Taiwan on Two Wheels

by Laura Buchan (Canada)

A leap into the unknown Taiwan

Taiwan was never on my list of places to go. In fact, it was hardly even on my list of places that existed. To me, Taiwan was a vague concept of a sort-of-Chinese island somewhere off the coast of Asia, and that was all I knew. Similarly, cycle touring was never on my list of things to do. Over the course of a year, I biked maybe 50 cumulative kilometers. My brother went on a long bike trip once. I'd never really thought about it. So, quite frankly, I was as surprised as anyone to find myself circumnavigating Taiwan on a bicycle. Two weeks earlier, I had been in the Colombian Amazon, trying to buy a boat ticket to get to Peru. In a rare moment of functional WiFi, I got a message from my friend Kirsten asking if I wanted to bike around Taiwan on rather short notice. It was for an event called Formosa 900, in which people from all over the world biked around Taiwan to promote both cycling and tourism. My initial reaction was "no, not really, I'm in South America and I haven't even seen the Andes or purchased a llama sweater, so I'll stay put... but thanks, I guess." But after an unpleasant boat ride, an even more unpleasant mototaxi ride, and a sleepless night in the company of some questionable hostel roommates, I was more easily swayed. I made some hasty decisions, and before I knew it I was boarding a plane to Taipei, where I met the other members of our team and started to wonder if I had made a huge mistake. I was in the company of a cycle blogger with 40,000 Instagram followers, a former member of Australia's national cycling team, and a guy who biked across all of Australia in 22 days because he thought it would be fun, among others. As for me, I did technically own a bike, so really I didn't feel out of place in the slightest. The next morning, we cycled out of Taipei and into the rice fields and industrial centres of Taiwan's west coast. I had great confidence for the first 30 kilometres or so. After that, my stamina and enthusiasm began to wane, but my stubbornness and pride remained intact. A few hundred kilometers later, I found myself biking up Taiwan's east coast along the edge of a cliff, straight into a howling headwind while rain poured down in sheets. I dodged semi-trailers and construction zones, and I laughed maniacally because my only other option was to cry. The people who actually rode bikes in their regular lives were so far ahead of me that I hadn't seen them in hours. The support van trundled by and for some reason I told them I was fine. It started to get dark. The fast people were long gone. The slow people (myself included) had formed a pack led by the 15-year-old daughter of an official guide. On we biked, through darkness, across towns, past lights of distant farmhouses, as cars and trucks and buses sped past our poorly illuminated forms. After 130 kilometres of cycling, we reached our rather posh hotel. We walked stiff-legged to our rooms, tried to wash the mud and sweat from our bodies, and wandered down to dinner with vacant stares. We were asleep by 8:30, and up at 5:00am the next day to do it all again. Somehow, it was all worth it. For every headwind, there was a tailwind. For every wildly careening motor scooter, there was a local who gave a thumbs up out the window of their car and yelled the Taiwanese equivalent of "You can do it!". For every painful climb, there was a descent that could breathe the life back into the most weary of travellers. When the journey ended, we wandered the streets of Taipei on our last day in the country. We found a wall on which someone had written, "Forever two wheels Ride hard, die fast If you don't ride in The rain, you don't ride Live to ride. Ride to live." I like to think I did all of those things except the dying part.