Weekend Update

Well... the weather kept me close to home this weekend, but I did manage to get a short ride with some hot climbing done. Dom and I did a little ride over Dadu Shan between Taichung and the coast. It was nice to try out my climbing legs to better evaluate how I am coming back from all that down time. 


The goal was to push heavier gears to about 70rpm on the climbs


The speed was there, but the recovery times were not. I guess I still need some engine work. 


Good times. 


Here is the route for a short jump over the hill with limited time. 


Links:

• Pedaling Madly Backwards has a nice article about Taiwan's child bike seat nonsense.
• I am also happy to see Bikemaps has reverted back from using a map in Hanyu Pinyin for Taiwan. Whatever your feeling on Romanization systems, the fact of the matter is that on the road, a visitor will need to know the local spellings. 
• Don't Miss OzSoapbox as he continues to take the piss out of Taipei's bike lanes. 

.................................................


In other cycling news, the big one-day races are over, with my favorites in the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. The Ardenne series also wrapped up without the heavy favorites faring terribly well. I get the feeling Radioshack, BMC and a few others are holding back before the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France. 


I did enjoy seeing Nibali make a great effort to only place second in last night's Liege-Bastogne-Liege. He showed a lot of the courage that made him a standout in the 2010 Giro. 


It is a shame that so much racing is reserved for the final few kilometers of these races.  

Recovering on the Cobbles? Rehab Ride #3

Instead of hammering my legs into brutal submission on a 258km hell ride, I was merely satisfied with a slow tour around Taichung's Dadu Mountain to take a took at some of the area's listed bike routes.

I made my way down Wu Chuan West Rd. for a slow rolling warm-up, and turned down Anhe Rd. before the road could really begin climbing up to the Taichung Industrial Park. At Taichung Harbor Rd. I took a left until the Route 125 to Daya.

I was happy to be on the bike and two wheels under my ass felt fantastic after two weeks off. I deliberately kept the pace slow, but still managed to pass a few guys on mountain bikes.

It was at Daya on Chung Ching (Zhong qing) Rd. that I hit my first bike path, which consisted of little more than bicycle markings and roughened up concrete on the sidewalk. Some shops along the way had brought their wares out onto the path as well. I quickly retreated to the safety of the street. This road is also known as the Highway 10.

I had a wonderful descent into Ching Shui, a little town on the coastal plain, where the market was really too full of people to safely ride and take pictures. I didn't know how much longer I had on my leg, so I got moving south on Chung Shan (Zhong Shan) Rd. This makes for a nice alternative to the busy Highway 1 and it was on this stretch I was able to ride at my normal pace. After massaging my injured leg for so long, I could feel how much tighter my uninjured leg had become. Note to self: Achieve Balance.

Chung Shan (Zhong Shan) Rd. hooks back up with the Highway 1 in Long Jing near the base of Dadu Shan, where I met up with another bike path. Finally, I could hit the cobbles.

It was a raised pedestrian and bicycle path, which often means trouble, as we see above with a woman preparing to dry her garlic on the path. The rough brick is less than ideal for biking, but not too rough.

I stopped for a stretch and took in Changhua's bicycle infrastructure.

There are several spurs that break off from the main trail and go on up to the Zhushan-Nanliao Old Road, in which cyclists can chug up the hill to a dead end, where they can walk along an old rail line. Unfortunately, I didn't see any place to lock a bike. I returned to the Highway 1 and plugged along through Dadu. It was not long after this that my leg started to get sore. I was sure not to torque on it too hard and gingerly made my way home.

Unlike earlier rehabilitation rides, I was able to walk up the stairs to my house without any pain. A few minutes of stretching and 20 min. of ice, and I felt great.

Better, but not perfect.

The whole ride was about 40 miles, which I completed in a humbling 4 hours. Sometimes it takes a little discipline to hold back when you need to. I will keep working on this.

Bike route 897709 - powered by Bikemap

Houli Loop!/后里, 臺中縣

"...but plans can fall through as so often they do

and time is against me now..."--The Smiths

Pho

At this time of year even the best laid plans often go awry. The weather is simply too unpredictable. The Central Weather had been calling for thunderstorms all week and they never materialized, so we took a chance and planned a century ride up into Miaoli to the Ming de Reservoir. At 5:00am, I could hear cars sloshing through the rain and by 6:00am we had called off the ride, so I went back to bed. The next thing I knew, my phone was ringing and Michael was on the line with the news that the rain had stopped and we could get a ride in. We wouldn't have time to pick off the century, but we put together some hastily made plans to salvage a ride and in just over an hour he was downstairs. His finger itching to try out his new toy; a Fuji supercalifragalisticexpialadocious camera. I took him over Dadu shan along the road I use for my night loop. We then rolled into Ching Shui in time for a little lunch.

That Little Vietnamese Place

There is a great little Vietnamese place on one of the side roads off the Highway 1. The food is fresh and always prepared while you wait. We foreigners gotta stick together, you know!

Coffee of the World Unite and Takeover!

The best surprise happened after we finished eating. Just as we hit the road, the rain picked up and we didn't feel like getting rained on and hoped to wait a few more minutes over coffee somewhere to see if the drizzle would abate. No luck. Not even the 7-11 had their brand of ashtray-tasting brew. We continued on and then we found it. There, just outside of Ching Shui, on that decaying old ribbon of concrete known as the Highway 1, right by the auto repair shop, betel nut stand and rebar lot... in a nondescript concrete box, we saw a sign for coffee. We couldn't really tell if they actually sold coffee or not from the looks of it. but we gave it a shot. As we walked up to the door, a look of "whatthehellaretheydoinghere" crossed the faces of the family inside. We noticed they had all the trappings to make coffee and went to order.

A Coffee Maestro

Once it was established that they could in fact sell coffee and that we could speak Chinese, we sat at the only table in the living room/cafe and ordered. The proprietor set to work like some type of coffee artisan in choosing the proper beans (Yemen) and working through a process of brewing, steeping and pouring to make the perfect cup of coffee. It took a long time to make, but I have to say that outside of Cafe Vivace in Seattle, this was one of the finest cups of coffee I have ever had. It was not too acidic, not like Starbucks, and just hit all the right spots. Perfectly carmelized! Apparently, the couple who owned the place lost their jobs a few years back and had nothing to do to maintain their house in Ching Shui, so they used their savings to buy a small coffee roaster and set to work learning how to roast and make coffee. They sell their beans and other products to other cafes and restaurants in central Taiwan. The place is called Lailin Coffee/來林咖啡, if you ever have the chance to stop in.

Michael Rides A Dike

After we reluctantly left Lailin Coffee, we headed up toward Dajia. Just over the bridge across the Dajia River we took Zhong Shan Rd. up the river valley toward Houli.

A Real Dike

This is a very pretty ride, away from most vehicular traffic, and through quiet farms and fields. Navigating the labyrinthine roads takes practice and intuition, but it a also very rewarding. At one point the road was closed to traffic, but this being Taiwan and not over regulated, we just rolled our bikes up onto the dike and kept right on going.

Little Shack On The Alluvial Plain

After climbing out of the river valley up a short, but really steep hill, we were up on the plateau in the area that had formerly been known as Varizan, or 麻里蘭社, a Pazih village which was once one of several satellites of the greater Anli village. When some of the land was parsed off to some Han farming families in the 18th century, many of the Pazih settled in the area to take advantage of the water networks and even negotiated with Han farmers for better resource allocation. The close proximity to the hills and to the river made the location an ideal spot.

Father Son Time (Another kid on a proper road bike)

We got back on the Highway 13 in Houli and checked out a very interesting Reynolds 853 steel frame that is a fantastic example of the acrobatics between OEM, subcontractor, marketing team and distribution network. The question arose how a Giant franchise could be selling a rebadged non-Giant bike that used the advertising literature of the original brand while blatantly being an obvious rebadge. Still... a light steel frame with full SRAM Force for a decent price. Not bad.

I left Michael in Tanzi and hammered my way the rest of the 13km home. I was feeling great, so I tried to keep my speed up between 40 and 50kph the rest of the way home. That felt great.

So no great century ride today, but any day on the bike is a good day.

Ching Shui

A Pillar of Empire

Saturday was supposed to be a busy riding day. I woke up at 6:00am to join a ride with some local triathletes and then I was going to split off after a couple hours to do hills with Michael T. The sound of thunder and rain made the idea of a hard, fast ride at early o' clock in the morning sound un-fun, so I went back to bed with the hope that the rain would piss itself out by mid morning and I could still catch the afternoon session.

I was paranoid I'd be late and rode way too fast for a warm-up from Taichung to Tanzi. I met Michael and off we went to the mountains. Just before starting the climb, the clouds opened up and we retreated to Feng Yuan City for coffee.

When the rain stopped we headed out to the coastal town of Ching Shui instead. We took the Highway 10 out of northern Taichung County down a fast and fun descent into Ching Shui and took it from there.

Ching Shui Elementary

The Ching Shui area was formerly the home to the Papora speaking Austronesian cultural-linguistic group of indigenes. Prehistoric evidence of the Pre and Proto-Papora has been found in several parts of Taichung County. There are archaeological sites around Dadu Shan and one adjacent to the Tiger City mall. Taichung Mayor, Jason Hu, a Han-chauvinist at heart, once declared that he would move to continue development at the Tiger City site as the find was "not as significant as terra cotta warriors". Much of the site had been destroyed before scholars could file an injunction.

The Papora cultures were documented in Dutch records and Ching Shui is routinely mentioned in Dutch sources as, "Gommach", which is believed to have originally been located near Ching Shui Elementary School. Neighboring Shalu was another major village called "Salach". Each village was surrounded by several satellite villages that made for more balanced trade and resource management in the era before the Dutch organized the deer trade, which helped trigger a collapse of the traditional political economy on the indigenous Taiwan plain. Later effects of this policy would culminate in pressure for indigenes to acculturate into mainstream Taiwanese/market culture.

During the Cheng siege of Fort Zeelandia, in 1661, a Cheng garrison was stationed near Ching Shui. Soldiers from Cheng's forces started interfering in village life and molesting the local women, thus antagonizing the Papora villages, this and other forms of social tension led to several large revolts. In 1670, another revolt in the area led to the destruction of one satellite village and the wholesale slaughter of its inhabitants.

Later, in 1722, during the Qing administration over Taiwan's western frontier, Papora revolt leads Cheng commander Luo Guo Hsuan to destroy the village of Sha lu. In response, Governor Man pao ordered a boundary line constructed running North to South delineating the non-tax paying aborigines from the Han and Aborigines loyal to the Qing. The boundary of trenches and hills was meant to prohibit settlers from occupying land beyond the markers that may result in any more destabilizing Aboriginal violence.

Corridors of Imagined Communities

During the initial phases of Japanese colonial administration on Taiwan, Ching shui was one of the earliest towns in central Taiwan to be integrated into the greater imperial economy. Ching Shui is a fantastic example of the early Japanese infrastructure project as the town became a hub for moving produce and goods along the coast. Ching Shui also became one of the earliest manufacturing hubs in central Taiwan. Local weavers were recruited to produce hats and textiles in Ching Shui's industrial district. At one point Ching Shui was the largest producer of the popular straw hats the Japanese were fond of in the early 20th century. The industrial infrastructure laid by the straw hat producers provided fertile ground for other industries seeking skilled weavers; namely the sporting goods industry. Straw hats led to footwear, tennis racquets and later, in cooperation with the machine tool training many Taiwanese received during and after WWII... bicycles.

On our ride, Michael and I stopped at Ching Shui Elementary School on Guang hua and Zheng Nan roads, which was one of the earliest elementary schools in central Taiwan. It was founded in 1907, primarily for the children of Japanese industrialists, but later the children of the Taiwanese gentry were allowed to attend. This had a major impact on society asTaiwanese were, for the first time, able to be educated with the mission in mind, to help them read about and imagine their community.

Pedaling Pilgrims

We ran into the Hsin Kang to Dajia cycling event. The even is a 110km ride to follow the route the Dajia Mazu will take on her annual pilgrimage from her home in the Cheng Lang Temple in Dajia. The Mazu festival marks the traditional arrival of Spring. Although Mazu pilgrimage in nothing new to Taiwan, I have heard... ahem!... the Dajia event has become mainly a tourism juggernaut run by organized crime and local politicians to fulfill their political fortunes and fortify their local fiefdoms of gravel, construction, bid rigging, sex, drugs, weapons and betel nut. I have also been told that some of the revenue generated from these events, eventually makes its way into the coffers of a particular political party with roots in China... ahem!

Making for Mazu

We made our way out of Ching Shui back along the villages along the base of Dadu Shan. I noticed that the villages had a strange layout, like a soldier village, and Michael suggested they were more recent plains Aborigine villages. The names suggested as much. Much of the Taiwan plain is dotted with this type of village and EVERY major town was once a center of indigenous life. The villages we passed through on our way up the hill are in an area known as Fan Cheng, or "Barbarian City". These areas were probably considered indigenous until the Japanese colonial period when the ethnic markers that once delineated Aborigine from Han were eliminated only by official caveat.

We rode back to Tanzi and I sped the 8 miles home at speeds between 23(37kph) and 29mph (46kph). Another great little ride complete. For the day I only logged 50 miles (80km), but it was a really nice ride.