Travel. Asian Tiger lights up the sky with a thousand lanterns

The Chinese are big on lanterns; and lantern festivals are common wherever there are Chinese. Tony, our helpful guide, had arranged for us to be seated in the VIP lounge for the inauguration of the Taiwan Lantern Festival, being held in Taichung city, Taiwan. Celebrated on the 15th day of the first lunar month, the fest is a closure of sorts to the spectacular Chinese New Year festivities.

The highlight of this year was built around thousands of lanterns of every shape and hue, the centrepiece being a 24-metre tall goat (this being the Year of the Goat in the Chinese lunar new year). Since Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou was to open the fest, we had to be seated early. In casual clothes, some of us felt under-dressed, for most people were wearing a suit and tie. Security was remarkably unobtrusive; and even when President Ma strode in, a handful of guards took position, and then returned to their seats once he was on stage; no guns in sight. Along with the president, there was the prime minister and Taichung’s mayor, the host. All made speeches, mercifully short. Ma welcomed visitors in fluent, American-accented English, before switching to Chinese. There followed a bunch of performances, a wonderful drums show, and then the festival was kicked off with the giant goat lit up in gold, which quickly changed into a riot of colours. A short, spectacular show of fireworks lit up the sky, and the opening was over.

We got to do our own lantern show in the hills of Pingxi, east of Taipei. Families show off their calligraphic skills on the lanterns, before lighting up the golden paper at the bottom to fill up the lanterns with hot air before letting go. It’s a beautiful sight as they go up, glowing orange, before they go out of sight. We do ours right in the middle of the railway track; no danger of getting run over. When a train came by, everybody stepped off to let it pass before resuming the festivity.

“We hate Dubai,” says Tony, our tour guide, and throws his head back and laughs when we are back in the capital Taipei city. He’s not lacking in humour, our Tony; he’s certainly no dour Chinaman. As he’s talking, everyone of us in the bus, is craning to get a good look at Taipei 101, Taiwan’s tallest building – and until Dubai’s Burj Khalifa – the world’s tallest. Soaring into the sky, an imposing looking structure in black, it towers over everything else in the charming capital of the Republic of China. It’s the pride of Taiwan, and in Tony’s deprecating joke, you can sense a sense of hurt pride.

Like everywhere else in Taiwan, it’s neat – neat to the point of obsessiveness; the streets are broad, the lanes clearly marked and traffic signs at every junction; the buses are high-tech with messaging both in Mandarin and English; there are 7-Elevens in almost every block, McDonald’s, KFCs, and every major retail brand stores there is a general air of prosperity, and if it were not for the Chinese signage, you could imagine this could be Raleigh, North Carolina or Geneva, Switzerland. It has the look and feel of an advanced economy, and you can understand the meaning of the phrase ‘Taiwan miracle’ of the seventies and eighties which transformed this small nation, not otherwise widely known except for the charismatic Chiang kai-Shek, Kuomintang supremo and leader of the Nationalist forces, who retreated to this small island after losing the plot against Mao’s Communists in 1949. He came with the entire gold reserves of China, which is not just an interesting statistic: it was a useful tool in stabilising the rampant inflation post-war and setting the stage for the subsequent industrialisation and the transition to a high-tech economy. A grateful nation built the monumental Chiang kai-Shek memorial in Taipei to honour his memory, and today it’s a pilgrimage spot for its citizens – and visitors like us too. Many come to see the changing of the guard – on the hour, from 9am to 5 pm every day -- in front of the massive statue of Chiang choreographed with military precision. Once the guards crash to attention and assume the at-ease position, they remain unmoving, complete statues, their eyes not even seeming to blink, till their relief appears exactly an hour later.

The distance from Taipei to the port city of Kaohsiung in the southwest is about 345 km, roughly the distance from Chennai to Bangalore (or Bengaluru now that its name has been vernacularised). We are not driving down; our tour bus has left ahead of us, and we are ushered into the gleaming Taipei rail station by Tony, shepherding his tour group like we are a bunch of kids who might get lost – and it’s easy to know why, because it has so many levels, vast lobbies and abundant food courts.

Liveried in gleaming orange and white, with its futuristic looking engine, the high speed rail (or HSR, as it is better known) does the entire distance in flat 90 minutes – well, 92 mins -- with halts at major stations along the western coast. The stops are timed at exactly one minute, the electric doors close silently, and the train glides out of the station, accelerating so smoothly you don’t even notice it. Looking out the window, the countryside seems to go past quickly, you don’t really get the feeling that you’re going at high speed: but the HSR reaches a top speed of 300 km per hour so that’s not really true. It’s completely wi-fi enabled, free to boot, and by the time you’ve what’s apped and checked your mail you’re in Kaohsiung.

The difference in temperature is quite startling: Kaoshiung is nicely sunny, with blue skies and a gentle breeze; in Taipei almost the entire group was shivering because a cold front had set in with chilly winds. And blame the tour organisers: we were told to expect a pleasant 23 degrees C, and landed up in a grey Taipei with a temp 10 degrees less. At the scenic Sun Moon Lake about a couple of hours away in the centre of Taiwan, with its relaxed hill station look, the night was a bit chill but dawn brought out a gloriously sunny day, yet with a bracing wind. In Taichung, where we headed next for the opening of this year’s lantern festival, in west central Taiwan, it was again on the cold side.

The writer was in Taiwan at the invitation of the Taiwan Tourism Bureau

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