Taiwan

Taiwan was kind of a surprise port since we couldn’t go to Japan anymore. Since no one knew anything about it really and I had pretty much all of my field work done for my classes, I didn’t even bother to make plans for my time there except to visit the National Palace Museum and the Taipei 101. I’ve also been sick of group travel for quite a while now so I was really hoping to be able to travel on my own or with just one or two other people. I kept avoiding people when they invited me to do things with them but eventually agreed to spend the first day with Alex and Steven because they planned to stay in Keelung that day and a bunch of our friends were planning to go to Taipei to spend the night there. Somehow that turned into being a group of 9 people trying to walk around together the first day. After a misadventure with an ATM and following our ridiculous line of people to the upstairs of food market, I decided I’d had enough and that I was ditching my group. My friend Russ ended up coming with me. We were both not thrilled with the whole group thing. We tried another ATM and it didn’t work either so we thought we were going to have to go back to the ship to exchange money but we tried one more time and found one that worked so then we had money. Then we decided there wasn’t really anything to do in Keelung so we would go to Taipei after all. Then we couldn’t find the train station or figure out how to buy tickets for the bus. So we once again thought we were going to have to go back to the ship. Right after we started walking back to the ship though we finally saw a sign with English translation that pointed to the train station so we followed the signs there and bought tickets to Taipei. The train ride was about 50 minutes. When we got there we took a taxi to the National Palace Museum which is where there is a bunch of stolen art from China that some guy (I’m bad at history) brought over thinking he was saving it from communists. Sounds exciting, right? The museum was a little disappointing but there was some pretty artwork.

After an hour or two we were bored and hungry so we decided to find somewhere to eat. The museum was away from pretty much everything else in the city so we hopped on a random bus that we had no idea where it was going and got off at a stop that looked like it had a lot of stores and maybe places to eat. It was fun (not) trying to figure out how much we were supposed to pay. The driver finally told us to just go because he was frustrated too. Oh, I forgot to mention it was super cold in Taiwan. Well, compared to most of the places we’ve been. Especially since we were told it would be hot because it’s on the Tropic of Cancer. But no. It was cold and rainy and all of my warm clothes were (and still are) in the laundry from my Beijing trip so I was wearing shorts and a thin shirt. I at least had my rain coat. Russ just had shorts and a t-shirt. So we walked down a street for a long way and finally gave up hope of finding any restaurants because we were apparently walking down furniture store road. So we turned around and went back and went to pretty much the first place we finally saw. I got some really good squid spaghetti stuff. After lunch we took another taxi to the Taipei 101, which is I think supposed to be the world’s second tallest building. It’s also another fancy mall. We went to the place where you buy tickets for the observation tower but they told us the outside viewing area was closed and it was cloudy so we decided to save our money and not go. We ended up going to the Astronomy museum instead but we got there at about 4:40 and they stop selling tickets at 4:30 because they close at 5. But since we’d made it all the way there and didn’t know what else to do we bought tickets for an Imax movie. While we were standing in line we realized we were the only people there without little kids. We also had no idea what we were going to watch. It ended up being Attack of the Space Pirates and the people working somehow guessed that we didn’t speak Chinese so they showed us the seats that had headphones for translation. It was funny because it was an American movie already translated to Chinese so the version we were hearing actually fit the lip reading on the screen. It was pretty much the worst movie I’ve ever seen though. It was animated but it was a still picture half the time and the plot was ridiculous. After that we decided to head back to the ship which turned out to be another adventure but we made friends with an American guy who lives in Taiwan now and he and his family helped us figure out how to get back to Keelung.

The next day I went back to Taipei with 3 other girls and we went to the CYK memorial hall. Then we split into two pairs and Kayla and I went to a glass museum while the other two went to the National Palace museum. I’m really fond of glass art. Not sure why, but I think it’s really great. When we met back up we took the MRT to the Taipei 101 and this time we went up to the viewing floor. It had just gotten dark so we saw all the city lights. Then we went back to the ship.

The third and final day I went to Taipei yet again with my friend Matt. We ended up talking to a lot of locals and visited the 228 Peace Memorial Park. And we had a lot of food we bought at bakeries in the train stations.

Taiwan was pleasantly surprising, considering I had no plans or expectations. It was better that way, I think, because you can’t get upset about things not going according to plan if you don’t have a plan.

China

I finally realized why Hong Kong and China are listed separately on our itinerary and shirt so I feel like I should respect them as separate places now even though they’re technically one country. Anyway, I flew from Hong Kong to Beijing for a guided tour I signed up for through a company called China Guide. I went to the airport with two of my friends. Getting there was quite an adventure by itself and then when we got there we realized that none of us had even written down our flight number or information or anything and we didn’t have tickets because the company had told us we didn’t need them, just our passports. So that was fun too trying to figure out which flight or even which airline we were supposed to be using. Eventually we got it though but found out our flight was delayed almost 3 hours so we got to spend some quality time in the airport. We arrived in Beijing at about 10 and made it to the hotel a little after 11. The next day we went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and the silk market and then we drove to the Jinshanling portion of the Great Wall and spent the night there. Sleeping and hiking on the Great Wall is definitely the coolest thing I’ve ever done. It was gorgeous watching the sun rise over the mountains and the wall. I think those are my favorite pictures from the semester so far. The next day we drove back to the city for lunch and went to another market. Oh, I bought a really cool traditional Chinese silk dress at the first market. It almost fits. I’m not shaped quite like an Asian girl. Anyway. That evening we went to an acrobatics show. It was so cool. I was really tempted to buy a dvd of the performance but realized that would be kind of silly. I would definitely go to another show though!

We spent that night and the next day in Beijing. We went to the panda exhibit at the zoo and saw the drum tower and the Olympic buildings and the Summer Palace. And had more Chinese food. It was really good but too much meat and not very good quality meat. That evening we took a sleeper train to Xi’an. Very fun except they didn’t give us breakfast that morning. That day we went to see the Terra Cotta Warriors and the city wall. Then we got on another sleeper train to Shanghai.

We got to the ship in Shanghai around 8:00 the morning of the day it was to leave. There was something weird going on with immigrations so they took our passports to make copies and then we ended up not being allowed off the ship until almost 1:00 in the afternoon. They also changed on ship time to an hour earlier so we had to be back by 5 which meant we had a good 3 hours in Shanghai. It seemed like it would be a fun city to spend more time in. We took a taxi to the Oriental Pearl TV tower. Shanghai has really cool towers and buildings and lights. So does Hong Kong. Oh and we ate at Subway. Chinese Subway cookies taste a little different than in America.

Hong Kong

First I should say that I spent the whole time between Vietnam and Hong Kong horribly seasick. Luckily it was only for two days though. The first thing we did was take the Star Ferry to the main island (wait, is Hong Kong an island? I should probably know). I can’t remember if we had an actual destination or not. But we walked around for a while and then went to lunch at a place called Café de Coral which I learned a couple of days ago from an article I read for ethics class that it is pretty much the equivalent of McDonald’s. But it was pretty good. In Hong Kong, the official languages are Cantonese and English so we didn’t have terribly much trouble getting around and stuff. After lunch we took the peak tram. Turns out it just takes you to a really tall mall that has sort of decent viewing areas too. Most of the ports we’ve gone to have started to all seem the same. Fancy malls, big cities, tall buildings, same companies and brands everywhere. Some of them just drive on the wrong side of the road. Anyway, that night we got all dressed up and went to a floating restaurant for dinner. When we got there, we realized we kind of already eat three meals a day on a floating restaurant. Ha. But the food was pretty good and it was a fun experience. The next day I didn’t really get to do anything in Hong Kong because I had to go to the airport for my China Guide trip.

Vietnam

I hadn’t been off the ship two hours in Vietnam when I fell in front of a bus. Nothing happened though except I think I scared some old women, oops. I went on a field trip for my Human Effects on Coastal Systems class the first day we were in Vietnam. We went to the Can Gio Biosphere something or other. It was one of my favorite SAS trips I’ve done. We took a bus then a ferry to the tourist center. Then we took a speed boat (very exciting) to a mangrove forest where we got to ride in paddle boats for a little while and try to catch crabs in a holding pond. Then we speed boated over to another area where we walked on really cool bridges and then took a safari-type vehicle to a crocodile farm. We got to ride on a little pontoon boat and feed the crocodiles fish tied to sticks. It was very exciting and only a little scary. We also got to climb up this really tall tower that had a great view. It was a little scary too because it was rusted through in some places.
When I got back from my trip, I met up with some friends to go out to dinner. We went to a Japanese place right by the boat and got a lot of sushi. It took forever but it was delicious and pretty cheap. I had the next day free so I went to the market with two other people and then we went to a park to meet some Vietnamese students one of them had met the day before. Apparently a lot of students come to the park to practice their English with all of the foreigners. We talked to them for a couple of hours which was really neat and then we walked around a little more.
Monday I went on an SAS trip to visit a Cao Dai temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels. Cao Dai is a very interesting religion. It’s pretty much a combination of Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Or maybe some others. Or maybe and others. Anyway, it’s interesting. The temple was very decorative and reeked of incense. (Mama couldn’t go to any Asian countries because they would all give her headaches.) They also had an amazing flower garden. We watched part of a worship service. It was a lot of chanting and robes and whatnot. I think it’s kind of weird that they let tourists watch them. There were probably at least ten tour busses there besides our group.
The tunnels were really cool to see. They’ve been widened to accommodate Western sized people. They’re still super tight. And they have bats in them. Fun combination. The whole tunnel network thing was pretty ingenious. Another day in Vietnam I went to the War Remnants museum. The tunnels and the museum were really…enlightening can maybe be the word. They were from the Vietnamese perspective, obviously. I think the part that got me the most (not that it wasn’t all really hard to take) was the room in the museum about the aftermath of Agent Orange. While spending time in Saigon on my own, I’d already thought to myself “Wow, there are a lot of people with deformities here.” It didn’t occur to me that I was seeing the effects of Agent Orange. It’s unbelievable and awful.
Back to the lighter side. Another day I went to the Mekong Delta with on another SAS trip. We got to ride in another riverboat and eat a lot of snacks. Tropical fruits like jackfruit and I can’t remember the names of the rest. And we went to a place where they make coconut candy. We got to eat it while it was still fresh and warm. Delicious! We also went to a place that specialized in honey. We even saw the honeycomb with the bees on it. The guy practically held it in my face in fact.
I spent part of the last day shopping because I wanted to buy a hiking backpack for my trip in China. I ended up buying a really great one for $11. My friends were laughing at me because they said I was like a kid on Christmas I got so excited. If you want to see the excitement (or the backpack) just ask me because I’d love to tell the whole story about how I got it.
Let’s see…I rode a motorcycle for the first time in Vietnam. That’s their primary form of transportation. I didn’t drive it though. It was a taxi type thing. And it was more like a scooter than like a Harley or something. Oh, I had the most amazing shrimp spring rolls ever. They were from Pho 2000. It’s called that because Bill Clinton ate there in 2000 and they renamed it. There are pictures of him all over the restaurant and a sign saying “pho for the president.”

Singapore

Singapore was another one-day port. If you ask anyone what to do in Singapore for one day, the answer is eat. That’s why the first thing on our agenda that day was to get to the hawker center in Chinatown to try some of the famous food. We took the subway which was spotlessly clean. I think it was my first time on a subway and one of my friends called it “subway for dummies” because it was so clean and orderly. I didn’t mind. I don’t remember how many people started out in our group, maybe six, but we kept splitting up and by the end of the day I was with just one other person. When we got to the food place I searched until I found a vendor selling oyster omelets. It wasn’t as amazing as I’d built up my hopes for but it was still really good. After that we rode the subway again looking for the Raffles Hotel and got off at the wrong stop but walked around for a while because it was still a really cool looking place. We eventually made it to the hotel and found the part of our group we’d lost along the way but then I was getting impatient and Caitlin and I needed to go to the aquarium so we could do our class projects so we went on our own to Sentosa which is a man made resort island and where Underwater World is. We took the subway back to the waterfront and then took the sky tram or some other fancy kind of transportation to Sentosa and walked around there for a while and then we spent an hour or two in the aquarium. It was almost better in some ways than Two Oceans in Cape Town. I found my new favorite animal: sea angels. They’re so cool! Shell-less snails I think is the closest description they gave. After the aquarium we explored the island a little more then headed back to the waterfront and the ship. I would have loved to have more time in Singapore but it’s probably good that we didn’t because everything there was really expensive.

Surprisingly, no one from the ship got arrested for breaking any of Singapore’s many laws. You can’t spit, jaywalk, carry a durian on public transportation, eat or drink on public transportation, or a bunch of other things. The efficiency is very evident. They have four languages-English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil and the signs are all written in all four or at least two and the announcements on the busses and stuff are made in all of them too. The traffic was also a lot less scary than most of the other countries we’ve been to.

India

In India, I didn’t carry my camera with me very much. I wanted to really see things and experience them instead of looking through a camera lens the whole time. (Yes I did get the idea from the John Mayer song, but no I’m not ashamed.) And the times I did carry my camera, I didn’t get it out too much. In some cases I was just lazy, some I was worried about drawing attention to anything valuable, and in the case of the orphanage visit, I just really didn’t feel like having my camera used by all the kids. Anyway, there was a lot to experience in India.
The day we arrived, it took forever to get cleared by immigration. Getting in and out of the port each time was such a hassle. They checked our passports each time and signed us in and out. Very annoying and kind of weird. My friend Steven had invited me and eight other people to go out to lunch with his dad who was in Chennai for business so the ten of us got off the ship together and met his dad who had hired a driver for the day. Apparently Steven had heard that he could bring ten people but his dad seemed surprised to see so many of us so we had to take two auto rickshaws in addition to the car. First we drove to the fish market on the beach. It smelled very strongly. Then we visited the shrine of St. Thomas and then we headed to lunch at the Sheraton. It was very delicious, as all of the food in India proved to be.
There was so much to experience in India, I’m having trouble putting it into words. I’ll cheat and use part of my travel writing again out of laziness.
…three-wheeled, yellow vehicles because riding in a tut-tut (as the auto rickshaws are affectionately nicknamed) is an adventure in itself.
The adventure begins with choosing a driver, or more likely, being chosen by a driver. If you’re at a popular pick-up place like the harbor gate or outside the shopping mall, expect a swarm of drivers urging you to go with them. When you find the driver who will agree to the least inflated fare, you slide onto the cracked brown fake-leather back seat. If you have a fourth passenger, some lucky person gets to perch on the smaller front seat with the driver. Riding in an auto rickshaw in India is thrilling. You can only see up as high as the top of the tut-tut allows, but the scene is far from boring or void. Buses packed with people, flat-bed trucks painted in bright pastel designs, cars, bicycles, motorcycles carrying entire families, pedestrians, and animals all fight for space on the same roads. The rickshaws should come with an audio recording of “please keep your hands and legs inside the vehicle at all times” because it wouldn’t take much to have your arm knocked off by a car squeezing past at high speed. Or better yet, it would be really easy to reach out and tip over a motorcycle. You’d have to be a pretty evil person for that though since most of the motorcycles are driven by a father who probably has a kid between him and the handlebars, another kid behind him, and the mother in the back, probably holding a baby.
The lanes in India are more like suggestions than rules. A four lane road designed for two lanes going in each direction is more likely to have about eight vehicles abreast at a time and it’s not uncommon for the drivers to swerve into oncoming traffic to pass a stopped bus or cow or car that just isn’t going quite fast enough. A friendly reminder in curlicue font to “sound horn ” is painted on the back of all the trucks and busses. As if anyone wouldn’t honk without being instructed to. Horns are used in place of turn signals. And for everything else. It’s okay to create your own lane or throttle the wrong way down a one way street or drive directly toward a pedestrian, so long as you lay on the horn to warn everyone. Drivers take the honks in stride and gently inch over to avoid collision. Pedestrians yield to cars, cars yield to trucks, trucks yield to buses. Size matters here. A sign above the road says “If you want to stay married, divorce speed.” The general consensus of drivers in India must be indifference or hatred toward their spouses.
While riding in your auto rickshaw/roller coaster from hell, you’ll see filth and beauty. Women in spotlessly clean saris dot the grimy streets with vibrant colors. Every few kilometers there’s at least one gaudy temple along the street. The temples are shaped like pyramids and colored with tacky pinks and greens and yellows and intricate carvings and figures of gods and goddesses. Holy extravagance. Beautiful, clean university and public buildings are nestled between crumbling high rise office and apartment buildings. Men really do pee on the side of the street.
Somehow everything just flows among the filth and chaos and there’s something bright and beautiful poking out from all the dust somewhere in every scene. A flashy temple breaks the monotony of crumbling gray buildings and a shining sari-clad woman stands gracefully on the dirty street.
So that explains the traffic in India for the most part. After the afternoon with Steven’s dad, our group split up since we still didn’t all fit in one vehicle and Steven, Diane, Kristin, Caitlin, and I set out on a mission to buy children’s books and toys to take on the various service projects SAS was going to be involved in during the week. Books in India were dangerously inexpensive. Somehow I limited myself to buying only one novel. I’m really excited to read it when I finish all of my school work. It’s called One Night @ the Call Center. After a couple hours of shopping (we also went to a mall), we returned to the ship. Then I got on a bus for an SAS trip/welcome reception at a (sort-of) nearby hotel. There were local university students, dancers, henna artists, and of course, vendors there to welcome us. We were served delicious snacks and coffee and tea. Indian coffee and tea are brewed with milk and sugar and taste better than anything you can probably imagine.
The next day I went out with the intention of shopping some more with three of my friends. At first all four of us were in one rickshaw but then whether or not he was telling the truth, the driver said it was broken down so we had to split up into two groups, two per vehicle. Anyway. We told them where we wanted to go (one of the fancy new malls we’d heard about) and we agreed on a reasonable price and they said okay and off we went. We spent the whole day shopping and driving around but we never actually made it to the place we said we wanted to go. The drivers all have deals with shopkeepers and so never expect to make it anywhere directly without at least one stop on the way. Since we didn’t have a real agenda, we didn’t argue and kind of enjoyed our tour of sorts. The drivers all liked to have the passengers drive (bad idea) and one of the guys in the other rickshaw drove theirs for a while. Luckily it was on a less crowded street at least. We drove around all day, finally made it to one mall where we ate lunch on the roof. Two of the guys really wanted to see a cobra-mongoose fight so at one point we stopped on the side of some random street where there were men ready to put on a show for us. There wasn’t any sort of cage or barrier between the edge of the broken sidewalk where they told us to sit and the square of dirt where they had a mongoose on a leash and a cobra in a basket. I really couldn’t have wanted any less to see the fight but no one else seemed to care about my opinion. When the men named the price they wanted each of us to pay (I can’t remember exactly, but it was pretty steep), I decided to just not watch. Maybe if they had been paying me to watch I would have but no thanks. So I stood behind the crowd that had gathered (only my three friends were charged, of course). The “fight” only lasted a couple of minutes and when it was over some of the men came toward me with a camera and I thought they were trying to show me a video of the fight so I started refusing then they were like no, please. Turns out they wanted a picture with me. Okay, I don’t mind pretending to be a celebrity. The adventure ended in the afternoon when we were heading to a store for Steven to buy a rugby bat (we were in Chennai during the World Cup) but my rickshaw driver got lost so Stephen and I ended up just going back to the ship. First we went on a wild goose chase looking for the other rickshaw or the store. That was pretty exciting in itself. When we did get back, of course, the driver tried to charge us like $50 US. Didn’t happen. That evening I stayed on the ship with some friends and we watched an episode of Outsourced to keep up the India theme.
The next day I went on another SAS trip to a rural village. They showed us around the village and we learned about rice farming and I even got to plant some rice. Then we went to a coconut farm and got to eat fresh coconut. Very yummy. I’m not a fan of the milk though. After the village we drove to the Dakshinachitra Heritage Center where they served us yet another delicious meal on a banana leaf. The food was the best part of the heritage center. Other than that, we looked at model houses of the southern states of India and some artisans shops.
A lot of my friends were doing homestays so when they got back Wednesday around lunch time, I met up with some of them and a group of us went to the zoo and some temple. I never actually knew the name of it or why that one was chosen because they pretty much all look the same. The zoo was a couple of hours away and there were like eight of us packed into one taxi. It was a station wagon type at least with extra seats in the back. The zoo wasn’t very impressive and we were more of an attraction than any of the exhibits. Groups of people kept coming up wanting pictures with us. We rented bikes and rode around for a little while and then we headed to the temple which was at least another hour away. We were there until it started getting dark when we decided to head back to the ship. We stopped at another delicious restaurant on the way. The bathroom there was the least pleasant experience of my time in India I think.
Thursday I went with SAS on a college and home visit. The college visit was probably my favorite thing I did in India. The students were all really friendly and wanted to know all about us and we learned about them and it was just lovely. (It really was, I’m just tired of writing.) One girl sang for us and a few people danced. The home visit wasn’t as much fun but it was nice. We went to a pretty rich person’s house and just sat around awkwardly in her living room for a few hours. That night I went to a Bollywood movie with five other people. It was a lot better than I expected. Very cheesy, but I really liked it. It was called Patiala House and I’m determined to find the soundtrack when I get home. The theater was at the mall we tried to go to on Monday and it was by far the nicest theater I’ve ever been to or imagined. The bathrooms there were complete opposite from the ones at the restaurant the night before. These had fountains and televisions in each stall.
The last day in India I went on a service visit to the Bala Mandir Orphanage. It was okay, but I’m still not that great at interacting with kids. They were really excited to take pictures with our cameras (the reason I left mine in my bag that day) and they liked the toys and stuff that we brought to donate.
Overall, India was better than I’d expected. Everyone kept saying it was going to be so dirty and smelly and crowded and there would be beggars everywhere, but I really didn’t think it was that bad. It was definitely dirty though. Even if you spent the day inside a seemingly clean or nice place, the water would still turn brown when you got home and washed your hands. It was a pretty good experience though and if the opportunity arose, I would probably go back someday but mostly only to visit the people I met there.

Mauritius

We only had one day in Mauritius and I spent my time on a SAS trip. It turned out to be a pretty good decision, even though it meant I didn’t have any free time to do anything else. The trip was called Volcanic Island and my rationale for choosing it was that if I got to see volcanoes in Mauritius I wouldn’t feel obligated to go see them in Hawaii and could do other things there instead. We didn’t see any active volcanoes. Deceiving name. But we did see a lot of really cool things, including a volcanic crater (even though it just looked like a sunken part of the rest of the highly-vegetated island). We saw a few waterfalls that were really pretty. We also went to see the “seven colors of the earth” or something like that. It’s volcanic ash that’s in a bunch of different colors. We ate lunch at a Creole restaurant that was an interesting and delicious mix of French and Indian food. The island itself has a large Indian population, but it’s a whole lot cleaner and less hectic than real India. After lunch we went to a beach and swam in the Indian Ocean. The water was super warm and very calm because of a reef or something offshore that blocks all the waves. Mauritius was possibly the prettiest place we’ve visited but not a whole lot else to say about it.