Canadian-born author John Groot today publishes Taiwanese Feet: My Walk Around Taiwan, a book about walking round the entire coast of Taiwan. It’s a rather strange book, and I will endeavor to demonstrate why I think so.
Firstly, the walk doesn’t take place in a series of long hikes, let alone a continuous trek. Instead, it consists of a series of largely single-day walks. Groot begins in his home town of Tamsui. He heads northward for a day, then takes a bus home. On his next outing he takes the same bus to where he left off the first time out and carries on walking from there. Sometimes he’s alone, sometimes accompanied by a friend.
This works well enough as far as Keelung, and even Yilan, but when he gets to Hualien other strategies are called for. Now he tends to take on two or three days together, and when he gets as far as Taitung he takes a plane there direct from Taipei.
Further round his chosen coast-following route he begins to opt for the High Speed Rail down the nation’s west coast, plus a local train and then finally a bus or taxi. Needless to say at this stage he takes on several days’ hike at a time.
Consequently the round-island trip, though taking Groot 83 days in all, is actually spread out over several years. At one point he takes 18 months off due to a leg injury. His Taiwanese wife, who initially opposed the project, joins him for a single day when she comes south to spend the Lunar New Year with her family just outside Kaohsiung.
Secondly, Groot’s nature is an important item in the puzzle. Essentially, he’s a fanatic for Taiwan and the Taiwanese. No one he meets can do any harm. Someone may prove less than friendly, but immediately afterward Groot is the recipient of a totally unasked-for act of kindness. And even the officials who turn him back at the end of a long hike across a bridge are presented as good-natured, and only doing their job.
The problem here is that at times the book has the potential for being very funny, and Groot doesn’t take advantage of it. Outright comedy would have improved it no end, but in order to be really funny Groot would have had to be rather more sharp-tongued. He should, in a word, have allowed himself to be more bad-tempered, or at least opinionated.
He cites the US travel writer Paul Theroux as a major influence, and Theroux can be hilarious, but it’s almost always when he dislikes something or someone. His strong distaste for India, for example, contributes to the three novellas in The Elephanta Suite being virtual instant classics.
Groot, by contrast, is too kind. When on one occasion he uses a new toilet (and squeaky-clean toilets are one of his obsessions) in a not-yet-opened hotel, to the fury of its owner, Groot merely smiles his apology and walks away. Comic classics are not made of bland material such as this.
Groot loves 7-Eleven stores, probably on account of their cold beers. “Chunk! Fizz! Slurp! Ah!” is one of his regular laugh-lines. But for the rest he adores the blue sea, fresh mornings with the wind in his face and the prospect of a cycle-track to give some relief to his aching feet.
Groot also loves the exclamation mark. At times I found myself counting the number of lines before another one appeared — at one point it was some six or seven. The problem with exclamation marks is that they exclude the possibility of irony. A sentence that might have been ironic is made its opposite by the mark. I tend to use a lot too, but I invariably find that on revision the paragraph in question is greatly improved by my deleting them.
So on Groot goes, stomping, trudging, tramping or whatever, with a smile on his face and a good word for everyone. But Taiwan’s coastline can be hideously polluted. Groot does note places as being “not too noisy or stinky” and “not too dirty or stinky” (later “skanky”), especially along the highly-populated west coast. But I don’t think there’s a single instance where he blames this on anyone in particular, or on the local population in general. Instead, he goes on for a few more “klicks” (kilometers — a word I had to look up) until he finds somewhere more congenial.
I couldn’t help contrasting him with David Barton, a resident of Taoyuan (“the armpit of Taiwan”), and his vituperative evocation of dawn on a “dead dog beach,” with belching chimneys beyond. Groot would never be that caustic. Dogs, as it happens, pose a regular threat on Groot’s chosen route. He fends them off, though, with threats of thrown stones, and never gets bitten.
Of course this book is an unabashed tribute to Taiwan’s spectacular east coast, and anyone contemplating a trip along any of that coastline will benefit from Groot’s accounts of the beauties and perils in store. The depiction of the tunnels through the stupendously high Cingshuei Cliff (清水斷崖) near Hualien is worth the price of the book in itself.
Taiwanese Feet is available from today as an ebook and a print-on-demand paperback (with black-and-white photos) from amazon.com, and next month from the author — find him on Facebook — in a full-color version.
This author longs to be Taiwanese. As he writes close to the end of the book, “My face and my passport may not be Taiwanese, but my feet are, and part of my soul as well. The next time I hear someone call out ‘Foreigner!’ as I pass them, I’ll think to myself, ‘Not my feet!’ Hence the book’s title.”
What else? Well, there are admirable historical sections interspersed with the actual travel parts, next to the Tainan and Taipei passages, for instance. So there we have it — a slightly comic figure, but not comic enough due to his deference to Taiwanese. But that he has to be congratulated on completing his very demanding if slightly eccentric project can’t really be in any doubt.
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