What have the Romans

ever done for us?

Apart from long straight roads, toga parties, underfloor heating and Hadrian's Wall, it is thought that the Romans were also responsible for the invention of cement. With cement we can, of course, make concrete. How could they, along with other inventors such as Alfred Nobel, realise to what effect their invention would be put.

The main advantages of concrete are that it is strong and easy to make. In aesthetic terms, it can look good when new or if it is well maintained. However, as everyone well knows, when it falls into disrepair, it's about as attractive as conjugating Latin verbs - Beirut, Grozny and Croydon being cases in point. Add to this list Taiwan.

One of the by-products of the Asian economic miracle is the expendability of buildings. Ugly post-industrial houses are built only to be knocked down a few years later to make way for more concrete and garish neon. In Taiwan and Japan, where 50 years is considered old for a building, all cities tend to end up looking the same. Indeed, Nagano's unusual temple-style station was knocked down so that a generic JR station could be put in its place for the upcoming Olympics. Someone once said of Britain that we may have millions of unemployed, an impoverished health service and education system but we do at least have a lot of nice buildings. Any visitor to Taiwan can't help but appreciate the beauty and diversity of European architecture.

After suffering an excess of Olympic hysteria, I decided to exchange one set of concrete for another and get some warmth into my body by heading for Taiwan. Arriving in Taipei you could be forgiven for thinking you'd been re-routed to Hong Kong (without the pubs) or Singapore (without the clinical cleanliness). However, you knew you were in the renegade province rather than on the mainland by the presence of millions of mopeds, rather than bicycles, and pre-Mao unsimplified kanji.

My first day was spent dodging the mopeds, enjoying the window shopping (with the exception of the dentists - since when has dentistry become a spectator sport?), soaking up the kite flying and roller-blading ambience around the Chiang Kaishek Memorial and marvelling at the little pastry shops selling, of all things, little pastries.

With the possible exceptions of Moscow or Norway, going anywhere out of Japan is always going to result in lower prices. With this in mind I decided to take in some films, a rare event for me in Japan. Also, Taiwan is several months ahead of Nagano in the new releases stakes. To this end I went to see "Red Corner": Richard Gere and his damning indictment of the Chinese justice system which has caused much displeasure in Beijing. Very powerful and moving, in the way of "In the Name of the Father", it joins "Wild Swans" as a defining image of the enigma that is modern China. Watching it in the closest thing to China, surrounded by Chinese people gave it an additional impact.

After all that dodging and soaking I felt in need of some culture. My day of culture started off with breakfast in Hsinsheng park. The park is little more than an extension of the domestic airport's runway so that little pastry consumption can be combined with checking the tread levels on the incoming planes. Or you could if the smog wasn't so thick. No doubt Confucius would have something pithy to say about the tranquillity of his temple being shattered by the noise. Into an old field, an iron bird drops; I hear the tyres squealing. Or was that Basho?

In search of some quieter introspection, I attempted to head for the National Palace Museum - Taiwan's number one cultural attraction. The museum features 5000 years' worth of Chinese artefacts looted from the Forbidden City in Beijing when the Nationalists fled the mainland in 1949. The hype claims that it ranks with the Louvre and the British Museum as one of the world's premier museums. Perhaps it is a prerequisite of becoming a world-class museum that several pieces of old stone have to be looted from other countries. Anyway, in my clamour to see some more marbles I broke with the traditional British stoic silence and asked someone at the bus stop which bus I should take. She responded with the Chinese equivalent of "sorry, I'm a stranger here myself". However, it turned out that she was also going to the museum so we got another person to tell us which bus to take and where to change.

When we get there, the girl leads me to a kind of side building where there is a special exhibition called "in praise of women". Not knowing quite what it was all about, I bought a ticket anyway. The place was filled with about 1000 women and 3 men. It turns out that the exhibition is free for women on Mondays. It features a large number of western paintings and sculptures of semi-clad women, mostly the work of male artists. I'm not sure what particular aspects of women were being praised but I didn't go to Taiwan to see western art so I made my excuses and made for the museum proper.

Being one of these huge museums, like the Hermitage, where some poor fellow has calculated the number of lifetimes it would take to see all of the exhibits (presumably based on looking at each article for a certain number of seconds), I decided to concentrate on the calligraphy, painting and Tibetan artefacts sections. Besides, neolithic spoons and china from China held little interest for me. In the manner of all the best museums, the NPM is "climate controlled and features subdued lighting" (read cold and dark).

The calligraphy and painting sections were indeed very impressive. I think the Nationalists can justly be proud of their looting and consequently saving the collection from the ravages of the cultural revolution. The Tibetan artefacts section featured such delights as the tibia of revered monks recast as trumpets and their skulls transformed into bowls. Another section yielded the shells of turtles that had been boiled alive for divination purposes. Taking a wrong turn I ended up in the ivory section, home to some exquisite and delicate, but ultimately animal horn, creations. Along with the International Friendship Exhibition in North Korea these places serve to illustrate the changing values of cultures over the years.

After all that infusion of culture it was time for infusion of another kind, in the form of a trip to the museum's tearoom (old British proverb: if in doubt, have a nice cup of tea). The tearoom featured the aforementioned nice cup of tea, to the accompaniment of the sound of caged birds. It reminded me of the Yet Ch'at Chip tearoom in Seoul where the birds are free to fly around the room. After infusion, confusion. Let's get out of Taipei and see some of the rest of Taiwan he thinks. Two hours later, after asking 25 people and getting 37 different answers, deciphering the kanji and standing in various queues I am the proud owner of a train ticket to Hualien. Who said JTB tours are a waste of money?

The next morning, after a mad dash in the rain to the station, we were treated to a slightly less than mad dash down the east coast to Hualien. Lonely Planet Taiwan suffers from an overdose of superlatives and everywhere is described as "the most beautiful/attractive/scenic road/temple/mountain/... in Taiwan". Naturally, not wanting to be left out of this hyperbole frenzy, the east coast run to Hualien is described as the best east coast run to Hualien in the whole of Taiwan. Couched in these terms, it is no doubt true but in any other terms it is no more than a series of cement factories separated by newly sprouted rice paddies (in sharp contrast to the winter wonderland I'd left behind in Nagano) and the occasional flamboyant temple. And on your left you can see the sea. On a clear day you can see America but today the cement grey of the sky blends effortlessly into the concrete grey of the sea (just add water and sand).

Hualien itself has very little to offer the itinerant traveller but it is the entry point for trips to Taroko gorge. From Hualien I am the only passenger on the bus up to the first part of the gorge and Tienhsiang, the only town of any size on the central cross-island highway. Safely booked into the spartan Catholic hostel, I go for a look around the town and put the claims of Mr. Gore-Tex to the test. The scenery is spectacular - sheer cliffs and raging torrents capped with the sea of clouds featured in many a Chinese painting. Mr. Gore-Tex passes with flying colours. Japanese junior high school English textbooks inform us that Singapore is "clean and green". Its description of Taiwan would probably be "lush and green". However, there is only one way that a place can get that way and that's by having more than its fair share of precipitation. I was reminded of my other trial by gore-tex trip, to Snaeffles in Iceland, where the volcanic majesty was visible only if you were within one arm's length of it.

Dinner at the youth activity centre up the hill features a school (shoal? flock?) of junior and senior high school students on excursion to Taroko. After dinner they perform skits and song and dance routines involving a lot of cross-dressing. Perhaps the guys were hoping to get into the NPM for free the following week.

Being subtropical, Taiwan is an excellent place to stock up on your vitamin C. There's no chance of getting scurvy in Taiwan with so many delicious fruits to choose from. Ordinary banana and strawberry flavoured milks are kicked into touch by the delights of papaya milk and other juices such as lychee, guava, coconut and mango.

The next day is spent travelling along the remainder of the cross-island highway to Taichung. The road is an amazing feat of engineering, twisting and climbing, hugging the hillside with sheer drops below. Nature frequently tries to get its own back for all of that blasting by sending down rockslides and washing the road away from time to time. Indeed there were boulders strewn across the road in places and we were delayed while people with big yellow excavators cleared the road for us (why are diggers always yellow?).

In the second half the river widens out and turns from grey sludge to turquoise. However, the road doesn't widen and the tunnels are still only big enough for one bus to pass through. At one point the road splits into two single-track roads, one hundreds of feet below the other. Recently, the lower road was completely washed away so the upper single-track road is now being used for two-way traffic. No longer a case of "you take the high road and I'll take the low road and I'll be in Taichung before ye". To take your mind off your vertigo the driver of the bus (and indeed of every other bus in Taiwan) has brought along his collection of high-pitched wailing that currently passes for Chinese music. These tapes are presumably made by the people responsible for the Chinese remakes of western and Japanese hits to be heard in every convenience store across the island. Current favourites would appear to be Kylie, Abba and the Cranberries (they don't sound any better in Chinese).

One of the most noticeable legacies of Japan's colonial rule of Taiwan is the preponderance of convenience stores, stocking the exact same products. In the big cities you can't walk more than a block without running into one. However, at one fell swoop the Taiwanese have slashed school truancy rates by shrink-wrapping their magazines so that students can't spend all day in 7-11 reading the manga. Other imports from the colonial masters include the ubiquitous karaoke, the ecologically-questionable disposable chopsticks, the wallet-depleting "snack" bars and the confectioners' scam that is White Day (Valentines Day is for girls and White Day is for boys). However, by and large, the Taiwanese seemed to be much more positive about Japan than Korea, where there is outright hatred. Indeed, in Taiwan, some older people can still speak Japanese, which proved useful to me a couple of times.

As with any other country, attempts to render the native language into English can sometimes produce comical results and Taiwan is no exception. In one restaurant the closed side of the open/closed sign on the door said "drink tea"!

Another feature of Taiwanese shopping is the presence of a lottery number on every receipt. Apparently, you can win big prizes if your number comes up. The idea behind it all is to make sure that shopkeepers are honest with their tax affairs. Customers will always ask for a receipt if there is some kind of prize involved and so the shopkeepers are forced to put everything through the till and issue a receipt.

Meanwhile, in the Taroko gorge, it's time for some lunch. Why is it that bus trips through the most scenic places always have rest stops at the most inhospitable Buddhaforsaken holes known to mankind? The cross-island bus was no exception so that, being unable to take photos from the bus as it twisted and lurched its way through the gorge, we were left with the aesthetically challenged vista of concrete rubble, abandoned machinery and mangy dogs. One feature of Taiwan's bus service is the so-called "wild chicken buses". These semi-legal unlicensed buses can be found all over the island. Despite the name, I never saw any chickens on them (wild or otherwise) but one guy did have a very small puppy in a poke, which he was continually trying to keep quiet.

After changing in Taichung, I arrived at Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan's most lake-like attraction to feature the words sun and moon in its name. Being a top tourist attraction and thus popular with Japanese tourists, there were no spartan hostels to be found and so I was forced to spend the night in a luxury hotel. The threefold price increase (to a whopping £12) exchanged my spartan cold shower for a luxury cold shower (the water was three times softer). Other features included cable TV, showing such delights as Japanese karaoke, Man U v. Monaco and, erm, the Horse of the Year Show. Better than all that was the luminous stars and comets attached to the ceiling (perhaps to compensate for being unable to see the real things).

The next day is spent exploring the lake and walking about 15km each way around the thing to look at the various temples and pagodas. The walk itself is not particularly scenic as you have to walk on the road, as there is no lakeside path. Although there is not much traffic there are many long boring stretches where you have to look at the lake through the trees.

Having tired of the luminous stars and comets I headed south to Tainan, the old capital of Taiwan. Accommodation this time is to be had at the labourers' recreation centre. Despite my advancing years I decide against the adjacent senior citizens' centre. Sitting in the bank minding my own business, a young Taiwanese guy comes to talk to me. His English is very good and we get to talking about Scottish music. The grassroots internationalisation goes something like this:

him: "Do you like rock and roll?"
me: "Yes".
him: "What famous Scottish rock and roll music is there?"
me: <immediately wary of the term "rock and roll" and steering well clear of Rod Stewart and the Bay City Rollers I decide to go for something he might have heard of> "Do you know Simple Minds?"
him: "Oh, yeah. But aren't they a bit passed it?"
me: "How about the Jesus and Mary Chain?"
him: "That's that noisy bunch, isn't it. I didn't know they were Scottish."

Musical insights aside, Tainan was notable for its many temples, its melt in the mouth sushi and yet more little pastries. The thousand-armed statue of Kaunyin at the Mito temple is particularly impressive. The quiet and shady respite from the surging traffic outside and the thrill-a-minute adrenaline rush of crossing the street is very relaxing. There are eyes painted on Kaunyin's hands to represent that she sees all. I can only hope that she is all seeing when it comes to people crossing the street and manoeuvring their mopeds.

Risking life and limb I managed to get to the post office to buy some stamps for my postcards. Going to the wrong part of the post office at first I was redirected to another building. I'm not sure if it was where I was being directed to but I ended up in the philately section. They seemed much amused that I just wanted to post some postcards and not talk about tweezers and first day covers. Indeed, they had to phone some other part of the post office to find out how much it costs to send a postcard!

Having sent my postcards it was, of course, time to leave Taiwan and head back to being cold and counting up the days since the Olympics finished.

If you want more sensible information about Taiwan, try the following:

Cybertaiwan

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