Sunday, October 30, 2011

Where have I bloody well been?

Catch up part one

As some of you may know I am in Taiwan at the moment. My plan was to write a blog everyday as a travel journal of sorts, well actually my plan was to write a blog informing you all that I was morphing this blog into a daily travel journal and then start writing a daily travel blog, but not only did I not get around to writing that blog I have yet to get around to writing a single one of my daily blogs. And I’ve been gone ten or eleven days already, that’s almost a full week.

You know the story, I missed the first couple of days while acclimatising to strange surroundings, then I put off starting because I didn’t have the time to get it all done, and then the longer I put it off the longer I needed to pull it off, and so on and so on. Yep that’s how much fun this trip has been already!

Well I still want to write this journal thing damn it, and I just can’t catch up, so here is a catch up on what’s been happening so far.

I hate fishing, it’s a cruel and boring sport, so when my best mate Goshie, the famed fishing journalist, invited me to go on a fishing exploration trip I said ‘well if I don’t have anything else much happening then I’ll come'. Of course I thought I WOULD have lots going on then and it would never happen.

Then it turned out I didn’t have much on, as I have no real job and my latest book is taking longer than I thought to get to the bookstores, so the trip was booked. Plus there barely are bookstores anymore, what did I think was going to happen taking on this career? I should have stuck with something safe, and guaranteed to stay a relevant part of everyone’s lives, like being a newspaper journalist, or radio announcer.

Then Goshie got a bad ankle injury and the trip was at least mentally canceled.

Goshie decided an hour later that his ankle was ok and it was back on.

Two hours later Goshie decided that not only was his ankle fucked but so was his elbow from walking on crutches and it was back off.

I watched a little TV while he changed his mind four or five more times. I think the Big Bang Theory was on during part of this time, and this is a show I like but don’t love, so it was a satisfactory wait, but not exhilarating. Man I need a freaking holiday from all this mild satisfaction damn it.

Tension is built to unprecedented levels but in a shock conclusion to anyone who didn’t read above that I am in fact in Taiwan, the unthinkable happened, truly unthinkable, and if you think about it just about anything is ‘thinkable’ so this thing must be insanely hard to think, wait for it - the trip was called on and we left.

We meet Goshie’s fishing mate, Epi, at the airport and fly off, and 25 hours or so later we arrive in Taipei, a huge metropolitan city full of everything anyone could desire, but because we’re on a fishing trip we choose not to get a comphy hotel and instead get a bus, then a train, then hire a car working south, with stunning coast on one side and towering mountains on the other. It is really gorgeous.

We finally reach our destination, Chenggong – a tiny fishing village where we’ve come to fish. I hate fishing, but I love traveling. This is going to be interesting.

Also I should point out that the universe is trying to tell me something at the moment, I don’t know what, but it keeps showing me little clues. Maybe it’s telling me that the trip might get canceled, hmmm, hmmm, wait no, we’ve satisfied that cliff hanger already, wait, check this out for a cliff hanger, in our next installment someone will be in hospital! Really! But who? Oooooohh, cliff-hanger!

It’s Epi!

Damn it, I ruined it again. Wait, but how? Oooooh cliff hanger.