As you’ll have previously read (a man can dream, can’t he?), we’d cruised into the port of Keelung, Taiwan under a bank of cloud which had decided to free itself of its moisture content in our general direction for the entire duration. As with almost every port stop on this 2008 cruise in Asia we’d booked a shore excursion in order to make the most of our time in this part of the world. You’d be surprised just how many people will pay a lot of money to travel halfway around the world for the first time then try to get around as cheaply as possible thereafter, skipping out on organised trips just to save a few quid, and subsequently missing out on sights they may never be in the area to see again – we know a few – but we’re not like that. Taiwan was no exception, with our day due to include a trip up into the hills to visit a former-mining village, and we had some small hope that the rain might ease off once it was time to get off the ship and step ashore.
Hahahahaha, no, no the rain didn’t stop at all. It just kept raining. And raining. Then raining a bit more just to remind us it was raining, in case we’d forgotten it was raining. Heavy drops in warm temperatures. So, so humid. We would spend the entire day drenched. But, you know what? We didn’t mind a bit. We were in Taiwan! Do you know how many people we knew had been to Taiwan? None! You’ll take rain in that situation.
Nanya Shore And Rock Formations
The northern coast of Taiwan has many scenic viewpoints along its shoreline, and it was to one of these, Nanya, roughly twenty kilometres along the coastal road running east from Keelung, that our Princess Cruises bus took us first in order to get out and take some photos if we wanted. Quite a few people on the bus didn’t want to get off on account of the aforementioned rain but most did, and we were among that mass. As you could have guessed from the fact that this post isn’t called Views Of Rocks Through A Rainy Bus Window.
The Nanya Rock Formations are considered a natural garden to the people of Taiwan. The geology of the region is sandstone, and the constant battering of the rock from the sea, from winds, and from monsoons that blow in has over the millenia sculpted the rocks into attractive, abstract shapes with holes and coloured stripes offering snapshots of different levels of hardness of the rock and oxidisation in the atmosphere when it was all first laid down.
Pareidolia. Human beings are wired to identify patterns in things and ascribe some definition or meaning to them even when it’s all natural, a result of physics, or just random. It’s why we see dogs in cloud formations. It’s why religion was invented. It’s why we dream. It’s why many of the weathered rocks in Nanya have been given names. It’s why the sandstone formation in the photo below looks like Pac-Man had an affair with a giant fish, the child of which, unwanted by either parent, left home to become a beachcomber, eking out a living selling flotsam and jetsam to tourists.
We didn’t stay too long at Nanya; ten or fifteen minutes to wander around and get soaked through to the underwear mostly. I’d never consider myself a landscape photographer, favouring architecture and people more often than not, but this northern Taiwanese coastline offers some spectacular, raw views if you’re that way inclined. There was something here for everyone, really: the sea, rough, carried in on a decent-strength wind to pound the rocks; the sandstone artwork, sculpted by nature and ready to be whatever you see in them; the hills and cliffs inland, covered in green, verdant, lush from the regional climate.
If you ever find yourself on a cruise ship excursion then there’s a chance that you’ll be on one in which a film crew will accompany you. The ships like to produce video mementos of cruises which we’ve always steered clear of based on the price, but it’s a shame that they don’t make these videos orderable years later because we’ve found as time has gone on that we wouldn’t have minded seeing some of the sights we’d missed or forgotten about. For this Taiwan excursion our bus was host to one of the ship’s video teams who would set up panning shots of the scenery and conduct short interviews with the local guides every time we stopped somewhere.
Fushan Temple, Jiufen
The village to which we were heading was called Jiufen (or Chiufen, according to the literature we had at the time) and our time there will be covered in the next post from this travelogue series in Taiwan. We would have one more short stop for photos before reaching the village itself, and that was on the walk to Jiufen from where the bus parked up.
The Fushan Temple was dedicated to the Earth God in Taoism, and if you’ve never heard of the Earth God in Taoism then welcome to the club. In fact, the Earth God is one of the minor deities in the religion, but since Jiufen grew from a late-nineteenth century gold rush you can also say that the Earth God that the inhabitants sought protection from was a miner deity too. Yes, I went there.
The exterior of the temple was covered in sculptures and reliefs of heroic and religious and historical figures, plus typically fantastical and representative creatures like dragons, all from a grey rock that contrasted acutely with the bright reds, golds, and blues painted and lacquered over the flatter surfaces. The detail in the faces was exquisite, reflecting a lot of skill and local wealth from the mining operations.
The interior of the temple, however, was something we weren’t prepared for. Calm, peaceful reflection was not the theme here. Barbara Cartland would have loved this place, and if you’ve got a fondness for pink that knows no bounds too then you’d probably feel at home as well. Personally, phrases like “explosion in a bubble gum factory” and “remember, don’t visit here while on LSD” flew through my mind.
Anyway, feast your eyeballs on this subjective beauty.
That concluded the bits of our excursion prior to the main reason for picking this trip. In the next post you can take a look around the place that’s been claimed is the inspiration for the animation classic, Spirited Away, Jiufen.
Those Nanya rock formations look amazing and I love the fact that you don’t need to squeeze into a wardrobe to get there. A good friend of mine lives in Taiwan and I do want to visit him, so this post comes in very handy and will revisit when I actually booked a trip there. Explosion in a bubble gum factory sounds right up Ellie’s alley.
Taiwan is my family’s home, so it’s wonderful to see and read about someone’s experience of it! I miss the scenery and the temples. And of course hahaha the rain!