BREAKING! Taiwan Tourism Bureau Infotisement Doesn't Suck.

The Taiwan Tourism Bureau has a paid cycling tourism infotisement in the latest volume of the Smithsonian Magazine.

Over the last two decades, Taiwan has transformed into a cyclist's paradise, opening thousands of kilometers of interwoven bikeways through some of the island's most beautiful landscapes. The extensive new network of routes has earned the country many accolades, including a spot on Lonely Planet's 2012 Best Countries to Visit list and CNN Travel's top "Cycling Routes That'll Take Your Breath Away," and for good reason. By bike, visitors can cruise past hillsides painted with colorful flower farms, marvel at the geology of Taroko Gorge's marble walls, follow old rail lines through retired mining tunnels, cross thrill-inducing suspension bridges and sample sweet pineapple cakes from local farm stands. 

The countless routes provide plenty of opportunities for individual exploration, but here are six of the most spectacular bikeways to fuel the imagination.

My biggest quibbles would be that Sun Moon Lake is not a route for cyclists, but for non-cyclists who want to hop on a bike for the first time in decades and follow the shore. It is an environment that, at least on weekends, is not suitable for regular cyclists. 

The other issues I might have would be inviting cyclists to jump into the streets of the Xinyi District with no knowledge of how Taiwan traffic functions, and the loop through a bunch of prefab buddhas and a brand new temple of concrete and rebar. For me, personally, it does nothing. Someone might be into those things. Bagua Shan can be great, but the Buddha they affixed to the site of the former Japanese Shinto Shrine is a bit of a contrivance. 

The Yuli Bikeway and the interior of the Rift Valley is exquisite. Taroko Gorge is also something a visiting cyclist should hope to see. Though Taroko is best visited early before the hordes of tourists and motor coach trains start up the gorge after 9:00am.

Cycling Links, Notes and a Survey

Taiwan Links:

Mark Caltonhill lists his Five Favorite Routes for TiT. The routes are:

1) Kaohsiung-Lotus Lake and Love River.

2) Sun Moon Lake.

3) Little Kinmen.

4) Taipei to Iilan.

5) Wuling Pass.

I would advise riders who are unfamiliar with these routes to exercise caution as most of them require extensive road riding along with regular traffic. If you are not familiar with your bicycle or with Taiwan's traffic culture, consider these routes very carefully.

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Taiwan Today has a short expose on Hualien leisure bike trails. They may not be ideal for touring the East Coast, but they might make a great way to spend some vacation time if you are in the area.

With the government backing a major investment in tourism infrastructure, Jens Kastner writes a great piece in the Asia Times on China's potential for conducting tourism warfare against Taiwan.

Satin Satin Cesena give some wonderful insights on OEM frames and the value of branding.

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Survey:

Jean from Velo-city wants you to take their survey on Local Cycling Infrastructure. Check the sidebar for the survey tab.

Other Links:

• Some puzzling Amarican attitudes toward cyclists. What's with the hate? It Taiwan you feel so welcome.
• Elly Blue from Grist writes about Bikenomics. A radical way to think about the bicycle.
• Bike Chic. Would Heidi Klum wear it?
• WADA investigates leaked memo on suspected dopers. I was not on the list.
• Scotland: Where men are men and the cyclists run scared.
• Stolen bikes in Lithuania.

First Annual Taiwan Bike Festival Wants A "Do-over"

Taiwan's government has announced on their "International Service Portal" that, essentially, the First Annual Taiwan Bike Festival was such a smashing success... they are going to hold the exact same event again next year and have thus announced plans to hold the second First Annual Taiwan Bike Festival in 2011.

You read that correctly. Next year will be considered the "first" one and the 2010 festival is being called a "trial event" that doesn't really count. Sorry attendees. Luckily next year's event will be held in the month of November to coincide with my twelfth 25th birthday.

Among this year's successes that helped the Sports Affairs Council opt for a do-over was the October scheduling, which put the event at the tail end of typhoon season and resulted in several events being cancelled as several of the world's top cyclists waited in their hotels for conditions to clear.

... and there's more...

Here's the whole thing:

"With so-called LOHAS trends and environmentally-friendly ideals sweeping around the world, bicycling is gaining ground on driving to become one of the hottest forms of exercise in the 21st century. In order to promote cycling, the Executive Yuan’s Sports Affairs Council plans to invest NT$4 billion to pave cycling paths around Taiwan. Cities like Taipei and Kaohsiung have been setting up bike-rental services around MRT stations and popular scenic spots since May, 2009 and are encouraging visitors to take full advantage of bikes for city sightseeing.

To meet the goal of transforming Taiwan into a“cycling island”, the Tourism Bureau held a Taiwan Cycling Festival from Oct. 16 to 24 in Hualien and Taitung. As part of this event,internationally-renowned cycling teams were invited to Taiwan to join the “Taiwan Cup” road race. Other highlights included road races for both professional and amateur bicyclists, plus a triathlon, consisting of cycling, running and swimming, which was open to all participants. Thanks to the successful results of this year’s trial event, the Tourism Bureau plans to designate 2011 as the first official year for the Taiwan Cycling Festival, and organize large-scale related events in the second and third weeks of October, 2011. The goal will be to align the race route with bountiful tourism resources and attractions in Hualien and Taitung, enticing more foreign tourists to Taiwan."

The full article is only two paragraphs, but there is a lot to dig into.

I covered just some of it here. I think the article above really helps illustrate some of my points.

The first thing I would like to draw attention to is the extravagant use of the term LOHAS. The term has become a buzzword in Taiwan's domestic marketing with little action to back it up. LOHAS or Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, encourages the wealthier and more educated classes to be willing to spend more on "green" living.

Taiwan's government is clearly focused on pushing cycling touri$m, or rather, Tourism's ability to generate construction and development profits over real lifestyles of sustainability.

The promise of more concrete for bike paths rings empty when riders are asked drive their bikes out to ride them. The claims that Taiwan is becoming "Bicycle Island" sounds like something from Fantasy Island. With the narrow focus on only tourism, Taiwan's cycling infrastructure is like a new subdivision of big, fancy houses that are not hooked up to a sewer line or power grid. We currently have islands of bike trails that connect to nothing and very little investment pointed toward making those connection that might make those systems valuable to society.

They are always eager to throw NT 4 billion into concrete, but can you get there by bus?

Thinking About Sheng-Shing Station (勝興車站) and the Nature of Touring Taiwan

Bike Routes Around Sheng-Shing

Yesterday, Taiwan's central government kicked off its 2011 tourism campaign in which cycling appears quite prominently as one of Taiwan's 10 major attractions.

The government has narrowed the campaign into three key ideas; 1) "Tour Taiwan 100", an obvious (and shamefully ideological) focus on the 100th anniversary of the Republic of China, which first arrived in Taiwan between 1945 and 1949. 2) Authentic Taiwan, an attempt to distill and locate Taiwan's cultural authenticity through invented symbols and meanings provided by the government. 3) Great Service in Taiwan; a plan to woo Chinese tourists with Taiwan's strange and exotic service culture.

Authentic Taiwan will promote the culture and traditions of Taiwan through four key events, one for each season: Taiwan Lantern Festival (Spring), Taiwan Cuisine Festival (Summer), Taiwan International Cycling Festival (Autumn) and the Taiwan Hot Springs and Fein Cuisine Carnival (Winter). In conjunction with these events, there will also be a number of new initiatives such as ‘Taiwan Tea Adventure’ and ‘Taiwan Night Market Competitions’ designed to promote the other aspects of culture on the island.

It appears the bicycle aspect of this campaign will focus on East Coast tourism and "Aboriginal" entertainment.

This news could not have come at a more fortuitous time for this blogger, who was just about to write a little bit about his trip through Sanyi, and specifically, Sheng Shing Station (勝興車站)with some interesting insights into this tourist attraction and others like it in Taiwan.

Route Marker

Sheng Shing Station is the site of an old Japanese Colonial era train stop along the old North-South route to Kaohsiung, which was completed by 1908.

The area is located in the foothills just above Sanyi, a town that is regarded as a Hakka town predominantly populated the descendants of Hakka speaking immigrants from the foothills of Qing era Fujian, and the descendants of Kaxabu and Taokas speaking indigenous peoples who have lived in and around the Dajia River basin and river valley for thousands of years.

Japanese Era Building?

At first glance it appears the hoards of tourists that descend on Sheng Shing Station each weekend are looking for the things many tourists around the world seek when they travel; a little escape from their hectic lives in the cities. Here they seek some type of refuge in a little idyllic rail road town full of shops pedaling "traditional" food and handicrafts. These tourists may also hope to enjoy some of the authentic "local Hakka culture", eat authentic "local" food, and see lives that are different than their own.

In Sheng-Shing visitors can walk the old cobbled streets, enjoy the aesthetic beauty of the traditional, antique buildings and really get a feeling of authenticity of what life in this little town must have been like during its heyday almost a century ago.

Romantic Getaway From City Life

At first I was fascinated at how the local people had located their cultural and historic authenticity in the Japanese Colonial period (1895-1945), which had been so reviled by the Chinese Nationalists when they arrived on Taiwan. The Chinese Nationalists spent an enormous amount of energy trying to eradicate any residual evidence of the 50 years the Japanese spent colonizing and transforming Taiwan into a model colony of the Japanese Empire. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hoped to eradicate the Japanese "taint" and replace it with the symbols and meanings of their own Chinese Nationalist colonial project.

The task would have been too great as the social and structural implications of the Japanese colonial project were just too great and too deep to destroy. It would have meant burning Taiwan to ashes. Therefore, several structures like this old station remain and communities have constructed entirely new local identities around these vestiges of life during the Japanese era.

What I found so interesting was that without the Japanese experience, these local communities like Sheng-Shing would look much different or might not exist at all. Moreover, the local residents have made the projection of their Japanese experience their raison d'etre. It is not a Chinese identity or a projection of Qing era Hakka culture. Instead, the locals have chosen to "other" themselves to exist in a different time or mythical past than the tourists. The tourist is allowed to break from achronological time and visit people and places from the "past".

At first this seems astounding that an identity from the Japanese colonial period, which has long been over, could still find salience in modern Taiwan.

Hakka Food

I then stepped back a little and considered that the locals may not necessarily fix their identity in the symbolism of the Japanese era, but instead may be responding to provide the tourists with exactly what the tourists want to see.

They have constructed a facsimile of a Japanese era railroad town with faux cobbles in the streets, imitation wood facades covering more recent concrete-box buildings, and quaint little shops or stalls to sell the things that probably never existed in the time and place being portrayed by the locals.

The locals have created a fabrication to satisfy the exotic fantasies of the visitors, who, themselves, have located and identified Shing-Sheng's authenticity in a particular time, which is the actual object of desire-- not the locals.

Sheng-Shing Station Street

I was then reminded of one of my favorite passages from Michael Taussig who examines the way indigenous/local cultures, which have become the object of desire by the West, appropriate the West's imagery and symbolism, then reflect it back like a type of video feedback:

"To become aware of the West in the eyes and handiwork of its Others, to wonder in fascination with their fascination, is to abandon border logistics and enter into the "second contact" era of the borderland where "us" and "them" lose their polarity and swim in and out of focus. This dissolution reconstellates the play of nature in mythic parts of contactual truths. Stable identity formations auto-destruct into silence, gasps of unaccountable pleasure, or cartwheeling confusion gathered into what I call "mimetic excess" spending itself into a riot of dialectical imagery"--Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity p.246

Although Taussig had a more profound contrast between West and Other, I think the basic thesis can be applied here in the dialectic between the Local and Non-Local.

In the case of Sheng-Shing Station, it is not as simple as the locals engaged in cultural production or the commoditization of identity for consumption by the visitor. Nor is it necessarily a simple case of locals industriously deploying their cultural/historical resources for economic benefit.

The locals are not providing the visitor with the facsimile of what the visitor wants, but is instead reflecting back the reflection.

The locals (or the developers behind them) have produced an image of what the locals imagine the visitor would like to see. This exercise requires the locals to imagine themselves in the eyes of the visitor and project what that image may look like, while the visitor consumes the local's image of what the local thinks the visitor would like to consume. It becomes an endless house of mirrors of unintended parody in the world of mimesis and its alter.

Despite this strange and almost ridiculous contrivance, the result gains a type of authenticity as a living local culture that could not exist without the visitor, the visited and their preconceived imagination of the other reflecting back at themselves.

Many of Taiwanese tourism destinations are built around this relationship and make it interesting to watch, and thus when the government starts pedaling "authentic" local culture, I wonder if this is what they have in mind?

Sources:

1. Taussig. Michael.1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York, NY. Routledge