Daan Park; Shandao Temple

And so it ends. Mid-afternoon today, I’ll head to the airport to get my flight back to Toronto, my hometown.

I took it easy this morning and the first part of the afternoon in Taipei, Taiwan. I visited only Daan Park and Shandao Temple.

As this is the last post of this trip, at the end of it, you’ll find summaries of my time in Taipei and Taiwan, along with the trip as a whole.

Daan Park

My guidebook labels this park as “Da’an Forest Park”

The Taipei metro system has a station at the park. The metro includes English on its system maps and the onboard electronic signs announcing the current and then next stops. They named the station “Daan Park, i.e., sans the apostrophe and the “Forest.”

The Taipei tourism website also calls it Daan Park.

Google Maps is inconsistent. It labels the park as “Daan Park,” a garden within the park as “Daan Forest Park Garden,” and a pond in the park as “Da’an Park Ecological Pond.”

English on the signs and maps in the park call it “Daan Park.” That is, except for one map that showed a “Dean Park” metro station. When I first saw it, I didn’t immediately think this was the same as the Daan Park metro station.

I thought, “I didn’t know the park had two stations.” After carefully scouring the map and not seeing another metro station, I realized it must be a typo of Daan Park Station.

After exploring, I found a similar map with two differences. The “you are here” tag was in a different spot, and someone had glued an “a” over the “e” in “Dean Park.” The typo is confirmed.

Because it seems to be the local favourite, I’m going to go with “Daan Park.” Besides, I entered most of this section of this post on my iPhone. “Typing” on my iPhone is much more cumbersome than on my computer, so shorter is better. Plus, apostrophes require an extra two taps on my phone, one to get to the virtual keyboard screen with the apostrophe and another to get back to the alphabet screen. So the sans apostrophe version appeals to me.

(As I entered the preceding two sentences, it occurred to me that some whippersnapper will probably come along and say, “You doddering old fool. You could have typed the apostrophe this way and saved yourself a couple of screen taps.”)

Now that I’ve wasted a ridiculous amount of time entering the above trite naming notes, I think it’s time to move on and talk about Daan Park. Either that or take a nap.

I’ll be heading home soon enough. I can take a nap on the plane and, eventually, back at my place. So, let’s talk about Daan Park.

My guidebook refers to it as Taipei’s Central Park. On reading that, I took it to mean that it’s Taipei’s version of New York’s Central Park. I don’t think that’s what it meant.

Like Central Park, Daan Park is in the midst of the city, but despite being a large park, it’s significantly smaller than Central Park and it has fewer diverse features than Central Park.

But it is a beautiful park. And, even on a Monday morning such as, say, today, it’s well used.

As you might have guessed from my guidebook having put “Forest” in the name, it has a lot of trees. Those trees are of a variety of species. I recognized banyans, or a close variety thereof, and bamboo.

Yes, yes. I know. Bamboo is a grass and not a tree. But bamboo has tall trunks and leaves on its top. So, no matter what botanists may say, they’re trees to me. Botanists are experts. In the current MAGA era, experts are elitists and, as such, should be scorned and ignored.

It’s like tomatoes. I know that they are fruits, but from a culinary perspective, I treat them as vegetables, so they’re vegetables to me no matter what the elite experts say.

Google suggesting a garden likely led you to believe there are flowers.

In addition, as you no doubt also surmised from Google Maps showing an ecological pond in the park, Daan Park does indeed have a pond. It is a fair-sized, irregularly-shaped pond with vegetation growing on its banks. Some fish were swimming about. But they were dark-coloured fish swimming against a shallow, similarly coloured pond bottom. I took a picture, but I don’t know if the lack of contrast will satisfy the reader I took it for.

You also likely conjectured that, because it’s an urban park it has lots of benches. Urban parks tend to attract some old people, among others, and old people appreciate places to sit. Or, at least, one of them does.

There are probably many other things that you speculated about Daan Park, but I don’t want to use up all of the synonyms and near-synonyms of “postulate” in a single post. So I’ll leave you to make your assumptions with no further comment from me other than to say that all of the above, including the ones I haven’t already implicitly or explicitly confirmed, would be accurate deductions. (See, I don’t always try to mislead you.)

What you might not have inferred is that Daan Park also has an amphitheatre, a statue, interesting birds, flowering bushes and trees, some basketball hoops, and a playground. One of those flowering bushes was particularly intriguing. Its flowers were red and looked more like loose puffballs than traditional flowers.

Oh, and the park also has several paths. But you likely reckoned that.

I spent more than two hours in Daan Park, strolling its paths, looking at the beauty of its pond, and sitting on its benches. Specifically, the old people sitting on benches thing. Not all of its benches, mind you. Just a select few. Daan Park has far, far, far too many benches to sample them all and still make my flight.

Shandao Temple

Considering how significant a leitmotif temples have been on this Asian trip, I thought it fitting that I end the trip at a temple. My guidebook mentioned Shandao Temple. Looking at Google Maps, I saw that it was about halfway between Daan Park and my hotel, so I thought it might make for a good finale.

(In truth, after visiting the temple, I sat for a spell in a smallish park not far from my hotel. That is to say, it’s smallish relative to Daan Park, but not at all smallish compared to, say, a parkette or a breadbox.

It was a pleasant park, but I didn’t think it bore reporting on after Daan Park. Besides, alluding to it here would ruin the temple finale. So, please, forget I mentioned it.)

I wish I had chosen a more beautiful or interesting temple to end on. Shandao Temple was not what I was expecting.

On reflection, the short description my guidebook provided was accurate. Despite that, I was expecting something different.

It said, “This Japanese-era temple is an imposing, hushed edifice in dark-pink and brown marble, and is in sharp contrast to the flashy bling of most of Taiwan’s other temples. It is looked after by resident nuns.”

The edifice looks like a modern office building of about a half-dozen storeys. The book’s description of the marble paints an accurate picture of it.

From the street, apart from a ceremonial gate beside the street, there are only a couple of items that suggest it’s a temple. The word “temple” in the adjacent “Shandao Temple” metro station is one of them. But that gate isn’t even in front of the temple. It’s in front of a building immediately beside it.

Inside the temple, there was one, large room with minimal ornamentation. Three gold-coloured Buddhas sat in a row up front and there was a simple circular decoration in the centre of the ceiling.

The room was filled with rows of long tables. Green plastic chairs sat behind the tables. On the tables, there were what looked like book stands for reading, except that the stands held no books and were covered with red cloth. Each cloth was decorated with gold Chinese characters and a pattern that included several swastikas.

Scene! And that’s a wrap.

Taipei Summary

What a ride this has been. Taipei was my last stop on this Asian trip. It’s an interesting and enjoyable city. It has engrossing and beautiful temples, pleasant parks, and engaging museums. And there was the difficult to get to, but beautiful Maokong and the gondola to it.

I spend five nights, translating into four full days here before heading off to Tainan. I then returned for one night before catching my flight back home. I had half days in Taipei on either side of that night.

That was probably roughly the right amount of time in Taipei for my tastes. I saw most of the sights that my guidebook or walking tour app recommended as must-sees and many of the also-sees.

There were a couple of day- or half-day trips I could have gone on from a Taipei base and there were those unseen also-see sights that I could have seen. So, if I were able to go back in time and plan this trip again, but still knowing what I know now, I’d prefer a day or two more in Taipei to a day or two fewer.

In general, yes, I’m glad I came here.

Taiwan Summary

I barely scratched the surface of Taiwan. The guidebook I used to plan this trip and inform me about the sights to see while I’m here recommends several destinations in Taiwan.

I chose Taipei as one to visit because it was the easiest to get to (a nonstop flight) from my previous destination of this trip (Chiang Mai, Thailand) and it offers a nonstop flight back home to Toronto.

So Taipei was an obvious stop.

I chose Tainan because, after scrolling through the pages of my e-guidebook, I thought Tainan had the most to offer. That and the guidebook said that if I told people elsewhere in Taiwan that I was going to Tainan they’d be envious. It likely doesn’t reflect well on me, but I not-so-secretly enjoy having people be envious of me.

However, the other cities and towns the guidebook mentions in Taiwan also appeared to be worth a visit. Some of them are difficult, but I don’t think impossible, to get to without a car.

Then again, people drive on the proper and right side of the road in Taiwan. So I could have rented a car and would have only been horribly nervous about driving here rather than fatally nervous.

The point is, I probably could have planned a whole trip in Taiwan that would have been long enough such that I would have felt that I adequately amortized the investment in time to get here, while still feeling that the whole trip was fulfilling.

That being said, there were those couple of days when I heard military jets roaring overhead as China sabre-rattled and Taiwan responded. As I suggested in these pages at the time, that sort of thing is highly angst-inducing for me. Can’t the People’s Republic of China (China) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) just learn to get along? Is that too much to ask?

Trip Summary

And now there is one. When I book a trip, I flag all emails I get that include flight or train tickets or hotel confirmations. In the rare cases when I have bookings for multiple trips active simultaneously, I use a different colour flag for each trip. This Asian trip is red.

When I check out of a hotel or when the conveyances on a transportation ticket are fully in the past, I unflag the email.

I finished this post at the Taipei airport. Now there is only one lonely red-flagged email left, the one that includes the ticket for my outbound and return flights to and from Asia—Toronto to Singapore and, shortly, Taipei to Toronto. 

I don’t usually do trip summaries in this journal because for the vast majority of my trips since I started including summaries on the last posts from each location, I’ve almost always visited only a single country on each trip. So the country summary has also been a trip summary. 

But this trip included three countries, Singapore, Thailand (Bangkok and Chiang Mai), and Taiwan* (Taipei and Tainan).

(*I hope no one from the mainland China government sees this until I clear their and Taiwan’s airspace. Otherwise, they might launch missiles against me for referring to Taiwan as a country and for referring to Chinese and Taiwanese airspaces as being separate.)

There were more things I could have seen and done in Singapore, so I would have appreciated a bit more time there. But because Singapore is a city-state, there’s nowhere else I could have gone and still legitimately put it under a Singapore country index listing here.

Thailand is beautiful, interesting and more than enough of a culture shock for someone with no previous experience with the country, and barely more Asian experience elsewhere, for it to be fascinating. But Bangkok and Chiang Mai comprise a small fraction of what there is to see in the country. I might have been able to take a full, lengthy trip to Thailand alone.

I said “might” in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph not because I don’t think there’s enough to see there, but because of my angst. There are large segments of Thailand that have a malaria risk. If I’d visited them, worry would likely have consumed me.

Chiang Mai province has a malaria risk, except for in the city itself. I didn’t leave the city when I was there. Even so, I did experience some angst over malaria in Chiang Mai. It wasn’t all-consuming, but it was there in the background. However, there are enough areas in Thailand without a malaria risk for me to likely be able to piece together a good trip.

I won’t say more about the Taiwan portion of my trip because you can go back to the previous section of this post.

To conclude, in terms of wanting to see more, this trip was way too short. However, in terms of wanting to get back to spending some slow-paced time in my home and comfort zone, it was about the right time or maybe a day or two too long.

But, I’ll likely soon be recharged and ready for another trip. Where? I honestly don’t know.