

We caught the bus outside Taipei 101, which being the world’s tallest building you might think I had been up. But you’d be wrong, you presumptive fool – it was like my Grandma’s house in that respect. When she lived twenty miles away, we would visit every weekend , but when she moved just down the road from us we basically abandoned her and left her to die. There’s just not as much motivation when something’s so close.

The coach was rather comfortable, with soft, reclinable seats and enough suspension to convince you that they’ve finally got round to fixing all those potholes. Mind you, nobody brings round a small cake at half time and there are no personal televisions with HBO and a naughty channel, so it’s not quite as good as the coach to Kenting. Mind you, who really wants two hours alternately wondering how many more times you’ll have to spend parts of your life watching ‘Miss Congeniality’ and whether that’s a man’s or a woman’s arse bobbing up and down and is it okay to feel horny anyway?
The scenery flashing past felt new and exciting, but then we hadn’t seen any good scenery for at least twelve weeks, so it’s possible it was just a few hills and a tree. Presently, we entered a tunnel, reputed to be one of the longest in Asia, and I steeled myself for a long, monotonous trundle through grey nothingness. For some reason, though, I couldn’t help thinking about the Sylvester Stallone movie ‘Daylight’, and so found the whole tunnel experience rather more exciting than it perhaps should have been.
“That was quick,” I said to Anita as we emerged into the sunlight, before remembering that I had moved to another seat to get more legroom, and she was now busy listening to my i-pod - as usual. I’ve frequently broached the subject of buying another i-pod, to which she always answers:
“But I’m the only one who ever listens to it!”
I haven’t bothered to explain that this is because she always takes it off me before I’ve even had the chance to turn it on. This is for various reasons, but if you’re married you already understand, and if you’re not, then it really doesn’t matter.

What happens next? Did you fall out of the bus?

Can you just skip to the funny part? Or at least tell us which page its on so we can fast-forward?

You’re such a naysayer, Sandman. I, for one, am on the edge of my seat here.

There (Part One)

Clouds were gathering by the time we got to Yilan, but luckily the rain seemed to be holding off. Possibly it was storing itself up to have a good go later on.
“Look,” I exulted, “a supermarket!”
“Oh no.” Anita looked rather crestfallen. She isn’t as passionate about exploring new supermarkets as I am, but that’s her problem. Supermarkets you’ve never been to before always have new and interesting things to find… well, all except for Yilan’s ‘Surewell Fresh Supermarket’, which rather disappointingly has all the things you might expect from a supermarket but nothing more. In fact, I imagine it got its name something like this:
“Did you enjoy shopping there?”
“Erm…sure…well…”
I finally grabbed some semi-local varieties of moachi so that Anita couldn’t spend the rest of my life gloating, and we left.
The tourist office was empty of tourists, which may have been a little ominous, but at least there is a tourist office. The lady there was very helpful and recommended twenty seven different places to eat. Wandering around the small, sparsely populated shopping area afterwards we began to realize that there were only about twenty seven places to eat in Yilan, and thus she had managed to recommend every single one of them.
“That can’t be right,” I said. “They can’t all be really good.”
“No, you’re right.”
“What did you say?” I felt her forehead to see if she was running a temperature.
“Well – not right, but I almost agree with you.”
“Wow.” This was something of a first, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. “We should just go to the busiest one,” she decided, after a few moments of pensivity. “Then we know the food is eatable.”
After a few minutes of trying to decide where to go, I spotted a Caves Books and decided to do something strategic.
“I feel confused,” I said. “I don’t know which way to go…sorry, I’m not being useful.”
“Oh Hartley,” she gave me a look and then put on her taking control of things face. “You wait here. I’ll find it and come get you.”
“Right…well, maybe I’ll pop into Caves and look through the English books.”
“Good id… I see.” Her eyelid twitched and I knew the game was up. “No. Second thought, we go together. I’m hungry.”
“Fair enough,” I grabbed for her reluctant hand and dismissed all ideas of finding the latest version of James Patterson’s book.

There may be twenty seven places to eat or there may be a hundred and twenty seven, but it really doesn’t matter because every single person in Yilan only eats at one of them. And it has sixteen seats. The owners of the restaurant have solved this problem by giving you a number if you can struggle through the crowd and somehow get an arm free to signal your intention to eat there. Our number was 73, and they were currently seating person number 34, who had a party of twelve.
“This is going to take forever,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” Anita said, clearly not yet over my book-based deception.
“Shall we go?”
She turned to face me. “Why? Do you want to go back to place with the cold goose and the intestines?”
I clasped a hand to my mouth to try and force back the rising glut of horror. I couldn’t go back to the place with the cold goose and the intestines. It would be the end of me.
“We can wait.”
“Yes. We can wait.”
Eventually, though the word doesn’t really have as much depth of meaning as I require, we were ushered into the tiny spaces and jammed into a table of seven other people like the last pieces in a jigsaw. I have to admit, the rice noodles were exceptionally fine but as I was eating them over the top of someone’s elbow, I couldn’t do too much savouring. Also, as there were no napkins (or at least none I could safely get to) I spent the following half hour with someone else’s food slurped all over hair.
“Very good,” said Anita, as we left.
I wasn’t sure exactly what she was referring to, but I agreed anyway.

methinks hately is confusing ilan city with ilan county…ilan county has a wealth of touristic destinations…ilan city could well rival hatelypool as a deathly boring destination…rule of thumb; always head to luodong not ilan city…

edit: i hate autocorrection software…i-l-a-n is the preferred spelling not y-i-l-a-n…i dont care if the govt. websites are currently using yilan…yilan is in heilongjiang

Is Forumosa really the place for blog entries? I mean, there’s free blog services all over the Intarwebs.

OK, so that narrowly beats my weekend away with her who must be obeyed. We had earlier noticed it was unusually bright and even sunny outside so we went to Taipei Zoo Station to ride the little cable car thingy up to Maokong and got all the way to the four hundred people in the queue before we turned around and ate some DimSum listening to over-loud kids’ muzak from a large anklebiter playground next door to the restaurant, which was not outrageously priced at 350 for five plates despite being a little bland and predictably oily. Then we went to look at the queue again (Hey look, there are more people leaving than arriving now…Oh no, it’s just the same people who walked past a minute ago now deciding it wasn’t worth it and going back to the station) which had not changed much or perhaps had only grown slightly longer and then briefly stood looking at the river musing over a better life in the south of France before going back to the apartment.

There (Part two)

For the next hour or two we explored the various nooks and crannies that make up Yilan, and I believe I have come up with a slogan for their next tourist brochure, or perhaps ICRT could use it to promote travel in Taiwan:

“If you’re looking for a place that combines none of the bothersome facilities of the modern city with none of the distracting charm of a small town…Yilan. It’s the next best thing to shooting yourself in the head.”

If we hadn’t - rather ironically - stumbled upon the local distillery, I might well have thrown myself in front of traffic with the desperation of it all. The distillery has an absurd-looking aboriginal man singing tunes inside, and a rather quaint selection of stores selling local alcohol, ice-cream, sausages and moachi. It’s also home to everyone who lives in or is visiting Yilan on a Sunday, and most of them look like they’re suffering from gastro-intestinal problems. This is, perhaps, because they gave up on the rice-noodle restaurant after waiting for three hours and had to fill up on the distressing mixture of foods available in the distillery. Anita and I did try some of the ice-cream - which professes to be Taro flavoured – and had to spend half an hour afterwards in the vicinity of the bathroom, to see if our stomachs were going to stop sounding like a scuba diver who has run out of oxygen or take things a step further and deliver things downstairs. Mind you, at least diarrhea would have been something to do.
“Shall we go back to Taipei now,” said Anita, after we had ascertained that nothing disasterous was imminent.
“Yes!” I said. “Yes – let’s do that!”

Getting Back

It was as the third coach company told us we could only get a ticket for the eleven o’clock bus back to Taipei, that I snapped.
“But it’s only quarter past four!”
“I know.” Anita patted me on the back, trying to calm me down. “I know. But so many people want to go back to Taipei – it’s amazing.”
“I’m not surprised,” I corrected her. “If I was here I would want to go back too. Hang on… I am and I do.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“What do you want do now, then?”
“Cry.”
“I mean, how can we get to home?”
“Taxi,” I stated as boldly and incontestably as I could. “We have to take a taxi.”
This was about as likely as me getting another gig at Carnegies – a taxi home would cost more than the cost of our journey, meal and entrance to the distillery put together.
“Good idea,” she said. “That’s a good idea.”
She grabbed my hand and led us back to the taxi rank, in front of the tourist office.
“You think we should pay for a taxi?” I was starting to panic a bit. It’s only Anita’s level-headedness that moderates my natural tendency towards ridiculous excess. Without her influence I’d be taking taxis to the 7-11 for a carton of milk, drinking thirty eight beers a night and snorting coke off the buttocks of exhausted ladies all day.
“It’s okay. Only 250 NT each.”
“Okay… that’s not too bad.” Actually, that sounded quite reasonable – it was at least a seventy-five minute drive. “We should take taxis more often.”

We should not take taxis more often. True, it is only 250 NT each, but then ‘each’ has a special meaning in Yilan. I should have guessed really, what with the restaurant, and then all of those people at the distillery. If you can get the whole population of a small town into one restaurant, then… well… then a taxi isn’t going to head for Taipei with just two people in it. Oh no.
There were already four of stuffed into the backseat of the cab like oil-rich sea fish, and our lard-faced driver had spent the past giving us an unappreciated tour of Yilan while he followed cell-phone directions towards his final passenger. Whoever it was would have to sit in the front, or the old lady next to me was going to snap.
A few minutes later we pulled to the side of the road next to a reasonable looking Thai prostitute, complete with leather jacket, micro-shorts and white stilettos. The driver opened the passenger door and she got in.
“Shit,” I said to myself.
“What was that?” said Anita suspiciously.
“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t say anything.”
It was clear that fate was setting me up – I had to keep my eyes off the hooker, not even admit I knew what she was or Anita would ask how I knew so much. Then we’d have to trawl through those two years I lived in Singapore, when things went a bit wrong for me personally and I started spending too long and too much with the wrong kind of crowd. And the wrong kind of women.
“Gosh,” I said after a while. “That business lady in the front must be cold, what with all those clothes she’s not wearing.”
“What?”
“Nothing, just trying to make conversation.”
“Business lady? She’s a prostitute. Don’t you know anything?”
“Of course…of course, I knew that.”
She frowned and revealed a hitherto unknown grasp of question tags:
“Oh you did, did you?”

We chose to enjoy the remainder of our journey home in silence.

What’s a prostitute?

Jeez tough crowd. I thought he was hilarious.

:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:

I was once very angry at everyone that has told me I-Lan is a great place. Still someone gasped in horror the other day when I said that I once had to seriously fight the urge to throw up having driven two hours through the place and out the other side. A statement such as “You should go to I-Lan. It’s very beautiful.” should result in an immediate slap down if you ask me. When people say I-Lan is nice, they are referring to Taipingshan, which is not too bad, as long as you have fed yourself before ascending and you don’t go when anyone else does, or you will either be stuck in constant traffic, or have to stop and wrench the three tangled cyclists from under your car. If I-Lan is beautiful, then so is Taipei, because it has Yan Min mountain. And then come to think of it then, so is my arse; you know, the bit with no spots and hair on it!

My advice to the people who reside in I-Lan… Buy a bloody tin of paint you cheap skate mold dwellers and paint the outside of your grotto. Stop chewing that red crud , it makes even cows look more intelligent! Don’t think for an instance that making the outside of your apartment look like a disused recycling center gives it some antiquated feeling, it looks like shit! And at least try, for the sake of humanity to find something to be proud of and have a go at maintaining it.
Then when you are done, let me know and I may stop there on my way to somewhere, or else next time, I’m shooting straight through. Arr…That makes sense now. That’s why you have so many speed cameras through the place!

Hey, look, everyone, there’s an elephant in the boardroom. And I bet he’s been there all along!

But where else can you get flat greasy leathery, over-salted plastic-wrapped duck carcases to disgust your friends? Yilan must be the birthplace of the exclamation “Cor blimey, fuckaduck!” Or it should be – they’re very, very good at it.

he he. and no orange sauce needed either.