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.

Taiwanese is the language of the streets. The community loudspeaker only broadcasts in Taiwanese, the young and middle-age communicate in Mandarin between themselves but the old and intergenerational language is Taiwanese. Most houses contain three generations, some four. Of the six houses surrounding us there are 4-2, 4-3, 6-2, 8-3, 6-3, 5-3 (people-generations) and us at 5-2.

The house next door sells vegetarian meals on a very low key basis.

Not far away the local breakfast store provides a variety of tasty and filling meals.

Every day a dozen or so vendors drive by selling fruit and vegetables, household items and sweet tofu snacks. There is even one that occasionally comes by collecting old scooters.

The temple at the end of the street is a key social point and the place for many local activities.

The street is a very social place. After school and in the evening there are always kids out riding bikes, people out chatting, playing badminton and generally whiling the time away.

There are a few Vietnamese wives and a lot of Indonesian maids. An Indonesian maid is now the primary form of elderly care.

Overall, the very noticeable thing is the good healthy mix of young and old

There are plenty more photos from around the neighborhood in The neighborhood album section.

Night time view across the small pocket amongst which we live.

View larger map

Fongshan Military Academy This covers a huge tract of land. Though reasonably benign, it is an important military training ground that is a continual source of small arms practice fire. And surely a target of one of the 1400 odd missiles China will use one day. Let’s hope they are accurate enough to miss our place

Mental asylum Not in itself a threat, but placed between the military academy and the land-fill it an indication of the quality land use of the area.
Daliao landfill Or should that be “land-full”. A large hill now exists where a valley once was. They are now filling a valley right next to the full one. This is uphill from our house and not more that 500 metres away.

Traditional grave sites These are a common sight all over Taiwan. Hills are auspiciously good locations to place a grave. Grave sites are auspiciously bad to live near. And we live near hills full of graves

Christian cemetries Approximately 5% of Taiwanese are Christians. We live just one kilometre from 100% of Kaohsiung Christian graves.

Kaohsiung airport This was once a very busy and noisy airport. Now with the high speed rail much of the old noisy regular domestic flights have gone. Daliao covers the take-off flight path for the airport.

Daliao industrial zone This is where chemicals are concocted, boats are made, sewage discharged, recyclables recycled and poisoned residents ignored.

*China Steel refineryThe largest is Taiwan. Located adjacent China Shipbuilding, Taiwan’s largest shipbuilder. The source of much of Kaohsiung’s air pollutants.

Missile silos The Sky Bow missile placement that has been pixelled out in Google Earth. If the military academy is not a Chinese missile magnet, this installation certainly is.

Petrochemical plantsThe source for all sorts of odours. Environmental groups have successfully restricted development of this zone recentley. It has (rightfully) been the source of much local protest over the years.

Linyuan Oil refinery This is part of the larger chemical and steel industrial area. When passing through Linyuan you can constantly whiff the hydrocarbons.

View from the top of LinYuan hill adjacent the missile silos. Looking across to the Gaoping river, petrochemical  and oil refinery plants

This is not a rare occurrence. We seem to lose mains water pressure every couple of months. But that is not as bad as it once was. Taiwanese have endured a long history of an unreliable water supply.

Mains water pressure until recent years has always been unreliable and most households needed a booster pump to supply it reliably.  My wife recalls from her childhood days when they often went for long spells with no water at all. Many older people still maintain buckets of water in reserve for when the supply may be stopped. Indeed, every house in Taiwan has a roof-top storage and pressure tank.

Stainless steel water tanks reflecting the setting sun

Atop our roof

We use no less than three sources of water in our house. The first is the mains. This is used for all non-consumption purposes. It has a faint smell of chlorine indicating it has been treated. However, boiling it leaves notable scale on the water surface and all the pipes slowly clog with scale. Though it may be safe to drink, no-one in Taiwan does.

The second source of water is from our local water dispenser. This provides three grades of water for between 10 and 20 yuan per 20 litres. (USD 0.3 – 0.6). This provides all the cooking and boiling water for consumption.

The third source is from the commercial grade water filter connected to the mains. This is our fresh drinking water.

Anyway, around 8 am a truck and excavator arrived to find the leaking pipe. After a lot of digging and scratching they located it under the storm water drain. They patched it, filled in the hole and roughly smoothed over the diggings.

We were somewhat concerned that it would remain yet another rough patch on our tarmac-tapestry of a laneway.

But, two weeks later a road crew arrived, dug up the temporary pavement and put down a solid one.

Though the water supply fails occasionally the people are always quick to return the service. Though no one recommends you drink the mains water, I suspect it is just fine if you do. Though it is a burden and pretty ugly for all houses to maintain a roof-top water tank, they do guarantee a cool-shower or a toilet flush when the mains outside your house bursts.

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.

Six days a week the yellow rubbish truck winds its way through the lanes and streets playing The Maidens Prayer or Fur Elise in a distorted polyphonic ringtone. Upon the tune the whole neighborhood scuttle out of their homes with their bags of rubbish.

The truck has two barrels to collect food scraps. The meal of some happy (or unhappy) pigs somewhere.

Each Monday and Thursday a recycle truck follows close behind to collect paper, plastics, glass and metals.

I’m not sure when these musical trucks were introduced but I do recall the days when people would throw their rubbish into communal heaps where they were later collected. Though it can be inconvenient to make sure you reach the truck on time, it is far preferable than the old corner heaps.

There is a great recycle industry here that works through small local collection yards. There are 4 such yards within a short walk of our place. Here they pay by weight. Not a lot but enough that the twice-weekly recycle truck doesn’t collect that much.

They are messy places but interesting none-the-less. People busily break up and separate out the pieces.

They are sorted and recycled into something new.

Another part of the recycle chain are the old women and men who make a pittance living collecting and transporting stuff to these yards. Here a large hoard of rubbish sits by our road waiting to be sorted. Its been waiting a long time!

The end result is that Taiwan has a remarkable recycling record. There are however some things for which there is no recycle market. It is quite common to see old porcelain toilets and basins dumped on the roadsides and wastelands.

Perhaps more people should try recycling them like our relatives in Shanshang(山上).

We ventured out while the rain and squalls of typhoon Sinlaku were ravaging northern Taiwan. While there was also a lot of rain falling in Kaohsiung it did not stop people trying out the shinny new rail system.

The KRTC Red line opened back in March and was well covered by Taiwan bloggers. The NH Bushman gave an excellent two part series that covers all the fine details. David on Formosa also summarised an early day trip. The Red line opening provided free travel for a full month to allow Kaohsiungites to acquaint themselves with it. The Orange line provided one week of free travel followed by a month of discount travel if you purchase the contactless travel cards. With the week up today and 3 return trips into Kaohsiung we can attest that the KMRT is a huge success with big crowds joyriding, gawking and trialing the new system.

As with the initial period of the Red line the administration has had a large number of people out guiding and helping passengers learn the ropes.

The crowds last Sunday were small…

but by this Sunday word was out and we were having to cram into trains. Not quite like Tokyo yet.

Back in December the Orange line was still very messy on the surface. Here are a few Dec-07, Sep-08 photo comparisons of some stations.

Fongshan

Fongshan West

Weiwuying

Wukuaicuo

Kaohsiung has come an incredible distance in so many ways since my first visit in 1989. With parks, transport links, air quality and now a great underground rail system. And it isn’t slowing down, there are future plans for the MRT to reach north towards Tainan and east to Pingtung as well as fill in the other areas of Kaohsiung city.
Perhaps we are only at station 2 of the mammoth transformation of Kaohsiung.

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.

I pass perhaps 6 small dairy operations. Each of these fills the surrounding air with the stench cow poop. They also contrast enourmously from the content cows on rolling green fields that the TV commercials have you believe your fresh milk comes from.

Perhaps half the fields are rice but there are cabbages, tomatoes, corn, all manner of produce and fruit trees between. With the intensity and value of the crops they are srayed continuously. Every cycle ride encounters a waft of herbicide, pesticide or both.

And there are factories. Peer into a small shed perched next to a field and you find a milling machine, welder, burner, plastic press, recycling furnace, paint shop, machine repair. They are all there. The plastic and paint shops emmit the sweet smells of the hydocarbons in there processing.

There is always someone burning something. Not a nice hot flame that leaves just gas and ash, but slow smoldering flames where the plastics, paints and other compustibles can let off all their acrid toxins.

There are 2-stroke scooters billowing smoke.

Goose and duck farms and an egg farm too. The smell is indistinguishable.

And the general dust and dirt that accompanies all the mechanical activities.

There are many pleasant parts to the route as well. Like the billboard poster suggesting a stop by Bedding World,

or the men out flying their pigeons and the verdant rice fields.

With such an onslaught of odours it sometimes feels more like an aerial soup.

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.

There are still plenty of signs of the military. With a two year national service for all men and an incredibly dispersed military infrastructure no one travels far without seeing an army base or a young uniformed soldier.

But even that is changing. The army may soon be voluntary, the newly elected KMT are making wishful overtures of conciliation with China and military spending has been stalled as the two sides of government bicker over Tiawan’s future.

Koahsiung harbour is Taiwan’s largest ocean port. It was well fortified during the Qing Dynasty, briefly coveted by the Dutch and English, occupied by the Japanese and then concrete reinforced by the Nationalists.

A few favourites of the Nationalist era were a string of coastal lookouts and pill boxes. Every bridge and major rail route had small fortified checkpoints. You can occasionally see the remnants of these today.

Like many in Taiwan we live close to a military base. This is a large area that today is more often used by elderly gardeners and hikers. They weed and shuffle between old tanks, overgrown razor wire, trenches and spent mortar casings.

The future of Taiwan is no more certain today than it was 60 years ago. But hopefully that future will be shaped by diplomacy and strong international economics rather than the military concrete and iron of the past.

The field was tilled with a trusty John Deere tractor back on the 26th of December and sown with rice seedlings 4 days later.

They grew steadily over the five months until it was harvested on the 17th of May.

I was not around for the final 5 weeks of growing and missed the harvest by one day on my return. (Also the reason for the lack of blogs)

But the plains between us and the Goaping river 5 kilometres away are all being harvested at the moment. A contractor arrives with his Japanese built harvester and removes a small field in about an hour. It is harvested green while the rice kernels are still quite moist. The final drying and husking is done and a community based threshing plant.

Though completely different from the wheat farming I grew up with in Western Australia it has the same lovely agrarian feel. Something about that pouring grain just takes me straight back to the summer of my youth.

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.

A road not far from us is having high speed data cables excavated into it on both sides. Apart from the disruption to traffic, the final surface now has motor scooter hazardous bumps all over it.

During digging they cover the trench with large steel plates. These were always recycled ship hulls but more often these days appear to be raw steel plate. In the 60’s Kaohsiung had a large ship dismantling industry and old ship steel can be found quite often around Kaohsiung.

Here in Fengshan not far from us a major works is under-way that has consumed half the road and part of the intersection. The adjacent clothing store make good of a inconvenient situation.

The Koahsiung-Pingtung bridge over the Goaping river is having two new sections added. A span of the current bridge apparently collapsed a few years ago. They started building the new bridge then ran out of funds and construction halted for a year or so. It is now proceeding quite fast and should be complete soon.

And here the road-side mannequin with articulated arms warns motorists to slowdown. I suspect he is as effective as a real person and no-one takes any notice.

Update:

The road badly repaired after being excavated down both sides was resurfaced in June 2008. They smoothed out all the bumps and now make motorscootering as easy as prior to the roadworks. (Picture below)

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.

These cars are fast. Their drivers are obviously very skilled and it requires a good team to keep the car tuned, fuelled and on the track for the course of the race.

Back in the pits there was lots going on.

Tuning, cleaning, repairing, preparing.

A little prep talk.

And for line honours.