DANGER ZONE
TAROKO GORGE HIGHWAY MIGHT TAKE YOUR BREATH AWAY
There is no other road like it on Earth. Taiwanese guidebooks boast that its construction took 450 lives. So, I find myself wondering what exactly am I thinking by wanting to drive through the infamous, two-kilometre-deep Taroko Gorge, the country’s most dangerous and most visited travellers’ attraction.
I’d rented a car in Taipei and fuelled with the bravado of adventure and the security of some bilingual maps, had headed south for six hours along the seacliffs of Taiwan’s east coast. Then, I’d turned westward into the mountains — jungle-covered at the lower elevations, crowned with pine forests and alpine meadows up high — which cover the country’s interior. The only route through this coastal barrier is the amazing, and unimaginably precarious Highway 8 that threads through the Taroko Gorge for 19 adrenalin-filled kilometres.
It offers, I instantly realized, terrifying views downward toward the crystalline, boulder-filled Liwu River, hundreds of metres below. There are innumerable cliffside, hairpin turns, some so abrupt they’re marked by exclamation-point signs and convex roadside mirrors to prevent collisions. There are frequent little rockfalls and dozens of unlit, single-lane tunnels. And I find myself wondering at times whether the light at the end of the tunnel is, in fact, the light at the end of the tunnel ... or an oncoming truck with a headlight burnt out. When I stop at viewpoints, the canyon’s marble cliffs rise in places almost two kilometres above me. The sky is a pale blue snake; the river its icy green companion below.
The road is, I tell myself, either a feat of extraordinary engineering or equally extraordinary sadism.
At the gorge’s exquisite Temple of Eternal Spring — adjacent to the Light of Zen Monastery — I trade the vehicular for the perpendicular: a cliff-face ascent to the temple’s redwalled pagoda on a ridgetop above. Butterflies dance in the semitropical air. Cicadas drill. The river’s roar becomes a vague electric hiss — like a TV tuned to a dead channel. I regret not bringing nibbles or water. It is 453 steps up; I count them out of masochistic pleasure.
At an altar set within a cliffside cave, a dozen golden Buddhas oversee some smouldering joss sticks and, I note sadly, offerings of an unopened package of Jacker Coconut Milk Cream-Filled Waffle Cookies and an unopened can of Mr. Brown Coffee. I’m alone. And thirsty. I ask myself: would Buddha understand? Would he miss his Mr. Brown Coffee? Or would I be reborn as an earwig? The moral implications are too severe and I continue on, panting, until I reach the pagoda’s topmost balcony where — as my reward — a single, incongruous plastic lawn chair sits facing the panorama. It’s a Zen moment. The gorge is a slot in the Earth below. Misty clouds move across the forested nearby ridges. Above, the summits of a half-dozen, 3000-metre-high mountains float in the humid air. I drink the view. I ask myself whether I was right not taking the can of coffee. Or whether, karmically, it was — actually — meant for me?
Midway through the canyon — a surge of shrieking ambulances appear from behind, and an hourlong wait follows. I learn — fortunately a day later — a vehicle ahead had been struck by huge fallen slab of tunnel roof.
At 2,200-metres, Alishan is Taiwan’s premier mountain resort and shares with Banff the same sense of overbuilt dislocation. I know from my reading that the Chinese come to such spots out of belief in the virtue of deng-gao — ascending to high places. Mountain mists, they say, are curatives. They produce sexual energy. They strengthen longevity. So the mystically-inclined crowds follow trail signs upward toward Alisan’s pagodas — and food stalls — that crown nearby summits. The paths are full of people in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck T-shirts. I secretly lust after one hiker’s jacket that contains this cryptic, Star Trekian message: ‘Multi-Link Beam Suspension.’
It’s sort of like the silk moths of Alishan.
Each April, folklore says, the silk moths appear at Alishan’s ornate Shoujen Temple for a week, and bring good luck to those that witness the event. The temple’s pagoda-style eaves are baroque, upward-curving dragons and phoenixes upon which ride the demigods of Chinese myth. Its interior is dark, incense-filled, and populated by statues of the Lord of the Somber Heavens, the Earth God, and other celestial deities. It’s also populated by hundreds of human worshippers. They burn joss sticks, mumble prayers, and place gargantuan bundles of funeral money — and, I observe, not a few cans of Mr. Brown Coffee — on the temple’s golden altar. They also seek the blessing of the half-dozen silk moths that, for some reason, have chosen the gods’ hairy beards as resting places.
To mark the moths’ arrival, a noisy parade appears outside at the doorway. It’s led by musicians, costumed Chinese lion-dancers, and dozens of banner-waving celebrants. They, in turn, surround dozens of more celebrants who bear on their shoulders huge wooden palanquins, each surmounted by an ornate Chinese deity. A small mountain of funeral money is torched. The musicians’ cymbals clang. The drummers beat a mad tattoo. Thousands of firecrackers are ignited. Sulphurous smoke engulfs the temple’s plaza. The air is filled with paper shrapnel. The temple’s moths, however, appear unmoved.
The road further west into the country’s interior climbs seemingly endless switchbacks toward the high spine of mountains that run the length of Taiwan. Here, over 100 summits exceed 3,300 m. I pass through vast tea plantations that fill the mountain slopes with contoured steps of electric-green oolong. I pass through bamboo forests that tick and tock in the alpine breeze. Higher, and the forests are full of blooming rhododendron trees, cypress, and pine. Monkeys perch on roadside abutments, soliciting handouts. Finally, the road breaks above treeline and I can see the faint groove of trails following the crests of ridges upward. In every direction, mountains the size of the Rockies. Civilization seems far away. But at the highest pass, 3,275 m. above sea level, a dozen vendors are clustered around the site’s lookout platform, hawking Chinese sausages and grilled corn-on-the-cob.
It was just a matter of fate, I tell myself, that I’d paused at the Temple of the Eternal Spring to consider the moral complexities of stealing that can of Mr. Brown Coffee. Had I been driving the road 10 minutes earlier, I subsequently calculated, I’d have been about where the latest victims of the Taroko Gorge had begun their journey toward reincarnation.