A walk in yangmingshan park

Well, today I went to Yangmingshan Park. It’s the national park here in Taiwan. When someone says, let’s go for a walk in the park, you usually say yes. In fact, I would say yes nearly all the time. I still would say yes now. But to qualify this, Yangmingshan Park is quite large. There are quite a lot of steps and lots of different areas. Exploring it and hiking it, it’s not for the faint of heart. 

It’s a good thing that it wasn’t summertime because I might have died up there on the mountain. Like Mount Everest, they’d have to have the Sherpa come up the mountain and fetch my corpse because it is grueling to get up there. The view from up there is worth it. I think that everything about today was worth it. I am tired, So, so tired. 

I want to tell you about the day from start on because it was a good slice of a quintessential day and a space in time for a typical Taiwanese person. Today is Monday and I met up with a friend or a new friend and his suggestion to meet up and an activity to do would be to go to the park, Yangmingshan Park, because I’ve never been there. So I said, yes, I, of course, that sounds a great idea to have a local walk me around the park and show me around things. 

That sounds great. So we decided to meet at the subway station exit that we would then take the bus to go up to the mountain to the park or to the area of the park that we were going to start at. I got up in the morning, I had my breakfast, checked myself, was looking real cute, got to the park, got to see a few great things on the way. The town or the way that Taiwan City or Taipei City is designed is really quite civically planned. There are these large avenues that, just like in Europe, there are these large avenues that split off into smaller streets and sub streets and so on and so forth. So the buses, most of the buses, will go along the larger streets. 

This bus that I took that we took was not one of the buses that go along on the bigger streets. In fact, we had to take two different buses to get there. We had to take, I think, the 20 or the 141. It was a trek even before we got to the mountain. But like all good things in being a nomad, the adventure is worth it. We got to the mountain and we started hiking. Yangmingshan Park is a really large park. If I’m not mistaken, it takes up a good 100 kilometers? I don’t know the exact numbers, but that thing is large. It’s so large that it takes up space that is outside. 

It takes up so much space that one area or one part of the park is serviced by like one subway station and then another area is serviced by different subway stations. Not just subway stations— the whole line. I would say that the whole line is what services or the whole, it’s so big that it’s not serviced by the red line, it’s serviced by the blue line. That’s how big it is. And it’s really quite nice to be able to go all the surrounding way, but that was not my purpose. In fact, I did not even know how big this park was until I got on the bus. 

I’m glad I took the bus up. But when I got to the top, one of the things that was so cool about this park is that I saw what I believe were people living inside the national park or cultivating agriculture in the park or on park grounds. I went through walking in different areas that I saw bananas. 

I saw different potatoes, cabbage, different grapes. People were up here growing. They’re living. They’re making a life for themselves up here. It’s nice. The view wasn’t so bad, either. I got to see a nice view of Taipei. I didn’t know or didn’t recognize Taipei was so hilly and so gorgeous in terms of the mountainous landscape. But when you’re up there at the peak, you have the ability to look down and kind of see all the things and to see the landscape from a more reserved or bird’s eye view, I would say. 

You can see Taipei itself as like a little bit of weaving in between the mountains. It’s the same view as like when I was up there in Pao de Azucar in Brazil. You could see that Brazil, the town itself or the city itself weaves in between mountains. It’s not one continuous city. It’s actually separated by the natural art, the natural topology of things. It was a really cool sight to see.

My friend and I—my new friend and I—we decided to get a massage right after we came down the mountain and did all that walking. My feet are ready to fall off. So he took me to a massage place and this might be a specialty here in Taiwan, but I feel like it’s just the Asian specialty because there were a lot of different massage places and shops on, as I’m walking around, I’m seeing them, but we decided to sit down, and they give you a foot massage. So they start off rubbing your foot with their forearms, and they’re putting a hot towel on it afterward. 

Then they come back, they do another deep tissue kind of massage. Then they beat your leg a little bit. I would say the whole thing lasted around 25 or so minutes, the whole process of getting the legs or beating the legs and putting the towel on and the weight process and the difference, the different procedures that they did.

When I came out of there, my legs felt wonderful. Did they feel like I had never walked that mountain? No, I still felt the results a little bit, but they were so much better than when I had walked in. Another different thing to do in Taiwan, another thing to do when you’re in Taipei, you’re getting a nice foot massage. After the foot massage, I went out and got a little night snack from the night market. And now I’m just laying here, sitting, recounting my day, but I really had to write this down to get the majority of it out there because I want to remember these kinds of days, getting to explore and getting to be a part of the city with somebody. Thank you, my new Taiwanese friend.

-Tall Black Nomad