Descovering Pescadores - with Gaemi, Shakespeare and Voltaire

I just returned from my long-awaited travel of backpacking around Peng-Hu Islands, also known as the Pescadores, as the Portuguese sailors first called it in the 16th century, apart from their calling Taiwan as Formosa.

I was excited about the trip because many of our ancestors migrated from China, and in the long journey they would first stop at Peng-Hu Islands, before crossing the Peng-Hu Channel that separates Peng-Hu and Taiwan and was notoriously difficult to navigate, particularly in the winter time. Crossing the channel was such a risky enterprise that an old saying persists to this day: among the ten who cross the Peng-Hu Channel, six perish, one returns, and only three make it to Taiwan. So, as a lover of both history and culture, I had very high hopes about my Peng-Hu trip.

As it turned out, however, the long-awaited travel is an extended one, thanks to the approaching of super Typhoon Gaemi, with a sea warning issued on Tuesday, a day after my arrival in Magong, the only county- administered-city and the commercial and tourism center of Peng-Hu County.

It's definitely another unforgettable travel experience, among my 20 backpacking travels around Taiwan. While I already kept a travel log daily on Facebook during the trip, I felt compelled to take a few notes on Blogger, with the trip now coming to an end.

First of all, the trip was extended because Magong Port was closed for days with Gaemi lingering around. I ended up staying there for 8 days, against my planned 5 days. This is the first time I've had to extend my planned travel so far.

Consequently, schools and businesses were all closed in Peng-Hu for two days, and I had to change my planned itinerary and lodging arrangement virtually every day. On the other hand, many parts of Taiwan were worse hit by Gaemi,  so in this sense I felt blessed for encountering Gaemi in Peng-Hu.

The second thing that made this trip special is transportation arrangement. For my backpacking the norm of my transportation means includes train, bus, bike and walk, but this time bus was replaced by boat, with that I was able to visit 6 Islands in Peng-Hu, the most I have experienced in a single trip so far.

The third thing is about the cultural and historical heritage of Peng-Hu that is far richer than my perception before the trip. For one thing, Peng-Hu was contacted and ruled by outside powers far earlier than Taiwan was. To be exact, Peng-Hu was first ruled by the Yuan Dynasty in 1281, 343 years earlier than the Dutch ruling in Taiwan beginning in 1624.

In addition, Peng-Hu and Taiwan are like twins in many crucial historical events, and Peng-Hu always experienced it one step ahead of Taiwan; these events include the occupation by the Dutch East India Company, the occupation by the French Empire, and occupation by the Japanese Empire, followed by its territorial ceding, together with Taiwan, to the Japanese Empire as a result of the first Sino-Japanese War that the Qing Empire lost in 1894.

Even for Mazu, the most widely worshipped sea goddess in folklore beliefs of Taiwan, the very first temple was built in Peng-Hu, back in 1604, and the tallest statue of Mazu is located in Peng-Hu, too, measuring 48 meters, dwarfing all its counterparts in Taiwan and the rest of the world.

To this end, I found it most entertaining conversing with the locals in Hokkien which is the mother tongue for many people living in Taiwan and Peng-Hu, myself included. Their accent is identical to that spoken in Quanzhou and Xiamen of China (my grandparents spoke the same accent), while mine sounds a variant after centuries of evolution in Taiwan. Talking with the locals gave me a sense of nostalgia, as if I were talking with my grandma 60 years ago.

Finally, with my stay in Peng-Hu unexpectedly extended by 3 days, I was able to embarked on another virtual journey concurrently: reading Shakespeare’s play "Antony and Cleopatra", and have done 4 of the 5 acts of the play that would otherwise take me one week, if not longer, to go through.

This also reminds me of Voltaire's master piece "Candide" that I read last year, examining then the mainstream philosophy of the absolute optimism "the best of all possible worlds", coined by German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm: the unexpected happens with reasons beyond our reasoning or understanding (in my case Typhoon and my extended stay in Peng-Hu), so just accept it and enjoy it.

On the other hand, I didn’t forget what Voltaire implied at the end of the book: caring the garden against all odds, and so did I.  Unlike other guests staying at the same hostel who simply passed the extra time by watching Netflix and eating junk food, I adjusted my plan constantly and managed to visit all places of interest on my list, and studied 80% of "Antony and Cleopatra".

What an unusual, interesting and rewarding travel!