Intern Diaries: Allison in Taiwan

For some, summertime doesn’t mean downtime. It’s just another opportunity to travel, get an internship or otherwise move up in the world. But since you can’t do it all, INsite tracked down several students in places from Thailand to Miami, New York to Paris. Every week this summer, we’ve shared their experiences with you. This week, we have Allison in Taiwan to wrap the series up.

Near the end of my two months in Taiwan, I was suffering from a touch of cabin fever. I had been studying on a scholarship from the Taiwan-US Alliance in Pingtung, the capital of Taiwan’s southernmost county. During the week, I was tethered to my desk with homework and glued to my computer for news from the outside world. The weekend meant escape. But to where?

Many of my friends had been to a place they called “Monkey Mountain,” the highest point in Taiwan’s second largest city, Kaohsiung. Their pictures showed an idyllic wilderness, with commanding views of Kaohsiung and hiking paths as frequented by simians as by people: the perfect place for an impulse adventure.

Outside of the Kaohsiung metro station, Monkey Mountain, otherwise known by the Taiwanese as Shoushan, loomed overhead, so I shunned the hoards of cabs eager for a fare. Driving in Taiwan was practically suicidal: no one observed red lights or pedestrians, and taxi drivers in particular heeded the lines on a road as much as a preschooler heeds the lines in a coloring book. Plus, I had grown used to paying less than two American dollars for a meal, so the idea of hiring a taxi for about three or four seemed downright extravagant, especially to go to a destination that appeared so close.

An hour and a half later, I still hadn’t reached the hiking trail I was searching for. Climbing up the winding hillside, I cursed each of the many passing scooters and especially the taxi cabs that ferried people up the mountain with such ease and certitude, while I, lost, could barely take another step. All the signs with the cute monkey pictures and pointing arrows seemed to lead me nowhere but up.

As it turned out, a construction zone masked the trailhead. For certain stretches of my walk, bamboo stalks grew together over the trails, forming little tunnels of blessed shade, but when the bamboo forest gave way to the unrelenting tropical sun, Kaohsiung laid spread out before me. I could see from its busy harbor and Love River to its famous skyscraper with the forked base, the Tuntex Sky Tower. Too bad I couldn’t enjoy the view through the sweat raining down from my forehead.

I had climbed far. It was high noon, and I had yet to see a single monkey. The elderly Taiwanese women, all of whom shielded themselves from the sun with umbrellas and used ski sticks to propel themselves up the mountain, indicated to me that the heat was too much: the monkeys would be asleep. Frustrated, I turned around, back down the mountain.

But I wasn’t going empty-handed. I saw an abnormally large lizard, and so, monkey-less, I whipped out my camera to take a picture of the one instance of wildlife I had seen. The first picture turned out blurry; I went in for another. But when I looked into my viewfinder, the once immobile lizard was gone. I felt a tickle on my leg and looked down a second later to find the lizard, now planted square on my chest. During my subsequent outburst of irrational screaming, passing Taiwanese women used their ski sticks to poke the lizard into submission, and it leaped off to terrorize another day.

Burning from both the heat and embarrassment, I tore down the mountain, aware that, as the only apparent Westerner, I was as much a curiosity to the Taiwanese as the invisible monkeys would have been. Sweat bleeding through my shirt and in desperate need of water and a comb, I barreled to the trail’s last rest stop. And there one was: a monkey.

- Text and photos by Allison Griner