Taoyuan Nights

I was walking towards Yingko the other day, trying to track down a temple that was hammering out ‘bong, goink, bong, goink’ at an impressively loud volume across the hills of Gweishan. As I walked along, I noticed that in one case, the omnipresent rusty barbed wire surrounding the factories of the area had been supplanted by shiny, new razor wire (or butterfly wire, if you prefer).

Plain old rusty barbed wire - this stuff is ubiquitous around here.

So, having found this exciting, shiny, lethal, razorwirey stuff, I thought it would be interesting to take a picture of it. The problem being, that it was positioned so that I had to either take a bad picture (holding out my camera in front of me, pointing down, and unable to frame the shot correctly), or take the picture I wanted, but leaning out over the razor wire. I decided to lean out, as carefully as I could, using one hand and my knees to grip the wall and therefore prevent a premature painful and messy demise.

I had to take a couple of shots to get the framing I wanted, so I ended up leaning right out over the razorwire (with a 3 metre drop below me) for about a minute. Long enough, it turns out, for a local guy to sneak up behind me in a suspiciously quiet blue truck, and suddenly yell out

“HALLLOOOOAAHHHH!”

This one’s for you, Mr Batshit-Crazy-Blue-Van-Helloing-Dude.

Well, it didn’t do my heart any good I can tell you, as I barely stopped myself falling onto several rows of shiny, painful slicyness. I don’t mind the odd casual ‘hellohhh!!’ but the enthusiasm and timing of this one was very nearly the end of me.

Once my heartbeat went back to normal, I went off to find the temple…

An aside: The title of this entry is inspired by a local idiom, ‘expensive to the point of death’, which is a convenient way to describe the price of almost everything, when you have white skin and you’re in South East Asia. In Mandarin it’s: 貴死 (guìsĭ) [thanks Mark, Pete!]