Elizabeth – Page 2 – Elizabeth's Travel Site

Yurts and more yurts…

Okay, this is not a joke, though I know it looks like one — it’s the official emergency escape procedure for a yurt. I can’t help but think you must not be the sharpest tool in the box if you need help to figure this out 😂.

But… our hotel last night was a big step up from the yurt camp. Comfortable room, and good dinner, but the highlight was their fabulous gardens. The couple who own the guesthouse do all the work (and all the building) themselves, I will post a few pictures but these are just a sample of the many garden areas onsite.

Today we spent time around Issyk-Kul Lake, the second highest mountain lake in the world after Titicaca. It’s big, about 75% surface area of Lake Ontario. Divers have discovered the remains of several mediaeval settlements on the lake bed; it’s not known how they were flooded, but seems to have been a natural event, not related to damming or human interventions. Based on archeological cemetery excavations, it is thought the Black Death originated here, and was carried eastward to Europe along the Silk Road.

Stopped for a little hike through what our guide called “Fairytale Valley” (local name “Skazka Canyon”) so-named for its strange rock formations. I confess I did only the first few hundred metres, as fine scree covers the paths and I don’t have the best balance in the world, so I lifted a couple of pictures off Geoff’s iPhone after HIS hike to show you. So good to have one’s personal photographer with one at all times!

As you will gather from my many mentions, yurts are an important part of Kyrgyz culture, but fewer and fewer people now build them. We went to a workshop today in Barskoon, where a visionary named Mekenbek started an enterprise in the 90s to teach younger people the traditional yurt-building crafts. He has since travelled the world demonstrating the craft and has won several international awards and competitions for UNESCO-designated traditional crafts. We attended a yurt-raising demo, and even with us slowing them down by “helping”, the yurt went up in less than half an hour. Impressive!

Early days in Kyrgyzstan…

Safely arrived Saturday morning in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and spent a bit of an unstructured strolling day before meeting our tour guide and group at 5:00 pm. We are 14 travellers — 3 Canadians, 4 Americans, and the others from Switzerland, India, Australia, and Germany.

Sunday started with a guided walking tour of Bishkek, a rather low-key city with a lot of blocky Soviet architecture, but also some pretty parks.

Fine example of that Soviet architecture

Park monument to Kurmanjan Datka, the first (and I think only) female ruler of Kyrgyzstan

From Bishkek we set off for our next destination, a yurt camp on Issyk-Kul Lake. En route, we visited the Burana Tower, standing alone in a desolate place. There used to be a city here until Genghis Khan’s army swept through around 1200 AD and destroyed everything except the minaret of the mosque. And this lonely column, about half the height of the original minaret, is all that’s left of that now. Nearby is a field of balbals, gravestone images of dead soldiers. These are not in their original locations, but have been brought from other sites in Kyrgyzstan.

Next stop, a felt-making demo. This traditional craft creates a material that’s important for traditional yurts, which are covered in 7 layers of thick felted wool. To create the big sheets for yurts, the community women work together, with socializing, singing, and dancing. The ladies prepared a small demo sample today, and started by vigorously threshing shorn wool to cut up the fibres. I didn’t try it but some fellow travellers did (causing some wool to fly about!) The cut wool was arranged on a reed mat, with contrasting wool laid on top to make a pattern. They soaked it by sprinkling boiling water over it, rolled and wrapped it tightly, then rolled it along the floor while pressing it with their feet. Upon unrolling, the material was fully felted, and the pattern clearly visible.

Arrived at the yurt camp late afternoon; they divided us by gender to maximize space and my roomies and I spent a comfortable night. The stove is powered by dried sheep-dung cakes, which burn surprisingly well. Luckily we did not have to load the fuel ourselves, as a kind gentleman visited us to light it just in time to stave off the evening chill… 😃

Arrived in Istanbul…

So… we are officially on the first stage of the big trip. Arrived yesterday afternoon in Istanbul, to find our hotel had unexpectedly cancelled our booking — yikes! But they found us another one quickly and, once re-housed, we had time for a neighbourhood walk and an authentic Turkish dinner.

Today we strolled in the old part of the city, and took a bus tour that crossed the Bosphorus a time or two, taking us from Europe to Asia and back — they boast it is the only city tour that covers two continents, and it might well be so. Since our time was short for in-depth sightseeing after that, we decided to tour the Hagia Sophia, a very old mosque that started life as a church in 537 AD.

The old city is pretty, with lots of life in the streets, and street vendors selling chestnuts and corn-on-the-cob from grill carts. Quite a few stray cats as well, but they seem healthy and adequately fed, to my great relief.

Inside the Hagia Sophia, taken from the visitors’ gallery looking down into the prayer area.

A pedestrian square nearby.

As we made our way through this Islamic city, we heard periodic prayer calls. The sound is very haunting, and I learned something interesting today. The prayers are not always at the same specific times of the clock, they depend on the movement of the sun, so — if I understood correctly — they are related to sunrise, the highest point the sun reaches each day, the beginning of sunset, and the moment the sun vanishes. That means prayer-time shifts over the weeks by some minutes, and will be at different relative times in different time zones.

I was excited to see the Pera Palace Hotel today, didn’t get a picture because we passed it fairly quickly on a bus, but that’s where Agatha Christie wrote “Murder on the Orient Express”. She stayed here regularly when she and her husband Max Mallowan were travelling back-and-forth to Syria and Iraq for his archeological expeditions. How cool is that?

As usual, we are working to learn a few phrases in the local language, Turkish in this case, along the lines of hello-thank you-please-goodbye. Geoff of course already knows how to ask for “a beer, please”, but he was asking the waiter JUST THEORETICALLY about how to ask for “another beer, please”, and the waiter misunderstood and quickly brought him another beer. Can you guess what happened to it? Well, I mean, it would’ve been rather impolite to send it back, right?

We are now in the airport, leaving late tonight for Kyrgyzstan, and meeting up with our tour group in Bishkek tomorrow if all goes well. There is a very surprising amenity in the Turkish Airlines Lounge. Look at this…

Hopeful start, excellent backswing…

Anticipating an amazing result…

Uh-oh. Realizes may need a golf lesson!

Tainan

I’ll continue the story about our evening trip to the main train station to scope out tickets and coffee for the next day. Despite a lack of coffee shops, the station was hopping and all stores and services were open. Well, the next morning, we showed up for our 8:00 am train to find everything shuttered, all the stores, the food outlets, the lovely bakeries, everything deserted. And the station was jammed with incoming and outgoing passengers and commuters, so how could this be? We were so puzzled, but went through the barriers to access the platforms, and lo and behold, found a little kiosk there selling packaged buns, other snacks, and coffee, so got modestly fed and watered before the trip after all. That’s when Dorothy and I realized we weren’t in Kansas any more 😉

Taipei to Tainan took 90 minutes by high-speed train, and we travelled about 70% of the length of the island, so that gives an idea of how much is packed into a small country. Happy to report that Tainan was worth the trek. Taiwan was occupied by the Japanese from 1895 to 1945, and a strong influence is still visible. The Hayashi Department Store in Tainan is a beautifully-restored 1932 building, selling local and Japanese goods. It also boasts an elegant café on the top floor where Geoff tried a local specialty called “shaved ice”, that is not at all icy or granular. Rather, it’s like fresh snow, the powdery kind but not quite so powdery as the kind that blows away, scooped onto maraschino cherries, and covered with an intensely-flavoured fruit syrup. I’ve no idea how they make actual snow in a café in warm weather, but there you are.

Don’t eat yellow snow. Unless it’s yummy pineapple shaved ice in Taiwan. Strange but delicious..

Next visit was to Anping Old Fort, originally built as Fort Zeelandia by the Dutch around 1620. In true Dutch fashion, they reclaimed a huge lagoon and a sandbar to create enough terra firma for a big fort and outbuildings. There was no mortar in those days, so the bricks were laid with a paste of oyster shells, syrup, and ground sticky rice which the Hokkein-speaking Taiwanese called “ang-mun-tou”, meaning “red-hair soil”… because the Dutch were gingers.

For some reason, Tainan is a big centre for shrimp chips. They put the dough into the silver hopper you see here, and every 5 seconds or so the gizmo spits out a freshly-blown shrimp chip with a startlingly loud “pop”! Intense competition among the vendors to have you sample and buy THEIRS.

In closing, a somewhat random post — the Taiwan Walk light. I love the guy’s easy stride. Sadly, I wasn’t able to film the next stage because it created a strange sparkle effect on my iPhone, but around the 6-second mark he speeds up and starts running like Usain Bolt. Love it!

And to finish this trip’s blog on a totally random note, here I am displaying my relaxed crabby face, watching a movie with a bear, while the big cat looks somewhat irritated by the photographer.

Back to Taipei

We’re now back in the capital Taipei, and have visited Taipei 101, which is a mega-skyscraper that’s almost but not quite as tall as the CN Tower. That said, it has a faster elevator, which takes just an ear-popping 34 seconds to reach the observation deck on the 89th floor.

Taipei 101 on the left, with the picture above showing the view. A little foggy that day, unfortunately.

Taiwan is earthquake-prone and subject to typhoons, so there were challenges in building something this high here. I tried not to think about any of this until I was back at ground level again, but must confess I felt I was swaying a bit up there, though that could have been my imagination playing tricks. The tower holds a Tuned Mass Damper, which is a 600-ton suspended steel ball in the centre of the structure’s core, up around the 80th floor, that moves to counteract the building-sway effect of earthquakes and typhoons. Thankfully it was not moving when I saw it, but I took a video-of-a-video showing it swinging during Typhoon Soudelor in 2015. I do hope it was filmed by an unmanned camera, and that some poor soul was not up there filming during this scary event.

And during the typhoon!

Visited the Puppet Arts Centre, a fun and funky little museum dedicated to this historic form of entertainment. Lots of puppets from around the world, some videos of what happens behind the scenes, and demos of the ways puppeteers can move multiple parts at the same time. There were mock-ups we could use to try our skill, and believe me it was hard to move just one leg or one arm the right way at one time. Can’t imagine making a puppet dance, scratch its ear, fight with another puppet, and move its jaw, all at the same time.

We found ourselves at one point in a very upscale shopping center, with stores like the Mink Mile in Toronto, and are not exactly sure why the Canadian city that made it into the list of sites with directional pointers was (can you guess?)…

Our guided trip is now over and we are on our own. In planning a day trip to Tainan on the west coast, we went to the main train station last night to buy our tickets for the journey today. We also tried to scope out a place where we could pick up a coffee before boarding the train. This enormous train station has about 20 bakeries and pastry shops, all selling amazing-looking stuff, and all doing a brisk business, but NONE of them sell tea or coffee as well. To a Canadian, that just seems so strange. Finally found one lonely Starbucks, up on the third floor of the station, well away from where people actually board the trains. It’s not a big takeaway coffee culture, that’s for sure. But do check out a sample of the beautiful bakeries:

Taichung…

Starting to make our way back to the north today.

First, a somewhat typical breakfast here — a little different from the bacon-and-eggs or cereal-or-toast standbys at home. I’m enjoying the change but not sure that I could really get used to this.

Enjoyed a trip through the Old Town in Taichung, which also has one of the oldest temples in Taiwan.

Above is a house in the old town, with a typical gate entrance to its front garden, and on the right is an alleyway street. Very charming, very quiet.

I know this next photo is not artistically attractive, but it’s the best I could do from my vantage point. It is not the Russian embassy, despite what you might think — it’s a condominium in Taichung!

Next, Rainbow Village, also in Taichung. After Chiang Kai-Shek lost the war and had to leave mainland China in 1949, small villages were constructed for army veterans who came with him to Taiwan. Over time, many houses became rundown and were slated for redevelopment. But in an attempt to save his little compound, even as his neighbours moved away one by one, a certain Mr. Huang began painting inside his house, then outside his house, then just kept going. Eventually, local university students discovered Huang’s work and successfully campaigned to save this particular village. Something of a Maud Lewis vibe happening here!

And that’s it for now, friends!

Tourism, Temples, and Tea

We spent a lot of time around Sun Moon Lake today. First in the town of Ita Thao, which reminded me of Banff, with that same kind of touristy charm and a mountain backdrop — plus the lake. We saw floating fishermen’s houses, which are small, and built on rafts with a crane at one end. They don’t fish during the day, but at night they spread a net under the water, shine a spotlight down into the water from the top of the crane to attract fish, then use the crane to lift up the full net. Doesn’t seem entirely fair, somehow, does it? 🤔

<== Of course we had to go for a ride in a swan boat. Once Geoff got past the idea of ramming the Aussies boat (there is a bit of rivalry within certain segments of our little tour group), we enjoyed a leisurely sail at an absolute snail’s pace.

Captain Ahab, looking for the white whale…

Wen Wu Buddhist temple was next on the list. Beautiful building, although Geoff got his fortune told there, and got some disconcerting news. Oh, well….

Visited a tea shop attached to a farm. As this is not the time of year to see planting, harvesting, or processing, they got us making our own tea bags instead. Our tour guide asked if I had ever worked in a tea factory because, for some odd reason, I showed a surprising talent for this work, and ended up assembling and filling everyone’s gift boxes, having finished up all my own tasks too quickly. Who knew!?!?!? But, tea-blending…? Phooey! Just wish my super-power was golf, or skating.

Onions! Hot Springs! Indigo! Opera!

It’s been a bit of a whirl. Taiwan’s a volcanic country, and last night we stayed in Yilan, a hot springs area. The hotel pool is a natural 37 degrees C., and the in-room showers are also fed directly from the hot springs, no further heating required.

We visited an onion farm. Tasty scallion pancakes are ubiquitous in Taiwan; some are thin like crêpes, and often envelop a cooked hard-fried egg, but others are more solid and scallion-y, and yesterday we had the chance to harvest the main ingredient and make one of those. All pancakes are equal, but some pancakes are more equal than others. No names mentioned. Well, first names only.

From L to R: Elizabeth’s pancake, Geoff’s pancake

We spent part of this afternoon at The National Centre for Traditional Arts, a sprawling complex with a visitor centre, artisan demos, shops selling local products, and a theatre. We attended a performance: a lively combination of singing, dance, magic tricks, and acrobatics. Also bought a souvenir teapot, painted with a dragon to celebrate my Chinese zodiac birth year. Geoff is a 🐇, not nearly as impressive, in my opinion.

Indigo dyeing is a local traditional craft we were excited to try, hoping to discover hidden artistic potential… although to be honest, it still remains well-hidden 🤔. But we WERE pleased with the results — two reversible water-bottle holders. And it takes some pressure off, as I think we now know what we’re giving each other for Christmas.

Finished the day — in the rain, sadly — visiting Jiufen, a mountain village. Only the town residents can obtain a motor permit, so it was a very very VERY long walk up what felt like thousands of stone steps. A few general pics: