Today’s Laundry

31 December 2009

Pingtung

Yesterday we drove along the coast, south towards Eluanbi. Narrowing quickly, the coastal plain thins down to a point where the mountainous backbone of Formosa slips into the South China Sea. Eventually the highway and the old, Japanese-built railway run nearly together, the latter ducking in and out of pitted concrete tunnels that I figure were built to protect from high seas, landslides and, perhaps, were intended to camouflage it from the air.

As you head south of Pingtung there are banana plantations and factories. Apart from the mountains to the East, just kilometers away but difficult to spot through the sea haze, the plain is as flat as a pool table.

We didn’t make it to Eluanbi – it’s not far but we stopped and took a nap on the coast just north of Kenting. When we woke it was time to drive back.

This morning we drove to Dongkang, the fishing port. The boats don’t get in until 2 pm so we had to settle for yesterday’s catch. However, since we were buying shellfish, prawns and the like, they were live anyway. Once bivalve, a greenish clam-like being, looked delicious and I’m told they are very good with basil and butter. They stick a stalk-ish appendage out of the shell and then spit at you. I will have my vengeance at our New Year’s Eve dinner tonight.

We reminisced as we drove, this route past cane, rice and corn fields, remembering mutual childhoods when the sugar-cane seller would sell a foot-long piece at a time, to Ting here in Taiwan and to me in Sonora (I still wonder where they grew it, certainly not in that desert!). You would chew the fibrous interior and the taste of that sweet juice is a memory that lingers, always there.

Later, back in the relative chaos of Pingtung (relative because it is nothing compared to the bigger cities), we stopped along the street at a bakery that produces marvelous fresh cheese bread and loaves filled with sultanas and nuts. How these people remain so slim is something that still baffles me. Perhaps it’s the water?

Schools were letting out and I think I was the only gwai-lo on the street so that every one of them wanted to shout ‘Happy New Year’ at me. Chinese teenagers seem so naïve compared to their Western homologues.