A farmer, his face tan and riven with creases of age, bent over and hoed the soil while a cigarette dangled from his mouth.
He was preparing a hard-packed, stubborn plot of earth for ginger, some of which he would sell to the caravans of students and families that walked this section of the Tsaoling Historic Trail.
Noticing that we were watching him, a bit mystified as to what he was planting, he slowly straightened his bent frame, then quickly wandered over holding a stubby piece of ginger in fingers that looked as gnarled as the root itself.
"Do you want to buy some," he asked with a gummy grin.
No, we said, but inquired as to what all the PVC tubing was for that lay scattered about.
He took a painfully long time to explain, grinning and gumming his cigarette the entire time, waving his arm across the field occasionally, before asking again good-naturedly if we wanted any ginger, or perhaps some other medicinal roots that he grew within the PVC.
We politely declined again, so he shrugged and went back to his work as we fell back in with the procession of hikers strolling alongside the fallow fields that hem in the lower part of this 19th century migratory route.
Farming has probably been one of the few things that hasn't changed in this area since people started walking the Tsaoling trail more than 200 years ago, heading for the fertile Lanyang Plain of present-day Ilan County.
Tuti Kung (Earth God) temples still abound along the route that Aborigines first used as part of a larger network that wound from Tamshui to Ilan, but they are now joined by amenities that earlier travelers could only have wished for: interpretive plaques, bathroom facilities, pavilions and sausage and ice cream vendors.
In contrast to the hikers who do walk it for fun, during the early 1800s, mainland immigrants used it to avoid a more hazardous journey around the northeast coast from Tamshui. It was developed by the then Taiwan prefect Yang Yan-li, who adopted the aboriginal trail to make settling the Lanyang easier.
Preserved section
Only a tiny portion of this trail remains today, but it is well developed and ideal as a one-day getaway from Taipei. Winding up through a sparsely populated valley north of Fulung beach, the trail passes by rice paddies, patches of wild lilies and old, sometimes abandoned homes as it runs toward a break in the coastal foothills.
Most people begin the hike on the north end, heading south toward Tali and the Jade Emperor Temple. During the four-hour trip, hikers pass through three distinctive ranges, beginning in a low-lying farming plain, then crossing below forested ridges that eventually lead to a windy promontory from which uninhabited Turtle Island may be seen just a few kilometers off the northeast coast.
On the way up, the most bucolic section of the trail comes about one hour into the journey, starting from when the trail breaks left before a bridge and ascends a stone staircase that parallels a brook. Moss-dappled walls, flagstones scuffed smooth by the shuffle of millions of feet and tiny hollows on the brook where the crawfish nibble at your feet are all characteristics of this section.
Climbing out of the valley and toward the neck of the pass, the scenery abruptly changes. Leafy canopies and tree-lined paths give way to hillsides swept with silvergrass, their long, pliant necks bent by the sea-chilled gusts that race through the pass, sucked inland by the valley's warmer climate.
RSS