I told my editor on Monday of this past week that I wanted to write a travel article about Tahsi, a sleepy seaside hamlet on the Ilan County coast. "That's cheeky," he told me and he's right. It's cheeky because, far from being a mere travel destination, I've actually been living here much of the week for the past two months -- and because even referring to the place as a "travel destination" strains credibility.
There are no hotels here and the handful of restaurants in town are closed by 8pm. Nothing happens in Tahsi. It is instead all that the town doesn't have that makes it worth writing about, and worth a visit.
Perhaps saying it's not a travel destination is unfair. Most every weekend between May and September beach bums -- those for whom summer just isn't summer without a bonfire on a beach -- file out of the train station with backpacks and surfboards,
PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES
This paper has written in the past about Honeymoon Bay (密
Rather than the popular stretch of sand, it's the rest of the town that is a desert and that's how most of the locals prefer it. "Everyone comes here for the beach," my neighbor, Ms. Yang told me while weeding her onions. "It's fine with me; they get off the train and walk the other way."
She said that most of the town's residents, like herself, are retirees who prefer the sound of waves to waves of tourists and don't frequent the beach because they don't have anything planted there.
PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES
There are others, though, who depend on the weekend wave of tourists for their income. In addition to the handful of restaurants, three surf shops line the highway through town and a few mom-and-pop shops wait patiently for customers. They would like nothing more than to see a hotel built on the beach.
"I only ever see locals during the winter," said Ms. Hsieh, who owns a nameless convenience store -- perhaps the only parcel of land in town without a garden. "I make most of my money on summer weekends."
But for most of the town's elderly residents, the tourists and beach hardly exist. Mr. Huang is one of them. Far from retired, he wakes up at dawn each day, doffs his straw hat and pushes his wheelbarrow in pursuit of anything worth recycling; cardboard boxes, odd pieces of lumber and cans left by the weekend beachcombers. At night he wades into the surf with a basket and a metal-tipped pole attached to a car battery to look for anything edible.
He's the man who introduced me to sea snails, a variety he says can only be found in Tahsi. He said so at least five times. Whether or not they actually are only found along Tahsi's coastline I couldn't tell you, but I believe him, as do all my neighbors. A wet man with an electric spear is an undeniable authority on seafood. He gave us a couple dozen which my neighbor quickly fried in soy sauce with garlic. Such is the camaraderie between neighbors in Tahsi. When my roommate discovered several bags of what looked like rotted sponge in our storage shed, our neighbor told us it was a valuable type of seaweed. Then he took it away and used it to line the bed of his garden.
The best neighbors are the kids, though. They come to the house first thing every Saturday and Sunday morning to play on the porch swing and demand basketballs and bicycles. In exchange, they give us their dog for the weekend. Then, come Sunday evening, they disappear into their homes around the same time that the weekenders file back into the train station, leaving just the sound of the waves. It's then you realize what the locals here have known all along; the value of a quiet life.
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