Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (34 page)

Allen wasn’t the only motorbike manufacturer in Taipei. From the university we went to the district of Hsinchu and the hi-tech Sanyang (SYM) scooter factory.

We were shown around by Yang, the overseas marketing manager, who told us he would lend us a couple of scooters to ride back to Taipei. He was full of smiles and really enthusiastic about the plant. He told me they produce one thousand finished scooters every day; a completed model rolls off the production line every fifty-eight seconds. I know because I timed it.

The factory floor was colossal, with great banks of CNC machines making every working part of the finished scooter. There didn’t seemed to be many people around and it felt a little weird being among all those machines making crankcases, pistons and bodywork panels all by themselves. Not very long ago, this would all have been done by hand.

There were some people working in the factory, plenty of people, it’s just that they were further down the line. Once all the parts of the bikes came together, a line of workers in grey uniforms and baseball caps assembled them. There were bits of bike on different conveyors, starting with the frame and the engine then right down to the brake levers and indicators. When the bikes are finished, they’re fully checked to make sure everything is working, then taken outside and loaded onto pallets.

The warehouse is racked from floor to ceiling and can store ten thousand scooters. I watched awestruck as hydraulic lifts hoisted the pallets to shelves way above my head. In Australia I’d witnessed the birth of a Spitfire engine and now here I was in Taiwan at the birth of a motorbike.

The scooter Yang lent me was a 300 cc SYM. I was delighted to be on two wheels and took off through the suburbs, weaving between the cars with the wind in my face. It was a very nice machine, bigger than most with a good screen and decent-sized wheels so the whole thing felt stable. Ideal for bombing about the city.

Taipei lay ahead of us, clouds still massed over the skyscrapers. It was hot and very close and I rode in shorts and flip-flops. Claudio was filming from another bike and he told me that Sunny had mentioned something about girls selling betel nuts to passing motorists somewhere along the road from Hsinchu. Chewing betel nut was very common here, just as in Papua. I saw loads of people with red lips from the juice.

‘What kind of girls? What do you mean, Clouds?’

‘Pretty girls. Girls who aren’t wearing very much.’

‘Let’s take a look then.’

We rode right through that part of the city, suddenly coming upon rows of brightly lit kiosks where girls wearing lingerie and not much else were walking out to cars and trucks with trays of betel nuts and drinks. Sunny told us that the girls, known as ‘betel-nut beauties’, are something of an icon in Taiwan, where they’ve been a fixture since the original Shuangdong betel-nut kiosk first opened in the 1960s.

We got off the bikes and started to film one girl, but she immediately got very upset. Within seconds a young guy with cold eyes and stained red teeth was right in my face. He looked wired on the caffeine-like buzz you get from chewing too many of the nuts. He covered the lens with one hand and started yelling in Chinese.

‘He doesn’t want you to film, Charley,’ Sunny told me.

‘Clearly,’ I said. ‘But what’s he so pissed off about if it’s only betel nuts the girls are selling?’

The guy was glaring at me, one hand balled into a fist. He looked as though he was going to rip the camera from Claudio and smash it.

‘Maybe that’s not all they’re selling,’ Claudio muttered. ‘Come on, Charley, let’s go.’

By the time we got back to the hotel I was pretty tired and would have happily settled down to a quiet evening. But Sam had heard about the city’s night markets and insisted we go and find one.

‘We’ll have some dinner,’ he said, ‘deer penis, a bit of snake skin maybe.’

‘What?’ I stared at him, thinking I must have misheard.

‘Didn’t you know? The men here like to eat deer penises because they think it makes them virile.’

Oh God, this was the last thing I needed. But it seemed I didn’t have a choice. Sam dragged me down a brightly lit side street to a restaurant where a young woman wearing a headset and microphone was trying to persuade people to come in. Coiled in front of her on the counter was a very large, very live, golden python.

Inside they had all kinds of snakes, as well as the live mice to feed them. Reluctantly taking a seat at a table, I noticed shelves arrayed with jars of what I assumed must be deer penises bobbing around in alcohol. Before I knew what was happening, a waiter was hanging the golden python around my neck.

From then on it got steadily worse. Apparently Sam thought I still needed to pay for coming second in that trike race in Cebu. First off they brought me a dried snake’s penis - all bumps and spines and on a stick, of all things, like a lollipop. Yeah, right, I was really going to chew on that. Next came a glass of snake’s blood, followed by cobra soup. After that the waiter (who thought all this was perfectly normal) brought me a glass of snake’s bile and honey. I was beginning to feel sick.

The waiter assured me that the bile and honey would keep me young. I told him I thought it was all a load of bollocks. Then he presented me with a plate of snakeskin and gravy. I sat there with a slimy piece of diamondback dangling from a pair of chopsticks - it tasted rubbery, like very chewy octopus, and I told the waiter it would be better fried with garlic and chilli.

‘That’s how I like my crickets,’ I said, ‘fried with garlic and chilli.’ Apparently, although the snakes in this establishment were alive, the restaurateur was no longer allowed to kill them in front of you, which is something, I suppose. I don’t mind snake, actually. I’ve eaten it before and it tastes like chicken. But then everything tastes like chicken, even squirrel.

In response to my complaint about the snakeskin, the waiter fetched a jar of turtle bollocks fermented in alcohol and a bowl of turtle soup with a foot floating in it.

‘Any minute now I’m going to vomit,’ I muttered.

‘Fine,’ Sam said. ‘It’ll make good television. In the meantime, here’s some turtle blood and a glass of turtle ink. That’s really rare, Charley, so make sure you drink it all.’

WE WERE DUE TO LEAVE Taiwan in just a couple of days, having finally secured passage on a boat that would get us to Japan. We had attempted many boat trips on this journey and few of them had worked out; from illegal fishing vessels to converted trawlers, so far we had been thwarted at every turn. This time we knew we would make it, though, because we had decided to join a cruise liner.

I know, I know, a cruise liner is hardly roughing it, but we had to make sure we actually made it this time. I could hardly believe that we only had a couple of weeks left of the entire trip. It’s at this point in any journey that I find myself torn emotionally. I’m keen to reach our final destination, not to mention desperate to see Olly, Doone and Kinvara. At the same time I can’t help feeling sad that the adventure is coming to an end . . . at least till the next time.

Today I wanted to visit Taipei 101, which might not be the tallest building in the world for much longer. Its rival, the Burj Dubai, is already technically taller, but the guys who adjudicate this kind of thing reckon it needs to be fully occupied before it can be legitimately entered in the record books. So until the Burj is entirely finished, 101 still has the record.

The building is in Xinyi, the modern government and financial district, as well as where much of the city’s entertainment is located. En route I stopped for breakfast served from the back of a car. Two friends called Jason and Chien had set up this mobile catering business a couple of years ago, bringing hot food to the business district. They offered me black eggs, but having tasted them before I had to decline. I really don’t like them. They’re fermented in ammonia, which makes them go black, and they taste and feel rubbery. That’s bad enough, but what really puts me off the most is that they used to use horse piss to create the ammonia.

So after a nice, safe bowl of rice porridge, I headed for 101. At one hundred and one storeys, it was hard to miss. Standing almost 1700 feet tall, it’s roughly the same height at which an aeroplane starts to make its final approach. Mind boggling.

I felt dizzy just looking up at it. It’s styled like a pagoda with five additional storeys below ground level. Not only is 101 the tallest building in the world, it has the world’s largest counterbalance damping system. You can see it when you get up to the topmost floors - a massive golden ball comprising different layered weights that are designed to counteract the building’s movement in strong winds.

The building also holds the record for the world’s fastest elevator. It whizzes up to the top in thirty-seven seconds - unbelievable! The lift is pressurised like an aircraft cabin and the outer skin is made from the same kind of heat-resistant ceramic they use on the space shuttle.

Unfortunately, on the day we visited the very top floors of the building were closed and I was only able to get up to level 89. That was all right - it was high enough for me. I stepped into a spacious foyer with glass walls offering the most outrageously dramatic views across the city. Funnily enough, it wasn’t so much the views that brought home the height of the place as the window cleaners. I had wondered how on earth they cleaned the glass up here and had been thinking that it was probably done electronically. Then I saw one of those cleaning platforms with two guys scrubbing away with spray guns and squeegees, 1700 feet above the city.

Every year at 101 they hold races to see who can run up the ninety-one flights of stairs to the outside observatory the quickest. Just the thought of it was enough to make my leg muscles ache. But being the bold adventurer I am, I was keen to try it. Not the full ninety-one, mind you . . . ten or so perhaps, just as a taster.

I would need someone to race against, so of course I thought of Claudio - especially if he had to carry his camera with him . . . Robin was up for a race too, but he’s younger than me and much fitter. In fact, Robin looks like he could cope with the ninety-one storeys every day. But in the end Sunny suggested a local guy who worked in the building and ran the race every year.

‘That’s cool,’ I said (feeling slightly worried now). ‘If he’s a regular competitor that will make for more of a race.’

His name was Hon-Nein Peng and when I found him he was doing his warm-up exercises in full running gear. He was an incredible ninety-two years old, his head shaved to a bristle and a Confucius-style goatee clutching his chin. He greeted us with a smile.

I couldn’t believe it: the guy looked so trim and fit, he made my cycling buddy of the other day look like a schoolboy.

‘My God, Hon,’ I said, ‘you look so young. What’s your secret? Cigarettes, whisky, wild, wild women?’

‘My friends think I look about seventy,’ he said, ‘maybe sixty-five. There is no secret though, not really. I think it’s just down to meat and skydiving.’

‘Meat and skydiving?’

‘Uh-huh. I don’t eat vegetables, never have. I just eat lots of meat, go running and swimming and every now and again I jump out of a plane.’

‘Right . . . Tell me, Hon, how many times have you run up the ninety-one flights of stairs?’

He held up six fingers. ‘Once to practise then five times racing.’

‘How long does it take?’

‘Twenty-seven minutes.’

Like a couple of good old boys we warmed up - lots of chest pumps and stretches, a bit of toe-touching, the whole routine punctuated by the odd macho grunt.

Then he beat me.

Of course he did. I wasn’t about to embarrass a ninety-two-year-old skydiver, was I?

Back on terra firma I received a text from a biker and internet blogger called M13, who had heard that we were coming to Taipei. I really wanted to meet him . . . as did the local police, apparently. They think he’s responsible for organising illegal road races and he is something of a thorn in their side. He sent us a video clip where he’s in deep conversation with a roadside dummy - one of the mechanical flag-wavers that the council use whenever there are roadworks. He never takes off his crash helmet for fear of being identified - you could call him the Stig of Taiwan. At the end of the video a construction worker in a hard hat comes and drags him away.

He sounded like a lot of fun, though I wasn’t sure about road racing. A track would be good, particularly when he mentioned I could borrow a 1000 cc motorbike. Anyway, the plan was to meet in the early hours of Saturday morning and it was all very covert. M13 sent us some GPS coordinates and a time to rendezvous and that was it. He promised us a day of mayhem and madness so of course we said we would be there.

Mayhem and madness was pretty much what we got. I was up at 4.30 a.m. and was not feeling confident at all. In fact, it was more than that: I was feeling distinctly uneasy and that’s not good when you’re planning a bike ride. I’ve had that kind of feeling a few times in my life - waking up early with a nagging sensation that something was wrong. Unfortunately that’s often how things have turned out.

I remember one Sunday morning when I met up with my friends for a bit of a blat. On a country lane south of London somewhere, I came round a tight bend too quickly and lost it. I went flying across the road and collided with a wooden post. I was knocked out and woke up with torn ligaments in my shoulder and arm. On another, far more serious occasion, a good friend of mine overcooked a similar corner, ran across the road into the bushes and caught a piece of wire across the throat. He was killed instantly.

So it was with a certain degree of trepidation that I punched in the GPS coordinates M13 had given. I really did not know much about this guy. He sounded like a lot of fun, but taking the decision to hook up with anyone you don’t really know is always a leap of faith.