Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (31 page)

‘They were placed here in honour of the first five hundred enlightened and liberated disciples of Buddha,’ Hue told me, ‘the monks who made up the first Buddhist council.’

It was an awe-inspiring place, vast and quiet and very peaceful. We passed beyond a third gate and Hue took me to the meditation hall. The sign above the door was written in Chinese characters and translated as ‘The Gate to the Sane World’.

‘There are two types of meditation,’ he told me. ‘Concentrated meditation and inside meditation. Concentrated meditation is where you focus your mind on one thing, like watching your breath, for example. You breathe in and out, every breath is counted and that is a way of sharpening your mind. Your mind is a tool that needs to be sharpened all the time and in so doing, it calms you. If you lose count of the breaths, you have lost concentration, so you begin again.’

It sounded fascinating. ‘And the other type, inside meditation?’ I asked him.

He smiled now. ‘That is where you investigate yourself, Charley. When you’re concentrating you can experience a state of incredible happiness, but that is only a side-effect of the tool-sharpening process. When you investigate, you look in on yourself. You investigate what is going on deep within the person you are. You consider things like greed and jealousy, hatred; emotions that can only lead to unhappiness. In order to be happy you have to know the problems that lead you to unhappiness and get rid of them.’

I was really intrigued now. I have never been one for any kind of structured meditation, but I understood what he meant. Over the years I’ve noticed that when I’m riding a bike all day, as I did on
Long Way Down
, my mind drifts off in all kinds of directions. There’s no one talking to you, no influences other than what’s happening on the road, and I find myself meditating on all sorts of different things. Hue understood exactly what I meant.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You are within yourself. You are alone with only the road ahead; it’s the perfect kind of meditation. That’s great; there are many different methods of meditating, many different ways to create feelings of non-greed, to achieve a state of mind where you are happy for people who have more than you and not jealous of them. There are ways to create feelings of compassion for people you might otherwise really dislike.’

I enjoyed his company. Together we walked round the complex, pausing before a wall inscribed with so many vertical Chinese characters that from a distance they looked like rain.

‘I had one guest from America who told me it reminded him of
The Matrix
,’ Hue told me.

‘Yeah, I can see what they meant. You know it’s funny,’ I said,

‘when I came out of the cinema having watched that movie, for a moment . . . just a moment . . . I wondered if the street outside was real.’

‘Did you?’ Hue arched one eyebrow. ‘So what had you been smoking?’

They taught sutra calligraphy at the monastery. Taking a seat in the hall, I had a go at it myself. It was a simple method where, initially at least, the characters are traced for you and you sort of colour them in. It gives you an initial feel for the art, a confidence in your penmanship, and progress is built from there.

I’m not sure what I had expected to find here - enlightenment, a really deep sense of spirituality, perhaps? But that’s not how it was. I can’t put my finger on why, but for all the chanting and the symbols, it did feel just a bit commercial. There were gift shops and the pilgrim lodges where we were staying felt exactly like hotels.

 

 

The morning meditation service the next day was held at ten to six in the great Vow Shrine, the most decorative building in the complex, designed to resemble a Chinese emperor’s palace. Hue translated the characters inscribed above the door: ‘Precious Palace of a Great Hero’, Buddha who had transcended suffering.

It was a beautiful morning - albeit hot and humid. It was always hot and humid in this part of the world. But the sun was up and as we walked to the shrine I saw lines of people making their way to the service. It was not just monks, but lay people wearing similar robes to the monks, people who had in some way devoted themselves to the order. Entry was marked by the chimes of a single bell and, once the gathering was assembled, the singing and the chanting began. Drums were beaten, and the chimes rang out from lots of different bells. There must have been six hundred people in the hall, the service lasting about half an hour. I have to say, it didn’t feel especially spiritual to me. It was a nice service, but I had felt closer to my spiritual side riding along the river bank, looking up at the pagodas.

Once the service was over, we trooped to the dining hall for a monastic breakfast; a simple meal of bread with peanut butter and vegetables. The meal was eaten in silence; waiters wearing surgical masks served us and it felt very formal and sanitised. I imagine the masks were due to the ever-present fear of swine flu. I was disappointed. As I said before, I’m not sure what I had expected, but I had not expected to feel like this. Hue was very knowledgeable and very funny, and through him I learned a lot. But the experience itself was nothing like as introspective and spiritual as I had hoped it would be.

Never mind, I had no plans to become a monk anyway. It was time to get going, and down by the main gate I found a delivery truck waiting for me. The driver’s name was Lo Bo-Ya and he spoke good English. He made deliveries to the monastery a couple of times a week, but now he was travelling north and said he would gladly take me to Tainan City. I told him we were looking for a cricket farm that was located somewhere on the outskirts. He asked to see the address, then said he knew the area and would take me all the way.

That was terrific, a perfect start to the next stage of the journey. And by the way, when I say cricket, I don’t mean anything to do with the game. I mean the large winged insects that make the chirping sound. They used to be something of a delicacy here apparently, though nobody really eats them any more. The ones we were going to see were fighting crickets and I hoped they wouldn’t be as bloody as the cocks in Lopez. Somehow I didn’t think they would. I just couldn’t see any way of finding a knife small enough to attach to a cricket’s leg.

Lo Bo-Ya was very chatty and as we drove north on perfect roads he told me he was into camping, so he and I spent the journey discussing tents and sleeping bags and being out in the cuds. I told him about camping with Ewan in Russia and Ethiopia and he said he would love to do that. His girlfriend hated camping though, so whenever he had some time off they argued over what to do.

The cricket farm was in the suburbs of Tainan City, in a modern apartment building close to a restaurant. It was a nice area, very clean and quiet. Ango, the cricket farmer, wandered out of his garage as the van pulled up.

I knew nothing about the sport other than it was older than cock fighting. In this part of the world it can be traced back to the Tang dynasty. It’s perfectly legal, though betting on it is not, and quietly Ango told us how now and again a bunch of guys will get together in some darkened basement to bet on the outcome of the fights. I assume the fact that the police might raid the place only adds to the sense of adventure.

Ango was a bit of a cheeky-chappie - you know the kind of person, he had a real sparkle in his eye. He took us into his garage and showed us how he farms the crickets. There are around 200,000 of them, and he rears them from eggs to the point where they have shed their skins a bunch of times and fully grown their wings. I had no idea, but there are nine hundred different species of cricket and the chirping sound is only made by the male. It does so by rubbing its left hind leg against its right, which has a kind of scraper on it. According to Ango, every species makes a different sound.

The ones he bred grew pretty large and they were black. Once the eggs were hatched, he moved the larvae into a large plastic container filled with rolled-up newspaper and sawdust. Then, after a week, he would move them on to another container and replace them with another batch of larvae. He did it with military precision; from week one to week eight, he knew exactly what stock he had.

‘But how do you know which cricket is going to be any good at fighting?’ I asked him.

‘Experience,’ he said; ‘experience and selective breeding.’

‘You mean sort of cricket genetics then, is that it?’

He nodded. ‘You can tell the good ones because they have a big head and small tail, and once you have a pair that both fight they can be mated to produce more fighters.’

This was fascinating. A Taiwanese man engineering
super crickets
in his garage. He told me that not even a big-headed, small-tailed cricket will fight just for the hell of it, mind you; it has to be coerced and coaxed . . . really pissed off, basically. And he did this by tickling it with a prod made from cat’s hair.

We moved next door to the restaurant where a group of families were gathered. Ango set up the fighting arena to show me what went on. The crickets were placed in a narrow Perspex cage that was split by an opaque partition. Taking a pair of cat-hair prods, we tickled our respective gladiators into action. With their hackles well and truly up, the partition was removed and they wasted no time in piling into each other. Ango told me that they were always evenly matched - they had to be weighed, just like the cocks, so neither had an advantage. It was a wrestling match, lots of flipping each other over and butting heads, until finally one of the crickets succumbed. Fortunately it was not a fight to the death. When one cricket had had enough he would scuttle away while the victor celebrated by scraping his legs and chirping.

It was much less cruel than cock fighting. Indeed, this little demonstration seemed quite tame. Watching Ango, I could see how much he was into it. As soon as those two tiny chaps went for each other, his eyes lit up and I could imagine what he must be like if there was money on it.

He invited us for lunch and, before we ate, I took a moment on my own to collect my thoughts. I wasn’t sure what I thought of this place; it was thoroughly modern, and so unlike the last three countries we had been through. I could see from the map why so much of the population occupied the western side of the island - the east was very rugged and mountainous. And of course it was at Kaohsiung that the Japanese had made so much of the harbour. I suppose with all the goods being landed there, it was inevitable that most of the settlements had grown up in the west.

Ango liked his crickets stuffed with garlic, dipped in batter and fried with chillies and green onions. They were served on a square platter garnished with slices of orange, and the wings stuck to your tongue when you crunched them. I took a plateful into the restaurant to see if any of the locals fancied them; it’s been a long time since most people considered them to be the delicacy Ango still believes them to be. Funnily enough it was the kids who got stuck in; they didn’t seem put off at all and some of them grabbed some chopsticks and tucked right in.

Our next stop was a bullet train that would take us to a tea plantation in the Alishan mountains, a thoroughly modern mode of transport that I planned to juxtapose with a thoroughly traditional one. The locals use bastardised motorbikes to carry fruit to market - it was another trike affair, with a trailer built on the back. I had managed to blag my way into riding one across Tainan City to the station. It was powered by a Kawasaki engine that had been converted to shaft drive and the gears were shifted by hand, using a lever behind the driver’s right leg. I think its top speed was about twenty miles an hour and the whole thing was a real mish-mash - the trailer, the engine, the way they cobbled together the shaft drive. It was rather incongruous set against the backdrop of modern Taiwan. But it was traditional, and as I was going to be taking the bullet train, I thought it would be cool to arrive at a modern station on the most home-made form of transport in the country.

By now I was feeling pretty tired and perhaps just a tad irritable. It had been an early start and I’d felt a little let down by my experience at the monastery. I was missing my wife and kids, too. They had been on holiday in Spain for a couple of weeks, something we used to do every year with Olly’s parents. It was a few years since we had been now and, far away in Taiwan, I couldn’t help feeling I was missing out.

I forced myself to snap out of it. Travelling the world, as I’m fortunate enough to do, is a great experience, and it’s hardly clocking on and off a nine-to-five job. Strangely, perhaps, the train helped my mood. Leaving the trike in the heat-soaked afternoon, I stepped into an air-conditioned station and from there onto a sleek, space-age train. It was surprisingly refreshing.

The train was so quiet I didn’t even notice it pulling out of the station. One minute we were sitting there and the next we were flying along a track built on a viaduct, with a motorway running underneath. The line runs for just over two hundred miles from Kaohsiung to Taipei City, but we were only going as far as Chiayi. From there it was a bus into the Alishan mountains, part of a national park in Chiayi County, famous for its traditional villages, temples and tea. There are twenty-five mountains above 2000 metres, the highest Da Ta Shan at over 2600 metres. I hoped the air would be cooler up there.

 

 

It was. After hitching a ride in a Post Office van from Chiayi, we spent the night at a tea plantation. Waking early, I worked out that today, 19 July, was our sixty-third day on the road and there were only three weeks of the journey left. For a moment it was hard to take in.

Downstairs I spoke to Lo Hsiu-Mei, the lady who owned the plantation. She was in her fifties and one of the top ten women farmers in the country. She is completely absorbed by her way of life. This area is relatively new in terms of tea production: the first plantations here were started in the 1920s, whereas most Taiwanese tea plantations date back to the early 1800s. Lo Hsiu-Mei told me that Alishan originally produced black tea only for the export market, but these days there are many different types. This place is close to the Tropic of Cancer and is perfect tea country: the atmosphere is cooler than the lower ground, and the air moist. The climate creates the right environment to keep the bitter elements in the tea leaves to a minimum, while naturally increasing the soluble nitrogen that helps it to taste sweet.