Sicao and its Green Tunnel

As was more than once the case in Tainan, and in my life in general, I was a bit confused this morning. I took a short boat ride through a green tunnel. My guidebook said it’s part of Taijang National Park.

When I searched for “green tunnel” on my mapping apps, they both found it, but said it was the “Sicao Green Tunnel.” A web search for “Tainan green tunnel” also found the same thing, Sicao Green Tunnel. Seeing the descriptions online, I knew that it was indeed what I was looking for.

The experience of going through the green tunnel sounded interesting. I saw some good, but also some mediocre reviews online. It’s a half-hour taxi or Uber ride out, but I figured that if it’s in a National Park I’d have the bonus of being able to also wander through nature while I’m there. So I got an Uber and off I went. It wasn’t quite what I expected.

When I got to the destination, there was the ticket booth for the green tunnel, a public square, and, on one side of the square, a large, colourful temple.

Apart from that, there were a few nondescript buildings and a scraggly little park there.

Here’s where it gets confusing. I don’t know if I was in Taijang National Park as my guidebook said I was. A large map mounted on posts provided both English and Chinese labels.

It said I was in Sicao. The scraggly park and most of the structures on the map were labelled as Sicao something. Ironically, the green tunnel that my mapping apps and the websites I found insisted on calling Sicao Green Tunnel, the map labelled as just “Mangrove Green Tunnel.”

On the map, there was an area labelled Taijang National Park off to the right, but there was a dotted line between it and everything labelled Sicao. So, is Sicao something within Taijang National Park, or was I not in Taijang National Park at all? I’m confused.

I’ve been to national parks with attractions, settlements, and even towns within their boundaries, such as Banff and Jasper in Alberta, Canada and Plitvice in Croatia. So Sicao may be to Taijang National Park as those towns are to those parks. I don’t know.

Sicao Green Tunnel

What, you might ask, is the Sicao Green Tunnel? You probably guessed from the fact that the map called it “Mangrove Green Tunnel” that it is a tunnel through or created by mangrove trees. “Mangrove trees” is not to be confused with a grove of man trees, which, as far as I know, is completely meaningless.

What you might not have guessed is that going through the green tunnel involves a 30-minute boat ride. You might also not have guessed that it involves a helicopter ride. Or that you have to walk through only while standing on your hands. There are all sorts of possibilities that you might not have guessed, but the boat ride is correct and the other possibilities I mentioned, and an infinite number of other options, are not true.

The boat is essentially a flat-floored barge that can accommodate about fifty people. Seating is on lower stools than a man my age would prefer. Or, that is, they were lower than I would have preferred until I went through the green tunnel. The stools had the appearance of upturned, unattached, lime-green rectangular buckets with rounded corners.

Tainjang used to be an inland sea, but it silted up during the 18th century. There are some channels through it, but I think they may be manmade. The green tunnel boat ride goes through one of those channels, turns around when it reaches a dam, and then goes back to the starting dock.

The crowns of mangroves growing on the bank reach out over the channel and, for a short way, create a canopy over it, hence the tunnel effect. It’s very pretty, but, to be honest, on the wrong side of the border of sensational.

Oh, about why I came to be pleased with the stools being low despite me having old-man knees, making it difficult to get up from low seats. At some points, even I, despite sitting on a low stool and being of less than normal height, had to duck to avoid being whacked on the head by a low-flying mangrove branch. Being whacked on the head by a mangrove branch is way down on my bucket-list items and there are other things I want to accomplish in life before that. It’s only number 7,239,842 on my list. On the other hand, it was right there, so maybe I should have taken advantage of the opportunity, but I didn’t.

Today is Saturday. I intentionally saved the green tunnel for a weekend because my guidebook told me that the boats leave only when they fill up and I could be waiting for a long time if I go on a weekday. As it happened, there was almost a boatload when I arrived at the waiting area, with more people coming. So I didn’t have to wait much longer than a minute.

They ran multiple boats on the channel and seemed to have enough customers that they were sending boats out as soon as they could unload one boatload and then load on another.

I read in English somewhere, I think it might have been TripAdvisor, but I’m not sure, that there is a commentary on the boat that talks about the mangrove biome and about what we were seeing along the way.

There was indeed a live, running commentary. The guide spoke pretty well nonstop for the 30 minutes. She had a green laser pointer to direct our attention to particular spots. Sometimes she highlighted certain trees and branches. Another time she directed our attention to some wildlife that just happened to be there.

I didn’t get much—or, to be honest, anything—out of the commentary. She spoke exclusively in Chinese.

The fact that it’s busy on weekends, but, according to my guidebook, not on weekdays, leads me to believe that the green tunnel is popular with locals, but less so with tourists. Adding evidence in support of this theory, I didn’t look carefully, but I think mine was the only clearly caucasian face on the boat I was on. I didn’t notice that when I first got on, but I did well into the jaunt. After becoming aware of it I glanced at one of the other boats we passed. I didn’t look carefully, but I only saw two faces that looked vaguely caucasian.

This might explain why they don’t bother with English on the boats.

After a while, I thought I heard the guide repeating the same words multiple times. They usually came when the boat was about to pass under low branches. I imagine she was saying, in Chinese, something like, “Mind your head.” She might also have said something such as, “That funny foreigner doesn’t understand a word I’m saying, It’ll be fun to watch him get knocked out by that branch.”

She likely didn’t say that last part. I was at the very back of the boat. She was a little farther ahead. And she always faced forward, meaning she couldn’t see me. But, don’t worry. Despite not facing me, I could still hear her clearly because she used a portable, battery-powered speaker. Not that that did me any good.

I sat at the back because I was one of the last ones on. I could have gotten a stool one row closer to the front, but I figured that I still wasn’t going to be able to see much over the heads in front of me. So, by sitting at the back, I could turn around and get an unobstructed view.

You might have discerned the problem with that approach. Before I could turn around, I had to take a look over the heads in front of me to make sure we weren’t coming to a particularly low branch that I’d have to duck under.

That’s what I did. A couple of the pictures I’ve posted here are taken facing the back of the boat. I’m pleased to say that I was never once knocked unconscious, but I did once have some leaves brush the top of my head. (The 7,239,842th item on my bucket list only calls for me to be whacked on the head by a mangrove branch, not to be knocked out by the encounter.)

Sicao Dazhong Temple

The large temple I mentioned above is the Sicao Dazhong Temple. I know this because that’s what it said on the onsite map. It’s much more impressive from the outside than from the inside. A lot of brightly coloured dragons sit along the roof, along with other kaleidoscopic decorative items.

Inside, there is a bright red and gold, mostly gold altar area containing many colourful tchotchkes. the ceiling is also decorated quite lively, but I found the temple very cluttered in general.

I don’t know if it’s always so cluttered. I think there might have been some sort of festival either recently finished or coming up. Some clues led me to believe this. Inside the temple, there were a lot of rows of tall packages of, I don’t know what, but I think they were temple offerings. Each package contained several decorated packages stacked one on top of the other and wrapped in clear plastic. Near the top of the assembled packages, there were red and gold ribbons and bows. And there was usually some sort of colourful gewgaw on top of the whole package.

As further evidence of the possibility of a festival, there were canopies set up in front of the temple. And across the square from it, there was a colourful stage set up. When I was there, two performers were on the stage. There was instrumental music (I think recorded) and the performers were, at times, singing and, at other times, speaking over the music. I have no idea what that was about.

Having been through the green tunnel, taken a look at the temple, and walked through the scraggly little park (which doesn’t warrant further mention), I grabbed one of the cabs waiting by the square in front of the temple and took it to what I planned to be my first destination of the afternoon. There, I wandered around a bit until I found someplace to grab some lunch.

If you’re a regular reader, you know the drill. My afternoon activities are fodder for another post, not filler for my morning post. Catch you then.