Daliao is very working class. It sits right on the industrial saturated rural edge of Kaohsiung city.
Our immediate neighborhood is made up of ordinary working people. The type Australian politicians like to call “battlers”. They are also a wonderful mix of young and old. They are mostly native Taiwanese but a few KMT immigrants, Indonesian and Philippine maids and Vietnamese brides as well.
I have eagerly followed the local Taiwanese news and I’m especially interested in news associated with our local township Daliao(大竂). Unidentified toxic gas releases at the local industrial park have kept Daliao to the national headlines recently. If you take a quick look around it is not difficult to see why this type of news item is indicative of the area in Taiwan we have chosen to live.
Night time view across the small pocket amongst which we live.
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About 3am a few weeks ago I woke to the rather pleasant sound of flowing water outside. After checking that it wasn’t raining I wandered downstairs to check that the kids hadn’t left the ground floor water tap running. What I discovered was a burst water main that flowed a torrent of water straight through and past our garage.
As unglamorous a subject as it is, it is fascinating to see the way the rubbish is dealt with. At its simplest, it goes into a truck, squashed up with lots of other rubbish and land-filled somewhere.
But the majority of rubbish is recycled one way or another. Between recycle trucks, local recycle yards and old women collectors, nothing with any residual value is placed in the ground.
For the last few years the streets of Kaohsiung have been a mess with construction of the two-line underground MRT. Last Sunday the 14th of September the East-West Orange line opened for passengers to finally finish the mammoth project. Since we live close by the Daliao end terminal of the Orange line this will be a huge boon for us. It currently takes over an hour to reach Siziwan near the harbour. The Orange line takes about 25 minutes to complete the 14 stations along the 14 km route.
I recently listened to a speech by Australian of the year, Tim Flannery where he describes our atmosphere as The Great Aerial Ocean. It is a great speech by a great man that jolts you in to realising just how valuable, vunerable and scarce that thin layer of air really is.
There is a circuit I regularly cycle across the flat plains either side of the Goaping river. It is fertile and irrigated land, covered in small farms, factories and villages. Each of the activities that take place along the route let off a tell-tale odore of their existence. A reminder of the aerial ocean in which we swim. [Read more →]
It is true that if the Communists had any sort of a navy in 1949 the history of Taiwan would have been very different indeed. When the Nationalists arrived in Taiwan they spent the first 20 years fortifying the nation for an impending communist invasion.
When I first arrived in 1989 Taiwan had just lifted martial law. Air raid drills were still common and the military had a very strong presence. You would often see movements of army vehicles and troops and there was a continual coastal watch. I remember being moved off the beach one evening by a couple of soldiers as well as being cautioned, though not badly, for taking photos of the Kaohsiung harbour entrance.
Just across the lane by our house is a field that has been growing rice for the last 5 months. I was lead to believe that farmers could get two rice crops a year from their fields. Having watched the field opposite us I can say that while they may be able to, no-one down here in the south does. Some farmers put red beans in between rice crops but most of the fields used for rice have remained fallow for the remaining 7 months.
It absolutely astonished me the first time I saw a team of diggers came to dig up the road not more than a week after it had been freshly repaved. They did their job and roughly patched over the hole leaving a beautiful street with a large uneven blemish. When I see these things now it doesn’t phase me at all.
It seems that each essential service is responsible for connecting to any new development. And these services typically run down the middle of the road. Most streets are a patchwork of different service entry scars, even the recently paved ones.
We live on the western edge of the plains of the Goaping river. We are a good 4 kilometres from the current river course. The plains have been long tamed by levees and are irrigated by water from the river year round. The tops of the levees are at least 20 metres from the river bed and are two kilometres apart. The main river bed itself varies in width but closest to us it is 200 metres wide at least.
A large part of the land between the levees is used for orchards and other agricultural use. But there is a small patch on the western side just north of the Wanda bridge that has a model racing car track. Most weekends you can find a few enthusiasts racing their cars. However, last weekend there was a championship race with a large number of cars in 2 divisions racing it out for all the prestige that model car racing has to offer.
