The ruins first-hand
After a night in Chiayi, we left early Sunday morning for the deserted streets of Ershui; a quaint town with some of the friendliest people we met along the way. We rode rickety local buses from here to witness the aftermath of the earthquake. Roadside communities of tents dotted the landscape. Piles of concrete and metal debris lay strewn out in lots where houses once existed. A curious grandmother approached us with her family and asked, "What are you doing here?" "We wanted to see for ourselves what happened here," I responded.
"Come inside our house. I'll show you," she said. The walls and ceilings of the entire house were deeply fractured, looking as if they had been through a war. She pointed out the extensive damage while a cacophony of jackhammers rang out on the streets.
"We only come here in the daytime now. At night we sleep in tents up the road," her son announced. In spite of their hardships, warm smiles beamed from their faces.
In Puli, traffic jams were common as motorists stopped to get out and take pictures of a crumbling Taiwan Beer Factory; one of the few structures that still hadn't been torn down. We boarded a bus to Taichung and speeded along bitumen riddled with cracks.
The journey ends
In Taipei, we were told that the train would only take us as far as Suao, so that is where we disembarked. The harbor spread out like fingers into the ocean. Hiking along the highway's edge gave us a scenic view of the entire city. We stuck out our thumbs and were picked up by a man whose job took him halfway around the island twice a week running errands. We wound along the eastern edge of Asia. The mountains of Taiwan plunged straight down into the ocean and the panoramic views were fantastic. Gigantic swells from the North Pacific lumbered along with us to the south.
Just out of Hualien, I spotted the flashing lights of a police escort accompanying a sixty-year old man who was riding his bicycle around Taiwan while seated backwards. While his journey had recently begun, ours was at an end.
RSS