Not All Who Wander Are Lost...

I was the farthest from my home I had ever been, on that jade-colored island in the Pacific known as Taiwan.

I had been in the air for 12+ hours and by the time my plane landed in Taipei I was nearly delirious.

I was traveling as cheaply as possible. Since graduating college just the year before I had been working in retail part-time to save money for this very trip. I booked the cheapest flight I could find, knowing my friends were waiting for me at a backpacker's hostel somewhere in the city.

They were two of my best friends from high school. We had remained close all through college, but now over the summer they had made the decision to move abroad to teach English. I knew very little about Taiwan and had never been to Asia before, but I had the sense that if I didn’t make the trip, I might regret it for the rest of my life.

After all, this was a period of our lives where almost everyone I knew was working on establishing themselves and their careers, and I had a sinking feeling that before I knew it, some of my closest friends would start to drift apart more permanently — pulled away by jobs, relationships, or academic opportunities in different parts of the U.S.

Or in the case of these two, different parts of the world.

I was determined not to let that happen without at least one more adventure, so together we drew up a month long plan to tour around the island, attend a silent meditation retreat, and explore the city while they hunted for jobs. Now that I was here we could begin the adventure, as long as I could find them.

I had traveled abroad before and was aware of the problems that can arise trying to work through language and cultural barriers, but I was not mentally prepared for what it would feel like to be rendered functionally illiterate the moment I stepped off the plane.

See, in the other countries I had visited, they spoke different languages, but they still used the same alphabet. So even if I didn’t know what “boulangerie” meant, I could at least pronounce it.

In the north of Taiwan, where Taipei is, people mostly speak Chinese which, as you probably know, has a completely different writing system that uses characters. What you may not know, however, is that in Taiwan they use “traditional characters” which were seen to be so complex that China created a simplified version of it to make it easier to learn.

For example, in Taiwan a character might look like this: 幾

While in China that same character looks like this: 几

That is why, after making it through customs I was absolutely overjoyed to discover that the airport’s public computers were set to English.

This was back in 2011, when internet connections weren’t always reliable, and none of my possessions could be considered “smart.” Back home I was still using a flip-phone that was so useless I didn’t even bother to bring it with me. For the duration of the trip, email and Facebook would be my only options for contacting people, and I’d have to depend on borrowing other people’s computers to use access them.

I checked my email. My friends had sent me the address of the hostel in both English and Chinese. I copied both into a pocket notebook I carried with me. I wasn’t sure how to go about writing down the Chinese address so I just tried to copy it to the best of my ability, thinking of it less like writing and more like drawing, hoping that I wouldn’t have to use it anyway.

Like some other international airports, Taipei’s main airport isn’t actually in Taipei, but is actually in a town called Taoyuan about an hour away. Because it’s an international airport, the staff all spoke perfect English and helped me book tickets on a bus into town that would drop me off in the general area I was trying to go. The woman at the ticket window handed me a map with my destination circled and pointed towards the bus idling outside. I was good to go.

There was a flash of something, a short moment between the frosty air conditioning of the airport and the bus when I was hit with the full force of the island’s tropical humidity, a completely foreign sensation to someone like me, who had until then spent almost the entirety of their life in the near-desert conditions of Southern California. As I settled into my seat, in the back of the cool bus I had a sense of foreboding.

The bus wove its way through mountains so densely covered with flora that they seemed less like a landscape and more like a large, lumpy green blanket. Eventually, we entered the city and after an hour of driving the bus came to its final stop and I stumbled back out into the damp heat. The jet lag was starting to seep into my muscles and my backpack felt very heavy, probably too heavy for such a simple trip.

I pulled out the map that they had given me at the airport and realized that it was a simple tourist map of the whole city, and it lacked crucial details that I would need to find my way, like street names. Also while the circle the woman had drawn for me did not look large on the map, standing on the street I realized that it encompassed a vast area of urban sprawl.

It didn’t help that when I took out my notebook I realized that in my efforts to focus on faithfully copying the address I had not taken the time to analyze what the different elements of that address could mean. It seemed more like three different addresses all stacked into one, with different names and numbers that kind of looked like this:

No.6 X Street, Lane Y, Alley Z.

I was tired, but I had come too far now to let myself get disheartened. Like an explorer, I pointed myself towards the direction of that great circle on my map and plunged into the urban jungle.

At first I was excited by all of the new sights that surrounded me. Temples burning incense and stands filled with all kinds of fruit I had never seen before. But after wandering for many blocks the weight of my backpack and the heat were taking a toll. I started to worry if maybe I had gotten turned around and ended up back at the same fruit stand as before. How many fruit stands could there possibly be here? Then, at a point I guessed to be near the center of the circle on my map, I found the street.

Feeling a renewed sense of energy, I was practically jogging down the street. I was excited to be reunited with my friends. The numbers on the buildings were fairly high so I had to go a ways before I finally got to number 6. When I got to the building I didn’t see anything advertising it as a hostel, but then again, everything was in Chinese, so I couldn’t be very sure.

I opened the door and walked inside. I was so grateful to be back inside an air conditioned space that it took me a moment to realize I was actually standing in a bar. Not just any kind of bar, but a karaoke bar. It was the middle of the day, and the few patrons there, singing on the small stage or sitting in the booths were all old Taiwanese women with permed hair.

The scene was so surreal that I just stepped back out the door as if it had never happened at all.

I retraced my steps all the way back down the street, this time paying attention to the buildings, trying to see if there were any signs that said hostel, or that pointed me in the hostel’s direction. After walking all the way to the other end of the street, I started walking back towards the karaoke bar, because at this point it was the closest I had gotten to figuring out where this hostel was.

But I was feeling more and more exhausted, and at some point I must have given up hope because I found myself standing in the middle of the street staring into the pages of my notebook, hoping that the address could provide me with some further clue, as if I thought maybe that if I let my eyes unfocus, the blurry Chinese characters would reveal the hostel’s secret location to me.

I don’t know exactly how long this was going on for, but I was awoken from my daze by a man on a scooter who was forced to swerve around me. He pulled up next to the front door of one of the nearby apartment buildings, kicked out the kickstand of his scooter and dismounted.

He was about to go inside when he looked back at me for a moment. I thought maybe he was going to yell at me for standing in the street, but instead he walked over to me and said something calmly in Chinese.

I tried responding in English, but if he understood me, he made no sign of it. He simply took the notebook out of my hand and looked it over. With a gruff nod he gave me back the notebook and walked away.

I thought it was kind of a strange interaction until I noticed that he was heading not towards the door, but back towards his scooter. He took out an extra helmet and placed it on my head. He started the engine and walked the scooter back out into the street, motioning for me to hop on.

I got on and he drove me back down the street, eventually threading our way through a tangle of side-streets and alleys that I would have never been able to navigate myself, before finally dropping me off right in front of my destination.

I had never felt like I wanted to speak a different language more than in that moment, to explain my situation and why what he did meant so much to me. I did what I can to thank him in English, but he acted so nonchalantly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as he put his spare helmet back in the storage compartment of his scooter and left.

That moment impressed me, because after finally making it home from wherever he had been, he could have just gone inside and ignored the foreigner standing in the street. Instead he decided to help this stranger even though neither of us spoke the other’s language.

The trip that I had with my friends ended up being one of the best of my entire life. And the Taiwanese people we met along the way were all consistently so kind and welcoming. The more time that we spent there, the more that we got the feeling that we were someplace truly special.

I was so moved by that experience that, when we returned to Taipei and it was time for me to leave, I cancelled my ticket.

I was going to stay.