04-APR-A-5
THE OVERNIGHT
TWO-DAY EXCURSION TO THE SOUTH
OF
PACIFIC BEACH SITE, CORAL, VOLCANIC AND SHELL
SAND
CLIFFS AND
CAVES, AND TROPICAL RAINFOREST
AMONG BIRDS
AND BUTTERFLIES AT THE SOUTHERNMOST
TIP OF
April 5—6,
2004
What a
thorough exploration of an interesting area of
I have seen
almost all of it, in the area of the southern tip of
We gathered at the bus stop where we were to meet the International Students Association. These were students from abroad but did not look remarkably different from the other students, since they were largely all ethnic Chinese, principally from Malaysia and a few from Thailand, Vietnam and Burma (Myanmar). When we had to each introduce ourselves, I said only two sentences figuring that no one would be able to understand me, but that shows that I have not yet realized the power of the English language to transmit modernity, since many of them understood me, even in they would not volunteer to say very much back in English of which they were not very forthright. I waited while reading my book, and also saw the white dog “LIFU” come out of the monastery. “LIFU” means the “Coming Good Luck’ or “Prosperity is Just Around the Corner!” Lifu has a genteel group to be living with, so I assume he is not beaten or put upon in any way that might harm a spirit trying to work its way up to our level and beyond. But, he does have one carnivorous disadvantage: living in the Buddhist Monastery, Lifu must be a vegetarian dog!
In addition to my being on this trip buy special request through the president, Nimit is (with two of his official looking satchels, each with beer in them) carried by the “boy” whom he refers to as “Thai.” As I was reading the book “King Leopold’s Ghost” Nimit asked me what it was about. I said it was about the horrors of the colonial period in the Congo when King Leopold owned its resources and exploited them. “You have been there many times, right? Why for you need to read this book?” I explained that sometimes it was helpful to get other peoples’ perspectives on the same subject to change one’s own mind on what was observed. Last night, since I had a rather dull day limited by our not going anywhere with the raining out of the Ali Shan expedition and the lack of any transport to go elsewhere besides my run, I watched a bit of CNN. There was an interview by Chris Bonnington, the 59 year-old full time British mountaineer, who reflected on how he liked doing what he was able to do full time—which was not just climb mountains, but to write and speak about them. He has a sliver beard, and deep set eyes, so that Nimit said immediately “He looks and sounds like you!” Maybe. I went on to watch the small parts of two movies that had been projected on the screen ahead of me on several previous flights, both about incidental love encountered while pursuing someone else’s wedding. One was “the Wedding Planner” with J Lo, and the other was “Sweet Home Alabama” with Reese Witherspoon. I am seldom relegated to TV watching, but had decided that the only dinner I might need was the shucking of peanuts and an early retirement, since we would be taking this extensive tour of the Southern reaches of Taiwan today.
The long drive started out on the Freeway of Taiwan’s central expressway. I cannot believe the highway system they have here which must be among the most expensive ever built, especially given the terrain and earthquake prone substrate. The expressway is an elevated toll way through mountains, and then when it gets to farmland; it is still suspended above the ground so that the farming continues to go on beneath it. It is essentially one very long bridge over the island. The toll plazas seem to occur every 25 kilometers or so , so it must be a high speed driving with frequent slowing down and stopping, with women who are toll takers stepping out of their booths wearing masks, and bowing to the approaching bus.
I settled in to admire the terrain around me and limbered out the camera to photo scenes we might pass. The serene ride was about to come to an end, since there is an automated control panel in the front and there is a compulsory fun time coming. Any one with a microphone can control the airspace around you at very high and unignorable volumes, and at first each student had a few comments and their leader would get a few nervous chuckles from what ever it was that was being announced—since I would not be able to pick up even so much as the names in the sing song Mandarin. What I did not know was a favorite activity of my host Yuth Nimit was about to be broadcast with compulsory participation despite my frequently declining the honors—Karaoke!
Many Chinese songs were sung with the back-up f a re-verb chamber. But, any title with some English in it, or an American singer, or especially one that was said to be tailor made for me—“USA for Africa’—you know, we are the world, we are the children…I successfully stayed an involuntary listener as opposed to a firmly declining participant. It is a Chinese phenomenon that there must be unanimity in any activity, and the kinds of “compulsory fun” activities have never been my favorites, even outside the orient.
In order to add the words to the songs in Chinese characters, there was a video screen up front, and there were multiple programs, one called the “Ju Ji Club.” But in some of the numbers, there was a background of freeze framed languid movement on the part of young Asian girls dressed in miniskirts in standard model poses—eye candy for the backdrop of the music.
The driver was the only one who could not see the screen although he could hear the music. He had his own entertainment, however, since he had a special waste basket near him, and he had two packages of betel nut. He had the reddish juice dribbling down his chin and staining his lips and teeth with a “chaw” in his cheek, and had to pick up the wastebasket to spit every once in a while. He had the whole waste basket full at the end of our trip.
We left the higher mountainous areas and crossed a large cantilevered bridge over a miniscule river, but the bridge stayed elevated above farm plots beneath us, giving way to extensive aquaculture ponds with aerating wheels flailing the surface of the water. The central tower of the bridge gave cables off in triangles in each direction to support the long graceful bridge, one of m any that seemed “over engineered” as thought they were keen on building a spectacular bridge and flung it across five times the length required. Beneath us as we sped on after a highway plaza pee stop we saw lots of carefully tended orchards, with banana stalks bagged beneath the palm fronds as I had seen in MKAVI (Mount Kitanglad Agro-Ventures, Inc. in Mindanao near Malaybalay) and even more intensively plastic bagged peppers hanging from the branches of pepper trees. I saw pineapple fields, each with plastic hoops around the pineapple leaves, and between such plots, the aquaculture of fresh water species—here, possibly tilapia, while closer to the sea they were salt water ponds given to raising tiger prawns. Aquaculture is big business in Taiwan. Somewhere over the flat farm plots before we turned ff the highway, I saw a low circling Hercules Airlifter by Lockheed, a reminder that there is a strong set of treaties with Taiwan drawn up under the influence of the considerable diplomatic pressure exerted by Madame Chiang Kai Shek who only recently died in the US at age over 100. The treaties would require the US to go to war to defend Taiwan if attacked by its hugely bigger brother just across the “Formosan Strait” and would obligate us to ally ourselves with them even if it were the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) that decided to attack the Peoples Republic of China (i.e. Mainland China) if they perceived that they were militarily weak with a huge primitively equipped army. That is no doubt why US must exert tremendous restraint on Taiwan as it is opening its rapprochement to the PRC and as that huge labor market is being used to export more of the low-wage jobs to, many of them being siphoned from Taiwan...
THE NATIONAL
MUSEUM OF MARINE BIOLOGY
AND AQUARIUM,
THE FIRST STOP
IN THE KENTING NATIONAL PARK
The first stop at the arrival of our bus in the south of Taiwan was the Aquarium. This is a centerpiece of the tourist route and is a very extensive collection with the kinds of tunnels under reinforced Plexiglas that has the audience going under the water world which is filled with the various species opf se life above. They have several kinds of sea mammals, like two belugas, and a number of dolphins, but the various behaviors are studied in research, but unlike the US Aquaria, they are not taught to perform as crowd pleasers for the ticket buying public. The exhibits are largely built around large spaces with the models of whales, porpoises, all forming good backdrop for what used to be called “Kodak Moments” now a compulsory stop for the kind of Japanese posed group shot in front of a borrowed backdrop for a digital photo. The tanks were very good. There were coral reef fishes with a number of the soft and hard corals and anemones and, the ever popular anemone clown fish. I am amazed at how many of the reef fish I remember well from my era as a scuba diver, and I saw the different communities around some habitats. I had watched a bass program while at the Gorman’s in Tahoe, and there had recalled the numbers which I repeated for Alden Harken the following day: there are over 23,000 species of fish in the world, which is twice as many as all birds, amphibians and all other vertebrates combined. We had got into a discussion about how many bird speices there were for a dedicated “birder” to pursue. I mentioned that the US had fewer than five hundred speices, and the most number in the smallest space was in Cost Rica which had 450 or more. But to see half the speices of bird life on earth (Kurt Johnson’s stated life’s goal) would take large and expensive trips to pick up individual speices to “tick” off the “life list”—such as the kinds of trip is have had for quite other purposes—such as, the Stellar’s Sea Eagle in Kamchatka, or the penguins in Antarctica, or the rare species that are endemic only on the Galapagos, or in the Amazon or—in this unique part of the Siberia to Philippines flyway—Taiwan, which also has its own endemic species such as the Taiwan bulbul.
So, there may be ten times more fish than birds in species, and these varieties are no doubt due to the very different environments of both fresh and salt water, and above all on the coral reef, which has as many niches for speciation as the tropical rainforest. I think of three different ecosystems as resembling each other—the tropical rainforest being the “Big Picture” the coral reef ecology being a scaled down version, the majority of the former species are botanic and the majority of the latter environment is animal; a third micro-cosm of as complex a speciation in collaborative compression in a limited space living under extremely harsh circumstances is the tundra.
Here the animal life is profuse, unlike the terrestrial dominance of myriads of plants filing various niches. As I went along picking up a few new things I could study, my attention would be commanded to be diverted to the view of a “plastic model diver” which I could see was real, or the information that I was looking at something interesting, which was exactly what was written out in English over a display. We had lunch and one of the carefully husbanded beers in the portable stock, and then returned to see the one “performance” of the day, when a young female scuba diver entered the main tank and swam among the densely schooled fishes around here as they could smell and taste the special net bag of squid she had in her hand to release as a part of the feeding time, doing this in the big tank in a ceremony that the visitors “under” the ocean environment, made up to look like a coral reef in places, or a sunken ship in others were at different levels in this carefully engineered tank that must have to withstand hundreds of tons of [pressure at every seam. We saw as much of the aquarium as we could and gathered at the sign and the models out in front for the compulsory photos of the group.
LONG LUAN LAKE
BIRD SANCTUARY
We drove off to a place next to one of the towns in the South of Taiwan where a reservoir was proposed during the Japanese occupation, but it was finally built at a time “in the Retrocession” when it was made as a special observation area for the watching of birds. This is along the migration pattern of the Western Pacific flyway and a number of ducks and waterfowl are clustered here. I heard the pretty warbling of the Taiwan bulbul and actually stalked and shot pictures of this black and white bird in the vegetation leading up to the observation building. It was a good spot, equipped with telescopic binoculars fixed in positions, which were shortly overtaken by a horde of Japanese tourists who arrived for a full bus, each of these elderly Japanese wearing a nametag identifying with their group and following a yellow flag held by their leader.
CAESAR’S COVE
BEACH RESORT
We drove over to a small beach tucked behind a limestone old coral promontory called Frog’s Rock Marine Park. This is a short sandy beach with a couple of five star hotels behind the roadway above it. So, this is the first place I saw a few fold who were probably foreign tourists who were in the hotel and came down to the beach to soak up a few rays in bathing suits that were other than the very pedestrian ones worn by a few of the Chinese who mainly waded along the water’s edge, or got rides on the wave runners that were launched from the beach between roped off swimming areas between reef outcroppings. I walked from one end of the beach to the other, with my main interest being in the limestone old coral rocks pushing out from each end. The beach itself is “shell sand” from the wave action breaking up the shells offshore. It is a fragile beach, and the reason that an investment in such a big five star hotel was adjacent to it, with the usual jewelry displays and the kinds of opulence only resort tourists would try to look at as leisure expenditures.
We adjourned to the villa at Frog Rock Marine Park for an elegant dinner of multiple continuing course, including a soy roasted fish, and I noted that my fellow diners respectfully awaited to see what I would have, then used their chopsticks deftly to scoop up the very choicest parts—the fish eyes and the fish cheeks. I note that when the President of Nanhua University asked me about the luncheon I had with them, and again here, it is never an open ended question, such as “How did you like the lunch?” It is always “Did you find the luncheon delicious?”
Again, I noted that in this audience it is not especially notable that I am proficient with chopsticks, which is always remarkable in a setting in which they do not expect to see a Caucasian using chopsticks in any way other than experimental. We had orange slices for dessert, and a guava drink. We then were offloaded into the resort downtown of after sunset street strolling, where we walked by many empty hotels and restaurants, the great majority of them Thai restaurants. There were Karaoke bars and the kinds of things one could find in Ocean City board walk and a lot of neon, with must-have souvenirs of the stay in South Taiwan, some of them marked “Aloha from Hawaii.”
We retired for the night to a comfortable student hostel in which I found myself on a tatami mat in an upper loft—just fine for my purposes, and more comfortable for my tastes than the opulence of the five star hotel at the Caesars’ Cove Resort Hotel.
A SECOND FULL
DAY IN SOUTH TAIWAN,
TAKING IN THE
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE KENTING
NATIONAL
FOREST AND ENVIRON
April 6, 2004
I awakened in my loft, and walked around the captive geese and ducks kept in the back of our hostel. I am at Kenting, which is 22* 03.04 N and 121* 02.08 E. I wm going to be all around the southern tip of Taiwan today, so I have only one other GPS mark of significance to add, and that is the furthest southern tip of Taiwan, which we will visit later in the day. Our first stop of the day after soy milk breakfast was a stunning one with a large park as the centerpiece of the Kenting National Forest
HENGCHUN
TROPICAL BOTANIC GARDEN,
HENGCHUN
RESEARCH CENTER,
FORESTRY
RESEARCH INSTITUTE,
COUNCIL OF
AGRICULTURE, EXECUTIVE YUAN
You might expect from a series of titles like this posted on the gates that this special place would be extensive and all-inclusive—a guess that would not be far wrong. It reminded me of the interest I had in visiting the Singapore Botanic Garden, from which rubber trees were clandestinely slipped out to be grown later in the Amazon, in Indonesia and around the tropical world, a source of wealth that could erode the near monopoly that a few folk had in the “rubber barons” of the Amazon at Manaus Brazil with their own opera house and other boom town appurtenances, or the story I am finishing while eon this trip—the wild rubber gathering tyranny of terror of King Leopold’s personal “extractive reserve” the Congo. This is a subtropical garden of a thousand speices in a unique environment. And it was put together by the Chinese in signage that announces something that I cannot read in Chinese, but then translates it nearly comically into English: “The Giant Autumn Maple: fungus be invading, but the outside is goodish, and will be wonder to view to your happy.” And, I am not making this up! If I had a lens that did not have to be shot from a distance, I would have photographed the signs as entertaining as the items they were designating.
As we left the bus, carrying, as I did, only the camera and one small flask of water and told we should be back by 11:30 AM, I wondered what I would do for four hours in this place. I spent four and a quarter and ran the entire periphery to return without being too late—but when I returned to the bus, I was alone, since the rest of the group got thoroughly lost and came back an hour late—just enough time for me to change film and shirt from my five kilometer run and record on tape what I had seen as well as photographed. We walked up the hillside between trees and plants that were labeled on signs, along with other signs that cautioned “Poisonous Snakes, Wasps and Centipedes” Welcome to the Kenting National Forest Visitor’s Center.
The Visitor’s Center had good maps and brochures, despite the text of all but short summaries being in Chinese. I got interested in seeing pictures of what would later turn out to be the “Sea-Viewing Tower” and various named walks and caves and seashore approaches. The first was an aquatic garden. I saw this area which was originally a reservoir that broke down, then was rebuilt to resemble, as much as anything in my nearby Wheaton Maryland experience, Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. I photographed dragon flies and white egrets, since I had at least the telephoto capacity, which may still turn out to be quite useful to me in the Amazon. I then took off on my own through a series of walkways that cut through the narrow defiles of limestone cliffs that had been upthrust from the floor of the sea where they had first been assembled by the myriad of small organisms that the corals are, before concentrating and secreting the precipitated calcium. The narrow canyons looked like small processions back into time. Along the cliff edges various of the Ficus, that is Banyans, from bird-dropped seeds had sprouted on precarious cliff edges, and then the long supporting root beams from these tree like vines came down to seek support in the chasms. Often the lianas would intertwine and coalesce, making a “Strangler’s Embrace.”
I went
through the canyons with their fanciful names, like “Fairy Caves” all
misspelled in stilted English transliteration.
No matter what their signage, the spectacles were wonderful,
particularly wandering through them alone and silently, hearing only the rustle
of the birds and lizards—and as yet, no encounters with the well-advertised
poisonous snakes, wasps, centipedes. I
discovered the “Sea-Viewing Tower” and climbed the multiple stairs to the top
to look out over the confluence of the oceans, and to see the volcanic outcrops
with the names that seemed to someone to describe what was going on. Frog Rock, which we had seen at closer range,
the Big Point Rock, the Fighting Horses Gate, Nose of the Peacock. These were rock outcrops poking above the
canopy of the classic tropical rainforest, an explosion of variety in different
species, including diecious and monecious trees, and a large variety of lianas
and vines among the floral trees.
Floating above the canopy, like floating spots in front of my eyes were
a myriad of butterflies. Especially one
large white butterfly which kept airborne even if it looked like it was about
to land immanently—a species I only
learned alter after pursuing many individuals of the species is called “Idea leuconoe.”
I chased this white butterfly and also encountered a darker swallow-tailed butterfly that I actually may have collected first on film, since I came after it with the telephoto on autofocus which as to decide from a myriad background of linear things to focus on whatever the evanescent frame of a butterfly I substantial enough to focus on, and I don to know if it is in the focal plane. The second butterfly is “Troides aeacus. Both these arcane bits of trivia I learned later from the signs, whose Latin I hope is more trustworthy than their English, but each will make an appropriate label to the photographs, if any, that I am able to post in my own album later of another of my global collection of tropical rainforest ecosystems.
I walked out of the Sea-Viewing tower, and down through some steep cliffs and canyons of the limestone former coral reefs, with the names like “Hanging Banyan Valley,” the “One Line Sky” (a slit so narrow, that one can only see the “red ball of the sun at rare noon, so that the sky can only be one line”) and “Point of Apes.” The deep and shaded cool grottoes of the Fairy Caves and the cliff faces with hanging banyans braiding and capturing the limestone rock in a coalescing embrace are a magic kind of environment, that only a special place like this reclaimed from the undersea and now imprisoned in a tropical rainforest embrace could produce.
I wandered far down into the Point of Apes, eager to see the macaque after which this point is named, and hearing it but not able to see it, since the canopy is dense where the limestone crevices of the roof allow a view at all. I did see an endemic prehensile rodent like squirrel and was able to photo it, from the sound it made through the rain of small nut husks it released to the floor of banyan leaves. I wandered so far, that I then realized I was in the far part of the park on the map I had and I had only ten minutes to get back to the bus as agreed upon at the start. Fortunately I was wearing my running shoes, and the unfortunate part was that I was wearing the George Washington University sweatshirt, not so much for its weight and warmth, but as a designation of origin and loyalty.
I set out on the run, and made my way back to the Sea Viewing Tower. There is a road there, which is longer but clearer as a running field than is the convoluted pathway up and down through the narrow defiles. So, I drank the water, disposing of the plastic container at the Sea Viewing Tower, and hoisting up the big Nikon and telephoto lens, I started out on a run to cover the five kilometers in as short a period of time as possible. When I emerged, I saw the bus in the far parking lot with its door open and engine running and I was preparing my excuses for my being late, hot and sweaty. I had no one to apologize to. After I had changed shirts and film and tapes, I had another fifteen minute to wait until I learned that the whole group had been lost in the maze and would be coming back after noon unless they got lost again. So, I only have had to apologize for being lost in the rainforest once so far this trip, and that was for the excursion into the dense bamboo forest behind my “wooden house” in the “Poisonous snake infested jungle “ that is the perimeter of the Nanhua “Jungle University.” At least I did not get lost on the clearly marked paved paths of a well trodden National Park with three maps of the terrain in hand. And, besides, I got in my run for the day, when it is unlikely that I will have another chance for such a run!
We returned to the Villa at Frog Rock Marine Park for a repeat of the last night’s spectacular six course dinner, with each of them good. They ad a special canned tea to add after the guava juice, and the guava fruit dessert substituted for the orange slices of the night before. It was a good dinner, and I also had a chance to walk around on the rocky limestone tide pools before we had to get back to the bus to take off again. It is an intriguing place.
SHORT STOPS IN
TRANIST AROUND THE
SOUTHERN TIP
OF TAIWAN
“Shatao Beach was the next stop, an ecologic beach to study the beach sand. The area here is a special exhibit area called Shatoa Shell Beach Exhibition Area with microscopes that allow the close observation of the fine sand made from coral or shell origin. The point of the exhibit area is that it takes millennia to create sand for a beach and only a short time to destroy it.
ELUANBI PARK
This is a park built around the Eluanbi Lighthouse built in 1882 to show the Bashi Channel between the Formosan Strait and Pacific Ocean. It also houses a five thousand year old prehistoric site. But it mostly has more of the same fauna and flora I had previously seen at the Kenting National Forest. Further, it has a pathway down to the southernmost tip of Taiwan at the end of the island which I marked as 21* 53. 44N, and 120* 51.14 E We drove by a “seastack” rock in the water called “Sail Rock” and then to a site called Fongshuisha, a place where high winds hit the bluffs, undermining the cliffs and creating shifting sand dunes. This was another site for the posed digital pictures all of which are not within my range as I could only shoot telephoto shots. As we drove along, I could imagine myself along the Big Sur drive in Southern California.
We stopped at a bright red and white suspension bridge very like any number of these bridges over the various branches of the Zanskar or Indus River, but this one was built to go a long way over a very narrow river leading to the surf, the primary purpose of building this bridge was as a tourist attraction to get the people to bounce along the swaying suspension bridge the way I used to do along the suspension bridge over Rock Creek below Needwood Dam. We only spent two minutes there, time enough for each of the group to get the highly spiced octopus shreds that generates a thirst for some drinks, which fortunately they just happen to have side by side with the roast octopus.
Next (and last tourism stop) is the Chuhuo Natural Fire Protected Area. This is an area between the volcanic peaks of Mount Sental and an Army base, with porous grounds over mudstone with cracks in it down to the magma chamber. But here the gas the bubbles up is methane, and that means that the ground actually burns. There is a concession stand nearby ready to furnish you with aluminum foil wrapped eggs to cook, of Jiffy-Pop popcorn in aluminum pans with a foil cover so that you can pop corn over the earth own gas range. I also noted the Taiwanese military on exercises in the nearby fenced off place ogling the tourists from other Asian countries as we were out to see the wonders of ground that burns.
We then began the four hour return home with a one hour stop for dinner. We crossed over the vast farm plots of southern Taiwan, where they are trying to promote “leisure farming’: the idea is that with the two-day weekend, and with so much of Taiwan is densely developed in agriculture, they need to expand the economy with some kind of internally generated variety of income. So, as I had seen in New Zeeland, they have “country home entertainment” in which you are invited to visit a farm and inhale the fresh produce and restore the spirits from the hectic pace of life by seeing the farmers even more hectically scrambling for more of the NT currency. We passed large onion farms where they were “topping onions” possibly the first job I had ever experienced by toping field onions into crates on my Uncle Kees Buddingh’s muck farm in Caledonia. The peasant women here were wearing the classic conical hats with the scarves wrapped around them and masks to keep their skin from being exposed to insects, sun or the other noxious things that the tourists presumably were going to be coming out to see on “leisure farming.” Two-day weekends.
As we drove along the long expressway on its elevated platform, I was able to dictate into the tape and also pack up the film and other items from this trip. I could also make close observations of several of the betel nut selling women, since the bus drive r stopped at a few to replenish his stock. WE pulled into a huge plaza that looked like a cross between a university campus mess hall and the mega-mall shopping center. It is run buy—would you believe 7-ELEVEN!
7-eleven is very big out here using its three color strip logos, but this one has a large food court in which one can buy cuisine of various parts of the world and specialty gourmet items, such as –once again—the shredded salted roast octopus. It also offers the mega-mall samples in marketing. From our dinner stop, we drove home with everyone drowsy and ready to unpack, but for Yuth Nimit. He was eager to go to the office for two reasons. One was to install a special statue of the Matriyah Buddha—the fat laughing statue of a seated Buddha who represents the coming Buddha. It has a spherical ball rotating in the Buddha’s lap right adjacent to his protuberant belly and its chakra point. It spins around in a gurgling fountain and he bought it at the Elubani Lighthouse where there were salespeople making “special prices” on genuine items such as red corral necklaces, and a lot of tourist junk. After bargaining from 2400 NT to 2,00NT Yuth Nimit bought this statue and wanted to install it in the office immediately. Meanwhile, he insisted, I could check my email. But, I was more eager to get home to check my email the following day which will largely be devoted to a long ride to Taipei to pick up the next speakers beyond me such as john Daly, and I would be remaining at the office, with plenty of time to check emails then. No, we will do so now, so I made as if to check my email and was really eager instead to get to the room and unpack from the last of my tourist outings in Taiwan pack away the film which will need special handling in carry-n bags and switch gears to start up the next visiting professor cycle of lectures.
So, I have been as far South as Taiwan will allow. I have completed a rather thorough visit to many of Taiwan’s beautiful places, and enjoyed the eco-touring of its tropical rainforest. I am now going back to work for the remaining part of to the week before I make the long trip back home to start up almost immediately on the next trip to an even bigger rainforest—the last really vast ecosystem of its kind on earth, the Amazon.