Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (30 page)

Now I understood why you see surfers spending such a lot of time just lying on their boards. It’s very tiring and if you catch a good wave you need to take a breather afterwards or you run out of energy.

Afei was a great teacher. He was very laid-back but really enthusiastic and he loved his job. He said the sheer excitement of his students rubbed off on him, and he couldn’t think of any other work where people smiled and laughed quite as much.

When the surfing was over Claudio and I had a go on a couple of bob bikes - tricycles on skis, like a sort of hand-held hydrofoil where you stand up and bounce to make them go. Weird things . . . mine kept sinking. After that I was strapped inside a massive plastic ball with Afei and sent tumbling down a hill. Don’t ask me why I did that! I mean, I climbed a hill, got inside a ball and bounced all the way down again. I hate stuff like that - it makes me feel sick and that bloody ball put me out for the rest of the day. But it was a dossing-about day, wasn’t it?

 

 

That night we had a barbecue at Afei’s place and first thing in the morning we headed back to Kaohsiung. The World Games weren’t opening until the evening, but I was hoping to see some dragon-boat teams going through their paces during the day.

The games have been running since 1981 and feature sports that either might become or once were Olympic events. The venue for the water sports was Lotus Lake - a beautiful spot where the shores were lined with the most elegant Chinese pagodas. Here they would hold the dragon-boat racing, the water-skiing and canoe polo, which up close looked really quite brutal. The Spanish team were practising in a small arena separated from the main lake by a network of pontoons, and looking on with his arms folded was one of the officials from the German team. He was a big guy with blue eyes and a bald head.

‘So who do you think will win?’ I asked, sidling up.

‘The Dutch maybe,’ he said, ‘since a few years now they have been the strongest.’ He gestured. ‘The Chinese are always strong but we don’t know if they’re sending a team.’

‘It looks like the rules are similar to water polo.’

‘They are,’ he said, ‘only it is much faster and the goals are taller.’

The canoes were small and clearly very nimble. The players used the paddle not only to manoeuvre but to pass the ball and shoot. Even practice looked frenetic: two guys were fighting for the ball, their boats clattering into each other. The German told me there were eight players in each team, though only five were on the water at any one time. The game lasted only twenty minutes and you could change the players as often as you liked.

‘What about Germany?’ I asked. ‘Have they got a chance?’

‘Germany only has a women’s team this year,’ he said a little sadly. ‘The men’s team did not make the qualification.’

Across the lake I could see teams practising in the dragon boats and I wanted a closer look. The boats are like large open canoes where twenty paddlers sit in pairs with one person at the back to steer and another up front beating the stroke on a drum. It’s an ancient sport, going right back to the fourth century AD when a famous Chinese poet named Qu Yuan fell foul of the Emperor. He was so out of favour that his only option was to take his own life, so he decided to drown himself in the River Mi Luo. The local fishermen heard what he was planning, however, and desperate not to lose the one man who stood up to tyranny, they went after him, racing their boats and beating their drums to scare away the fish.

I could hear the drumbeat as the American team raced across the water. A little earlier we had met their leader, a lovely lady called Kim who said I could have a go at paddling. Kim was in her fifties and had been a paddler herself for fifteen years, but injuries had forced her onto the sidelines and now she was the mama of the team. An event organiser by profession, she knew how to make things tick. Locating a twin-hulled jet-ski that took passengers, we made our way across the lake to see them.

The American team was made up of a dozen men and eight women, and their boat was provided by the International World Games Association, as they all were. Kim explained that there are four different races: two hundred metres, five hundred metres, one thousand metres and, the daddy of them all, two thousand metres.

‘That’s a chariot race,’ she said, ‘the one we all want to win. It’s four lengths of the lake, Charley, five hundred metres each length, and there are three turns. Each team starts at a ten-second interval and when you catch up . . . boy, it can be messy. You’re not supposed to touch other boats, but when you hit the turn side by side . . .’ She whistled. ‘It can be ugly, believe me.’

It sounded fantastic. Keen to have a go, I took a seat behind a really buff-looking guy called Gerry. We were on the left-hand side of the boat and he showed me the stroke. My right hand had to stay high, with the left gripping the paddle almost at the blade.

‘We’re going to practise the fast start,’ he told me. ‘Reach all the way forward and dip the blade, and when I yell “go” we go - three short strokes then ten long. You got that, Charley?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

The girl at the front began to beat the drum and our paddles dipped. Gerry prepared to start.

‘A-TTEN-TION,’ he yelled. ‘GO!’

Off we went, three short strokes and into the ten: it’s vital that you keep the rhythm, because if anyone misses a stroke it’s chaos. Of course, being the novice, I was bound to miss a stroke. At one point I found myself going down when Gerry was coming up, and I whacked his well-muscled shoulder with my paddle blade. It didn’t seem to bother him, but I was off the rhythm now and it took a moment before I could get back in time. I did all right actually - it was just a few hundred metres across the lake, but not bad for a beginner.

Back on the dock, I spoke to a couple of huge guys with muscles in places I didn’t even know existed. They were fifty-five and fifty-four years old and had been racing dragon boats since 1985. One had six children all under fourteen, all conceived in the boat, or so he said. The other looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his heyday. I’m serious, they were ripped, the pair of them.

I loved the boat and just hanging out with the team; I could feel the buzz, the camaraderie and the will to win. They were having a lot of fun too and it struck me that the athletes at these games weren’t under the same kind of pressure as Olympians; there was plenty of competition, but winning wasn’t everything. Kim said they had been trying to get the sport into the Olympics for years now and had been hoping for Beijing. But with such big teams it was difficult logistically and the only way it might be possible was to use smaller boats with only ten people paddling. What I found most amazing, having witnessed first hand how good they were, was the fact that the American team came from at least ten different states and they hardly ever got to train together.

 

 

We ate lunch in a busy street where the shop signs were hanging vertical banners with Chinese characters. I was looking for something traditional when I saw a toilet bowl fixed to a wall and above it a sign that read ‘Modern Toilet’ . . . believe it or not, it was a restaurant. The tables were made from toilet cisterns, the seats were toilet bowls and the food was served on plates shaped like urinals. So not remotely traditional, but so mad it was worth checking out. Everywhere you looked there was a reference to shit or piss, from a massive dangling ornamental turd to swirls of mock poo on the window sills. Appetising. Taking a seat on a toilet, I was served from both a urinal and a hospital bedpan. It was bizarre, and I asked one of the waitresses what it was all about. She told me that when the owner was a kid he was particularly naughty and his teacher used to punish him by making him clean the school toilets. It happened so often that the toilet block became his home away from home and when he grew up he decided to portray the toilet in a more positive light. So he started this restaurant. As you do.

The opening ceremony for the World Games was held at the most spectacular stadium. The stands looked as though they had been woven from lattice ironwork and the whole thing was powered by solar panels. We were treated to dancing and a light show before the teams were introduced. The President of Taiwan was roundly applauded and I was reminded that this is a politically sensitive country. Outside I had noticed banners proclaiming: ‘Taiwan is Independence’, yet all the competitors we had spoken to referred to the country as Chinese Taipei.

Taiwan sits between the South China Sea and the East China Sea, and Kaohsiung is the largest port in the country. According to Felix, the young translator who would be accompanying us to the Buddhist temple at Fo Guang Shan, there is evidence of human settlement here going back thirty thousand years. In terms of colonial influence, the island was Portuguese from 1544 until 1624, then Dutch until the Chinese invaded in 1662. After that the territory was batted back and forth between various dynasties, including the Great Qing in the 1870s. Japan had had its eye on the place since 1592, mind you, and when in 1874 Paiwan aborigines beheaded the survivors of a Japanese shipwreck, it finally invaded. In 1895 the island became an official Japanese colony.

 

 

We hooked up with Felix the morning after the opening ceremony and I asked him how he thought it must have been for his country, becoming Japanese after being under China’s control for so long. He was a young guy, but he knew his history and as we rode north on a couple of rented scooters he told me all about it.

‘Originally, we were enemies,’ he said. ‘The Taiwanese did not want to be a colony. But in some ways the Japanese were good for the country. Before they came the harbour at Kaohsiung was very small, and they made it much bigger and more important. They also built the road system and infrastructure; the capital city is like a chessboard.’

‘You mean a grid system?’ I said.

‘Yes, that’s right; a grid.’

We were riding in the scooter lanes, having picked up the bikes from a shop in the middle of town. Evidence of the Japanese grid system was all over this city; the roads were wide and well ordered and with the English translations of Chinese characters it was easy to find your way around. It was a bike-friendly place - the scooter lanes were nice and safe and the cars kept away from you. Riding alongside Felix, it was easy to hold a conversation; there was plenty of traffic but we seemed sheltered from it.

‘So they did some good then, the Japanese?’

‘In some ways, yes, but during the Second World War they were frightened that the Taiwanese would fight with the Chinese so they made the people worship the Japanese shrine. And they made them learn Japanese and take Japanese names.’

‘And after the war?’

‘Taiwan was given back to China. During the civil war in 1949, people like the monks at Guang Shan retreated here from mainland China.’

‘So what is the main religion here then?’

‘It’s a mixture. Buddhism, Taoism and some Confucianism as well.’

The monastery was an hour north on Highway 1 - the first real road to be built in the country. In truth we didn’t ever seem to leave the city. Guang Shan was no more than an extended suburb. We did pass through a little countryside here and there, following the Laonong River, at 137 kilometres the second longest in the country. The suburbs were less salubrious and well heeled than the downtown area and the buildings more traditionally Chinese.

At Guang Shan the river was spanned by an enormous bridge, and long before we got anywhere near the monastery the horizon was marked by a massive golden image of the Buddha, dwarfing everything around it. Pulling over for a moment, I just stared and stared. Felix took me down to the river, rather than going straight into the monastery. We rode under the bridge and beyond the enormous storm drains to the headland, where the monastery buildings with their white pagoda towers seemed to cover the entire mountain. This was the back of the complex, a mass of perfect-looking buildings that sprawled across the headland. We would be spending the night here and I couldn’t wait. Keen to have a look now, we rode back to the main gate. In many ways the size of the statue was a fitting emblem as this is the headquarters of the International Buddhist Progress Society. They promote a form of humanistic Buddhism that places great store in being relevant to the modern world. Because of that, they encourage visitors from all over the world.

The main gate opened into a massive courtyard bordered by trees. An enormous white arch spanned the flight of steps that led to a second gate.

A monk was waiting to greet us. His name was Hue Shou and he was from Austria originally. He had been in Taiwan for nine years and a monk for eleven. He was a lovely guy, very witty and very insightful, and was the designated host for European guests. Before he devoted his life to the order he had been what he called a lay Buddhist, back home in Austria. He had lived a normal life, with a girlfriend and a son. In fact, his son was with him in Taiwan, though not living at the monastery. The boy’s mother died before Hue left Austria, so it was only natural that he brought his son with him. The Buddhist organisation is one of the largest charities in Taiwan and Hue’s son lives in the orphanage attached to it. He was excelling at school and was something of a basketball star, apparently. He had already been on TV and had won a prestigious Nike award for the most valuable player.

As we walked up the steps to the gate, Hue told me the monastery was like a small city. It covered a huge area, with hundreds of beautifully designed buildings and all of it perfectly maintained. The buildings were different colours, white and cream and beige, but they complemented one another, creating an ambience of total tranquillity. The walkways were paved, and the lawns lined with shrubs and stands of trees that reminded me of bonsai. Beyond the second gate, the path was bordered by grassy terraces where five hundred white statues were huddled.