Taiwan Journal 11: Hashrun and Kenting

Well, it has been a while since I posted. In the mean time, quite a bit has happened. More importantly, I have had the opportunity to screw up in a couple of notable and hopefully entertaining ways.

One somewhat legitimate (but utterly untrue) reason for the lack of posts recently is that for weeks my computer was thoroughly incapacitated by viruses. I was unable to solve my problems independently. His presented me with a problem; while there is no shortage of places that could fix my PC, I was not sure who I could find who spoke English. Computer repair is necessarily jargon-laden, and my Chinese just barely escapes the purview of shopping and transportation. I eventually found a guy by searching the English language teacher forums. I called him up and asked him where I could drop off my laptop. He told me not to worry, and that he could come by to pick up the laptop in fifty minutes.


This made me pause. I was suppose to hand my computer to someone I have never met without even knowing his permanent base of operations? Though it was broken, my computer remained a reasonably valuable piece of technology and I was handing it over to a guy in a station wagon. I consoled myself by thinking that, because the guy was a foreigner and the expat community is pretty small, if he screwed me over I would probably be able to track him down. Still, when he called me later that night to tell me he had cleared my PC of Trojans and viruses, and that he could drop off the laptop whenever I was ready, I was quite relieved.

I finally had the opportunity to help lead a run with the Hash Run. The club paired me up with Kevin, one of the older members of the club. Kevin only hares (the run leaders are called the Hares) one run a year, but he has been doing it for a long time. He therefore goes (far) out of his way to make sure he is bringing the club to virgin territory. So we drove out to Dashi, a town south of Taipei close to Chang Kai-Sheik’s burial place. Dashi has a nice mix of farms and jungle hills, but what it lacked was hiking trails of any kind. That was what the “weed whacker” is for.


When I say “weed whacker”, I am not talking about a thing for cutting down dandelions or scrub grass with a spinning plastic whip. This thing is a gas powered buzzsaw at the end of a four foot pole. It cut through saplings and bamboo quite nicely, thank you very much. It is a tool that is appropriate for leaving a “pretty radical” section of lush jungle “smooth as a baby’s butt”, as Kevin says.

So we pieced bits of road and farms together by cutting trails in the hills. At first, Kevin would lead with the weed whacker and I would remove the debris. Now, as some of you might know, I have an irrational phobia of spinning sawblades swung close to and in the direction of my person. The motor is pretty loud, so I would have to get right next to Kevin to tell him anything. Every comment would usually lead to him terrifyingly swinging the whole tree-felling apparatus around in order to reply with a helpful “what!?!” I have had sawblade and woodchip related nightmares quite often recently.

Mind you, on this subject I am a total hypocrite. Once I had my chance with the weed whacker, I happily unleashed a fern holocaust on the jungle. I was like a villain from an episode of Captain Planet. Something about having a diesel-powered cutting device in my hands made me want to violate nature. Only pure willpower allowed me to stifle maniacal laughter as I hacked and gouged a trail through the thick underbrush.

Note: sunny photos are not of my hash run

Rain kept many people from the run, but it was still a pretty good time. However, the whole day I was something of a failure as a navigator. The plastic bag of flour I carried to leave a trail for the other runners sprung a leak early in the run. This meant I had to use chalk to mark the path, and chalk washes away pretty quickly in the rain. Nobody got totally lost, but the run was not as clearly marked as it should have been. After the run, my fellow hashers went out of their way to ensure that I got utterly sloshed. I readily obliged, which was fine until I was asked to help everyone reach the restaurant for the bash. Let’s just say that, while we did reach the restaurant, missteps occurred along the way.

This past weekend, I went down to Kenting for the annual music festival. Kenting is a big national park on the southern tip of Taiwan. My friend Kelly planned the trip and organized rental vans for a group of twelve of us to drive down in. Kenting’s music festival itself was nice I’ve heard, but for me and my friends it was just an excuse to go south for a bunch of wild beach parties on a long, two day weekend.

The parties were pretty wild, too. They were concert/dance clubs in these little coves on the beach. Cheap too, since the 7/11 was just down the street so there was no reason not to BYOB. The music was good and the air was filled with the lights from the many amateur fireworks displays launched from either side or within the crowd. I wont go into too many specifics, but the music kept playing until about 7am, I knew people who slept in McDonalds rather than “splurging” for a tent, and at least one of the people I was with ended up passed out on their tent rather than in it. Good times.


Going to the beach is a little odd in Taiwan. I knew from talking to my students and friends that many Taiwanese people are either incapable of swimming or terrified of the ocean. And yet they still go to the beach decked out in swimwear. I was confused about this until my friend Yvette pointed out that they are just taking pictures of themselves. And truly, that was what they did more than anything else I saw. People were posing, smiling, making funny faces, and jumping in the air all so that they could have pictures of themselves doing all those things, at the beach. The pictures were not to remember the trip, instead they were the purpose of the trip. I am sure I must be missing something, but it was a strange spectacle.

Prior to the trip, I had talked to a bunch of people about driving down to Kenting who had done it before. They all warned me about hellish traffic due to people traveling during Tomb-Sweeping Day weekend. They told me to expect to sit in traffic for hours on the trip back on the Sunday after the festival. On the way down around 1am Saturday morning we sat in pretty bad traffic too, which seemed to hint that Sunday would indeed be bad.

So, once in Kenting I spent a decent amount of time wailing like Cassandra and advocating that we delay returning until Monday, or drive north on smaller roads of Taiwan’s east coast rather than the big superhighway that everyone and their mother would be on. I was ignored, and this caused me not a little bit of consternation. Of course, irony of ironies, we hit zero traffic on the drive back. It took us just six and a half hours to drive the length of the island, two hours less than the trip down. I felt like quite the douchebag for making such a fuss the whole weekend. Still, glad I was shown to be wrong.

Friday I am off to China to hang out with my parents. I am sure that trip will arm me with much to talk about. So, more should be coming fairly quickly.