Joanna is another USC alum from our PhD program, but instead of returning to Taiwan she stayed around USC and has been heavily involved as the key staff person working with an international masters degree program offered by our School. It turns out that her hometown is here in Tainan, and she was going to be in town for a few days so Yungnane invited her along on our trip to Taijiang. I got the call that the driver had arrived, and headed outside to realize that not only was it a cool day, as I had anticipated, it was also wet, apparently having rained earlier that morning. After getting into the van that Yungnane had hired for the day, we headed to Joanna's parents' house and met her outside, which was then only a couple of blocks from Yungnane's home. We stopped there and his whole family piled into the van and we took off out of town.
Our first stop was for lunch. We pulled into an out-of-the-way restaurant, that had a large group of about 50 people packed around five tables in the main room, probably a tour group, so they put us in our own little side room where the seven of us sat around a big round table. We had the usual varied assortment of dishes, including some cold shrimp to start, something with oysters and some veggies in a nice sauce, a dish with veggies and probably some animal intestine cut into little slices (when I asked what it was, Joanna said if I liked it she'd tell me what it was; I didn't ask again) in another sauce, some sashimi, some fish we cooked in a broth that was boiling over a burner on the lazy susan, another whole steamed fish, and a Hakka dish with squid, a variant of tofu, and some vegetables that was my favorite of the meal. The Hakkas are a large "ethnic" group on the island, in the sense that they come from a particular region in southern China and speak a dialect that is different from the Taiwanese dialect that lots of other folks here speak (the Chinese characters used are the same for both, but they are pronounced differently), both of which are different from the Mandarin which is the dominant, formal language both here and on the mainland (although on the mainland they now use a simplified version of the Chinese characters, whereas in Taiwan they have kept the old, more detailed versions).
After lunch, we were not scheduled to meet up with the biologist until later, so we had a chance to look around on our own some prior to that point. Taijiang National Park is just beyond the part of Tainan where the An-Shun plant property is located, the polluted area that is the focus of Yungnane's research and that I talked about in my presentation in Taipei last week. So we first stopped there to take a look, which gave me a chance to take a few pictures since I didn't have my camera with me the previous time we had gone out there. Here's the reservoir and some large pipes that I presume were used to dump effluent from the plant into the reservoir, and Joanna and Yungnane in front of the sign warning that the area is polluted.
We also drove down a little road next to the Lu-er river, where we could see all the contraptions that locals had (apparently illegally) set up to grow oysters.
Where the mouth of the river meets the ocean, technically the Taiwan Straight, they had created a little stone monument to mark the spot where the Chinese general Koxinga presumably landed in Taiwan before defeating the Dutch and kicking them off the island. They also seemed to be developing a nearby building, maybe as part of the effort to mark this as an historical spot. Out here next to the ocean, it was definitely pretty chilly, and I was glad I had added an extra layer before heading out in the morning.
Taijiang National Park was established to protect a wetlands area north of Tainan that is winter home to a relatively rare bird species, the black-faced spoon-bill, as well as a variety of other birds and marine life that live among the mangroves and the brackish water. Two separate rivers drain into this area, and flooding over the years has brought enough silt down into the area that it filled in some of the land and essentially pushed the ocean back some. Some old Dutch maps and drawings I saw at the temple while we were waiting for the biologist to arrive indicated the existence back in the 1600s of some sort of peninsula in this area that apparently doesn't exist now that the land mass has increased.
We were waiting for the biologist at the Sihcao Dajhong Temple, which I had stopped at briefly with Jose, Yu Li and Wesley way back when they came down for a visit my second weekend here. The temple operates two short little boat rides, one of which we were scheduled to take, through an area called the Green Tunnel. Finally, Prof. Tzen-Yuh Chiang from NCKU's Biology Department arrived, although not alone but with two other older gentlemen, one a Japanese man whose name I never learned, and the other an American named Peter Raven who I learned was the head of the botanical gardens in St. Louis. While we were waiting, Yungnane had indicated we were being joined by an internationally-known biologist, or something to that effect, so I presumed that one or the other of these two -- more likely the American -- was the one he was talking about. Finally, with everyone gathered, we got onto the boat for the 20 minute ride back and forth through the Green Tunnel.
After finishing our little jaunt through the mangroves, our group got back into our cars and headed over to another area where Yungnane had arranged another boat ride out into the wetlands were we would have a better chance of viewing some of the birds of the region. For this ride, they had us all put life vests on, which I was more than happy to do not for fear of the water but because it gave me another layer of clothing on what by now had turned into a rather cold afternoon. And once we got out onto the water, with the breezes blowing, it was definitely cold, to the point of being distracting and even uncomfortable. (By the middle of the boat ride, I was fantasizing about a hot shower. I remember thinking that I had been colder on a ski lift once...!) Our guide on the boat was a local man who knew everything about the area by virtue of having been living and working in this environment for probably most of his life. He was making the trip barefoot, although he kept his head warm with a nice hat with earflaps.
He took us first to a viewing platform where they had set up a number of little telescopes for us to look at the birds with. Then we stopped at a little fishing platform he had built, with a very clever mechanism for raising and lowering a big net into the water as well as a little hut the fisherman could sleep in if circumstances called for it. Finally, we stopped at one of the oyster-growing platforms, which don't entail much more than dangling strings from the wood or bamboo poles and letting the fertilized oyster eggs attach themselves and starting growing. I think he said it takes about six months for them to grow, along with their shells, to the point you would harvest them. He cut a couple of them open, and one of the Taiwanese guys with us swallowed one just like that, with Yungnane's older son then following suit. Someone asked me if I wanted one; I declined. Unfortunately, my camera batteries were running out by this point, so I didn't get many pictures, but here is one of the birds off in the distance and another of the oysters growing on the string.
It was late afternoon by the time we got off the boat, so that was the end of our day in the Park. We drove back into town and stopped first at Yungnane's place, where we all got out except for Joanna -- the driver was taking her back to her place, as she was leaving for the US that night. It turns out that her mother had passed away, which is why she was in town, and she had apparently extended her stay to spend the day with us out in Taijiang. Then Yungnane and I said good-bye to his family and we headed to the hotel where we were scheduled to have dinner with the biologists who had been on the trip with us. We parked at the Shangri-La Hotel, which is the big glass tower at the mall that I posted a picture of awhile back, and went up to the top, the 38th floor, where the restaurant was located. After waiting for awhile, which included a number of attempts by Yungnane to reach his friend Prof. Chiang on his cell phone, we finally got verification that they were on their way, and learned that the dinner was being hosted by Chiang's Dean. Soon enough, Peter Raven, the Japanese man, and three other guys accompanying them arrived, and shortly thereafter Chiang showed up. Yungnane had already determined that he couldn't tell whose name the reservation was under, so when Chiang showed up, with apparently further confusion on the matter, I guess he called his Dean and learned that we had all assembled in the wrong hotel, and that the Dean was waiting for us in the restaurant at the right hotel.
So we all went back down to our cars, drove about 15 minutes across town, and finally ended up in the right place, where the Dean of NCKU's College of Bioscience and Biotechnology and a number of others were waiting. This was clearly a bigger deal than I had anticipated, and it was obvious that Peter Raven's presence was a key factor in the event. As we were getting seated, I ended up sitting down on his left, at a big table that could seat around 20, with about 15 of us there. I had already thought, and then Peter said, that this was the biggest lazy susan he had ever seen.
Sometimes, at a high-end dinner like this, the "fancier" dishes include things that I am less fond of eating, just don't enjoy as much, and that was the case at this dinner. The first soup on the table had some chunks of fish fin as the meat. We also had some nice abalone early on, and then later some baby abalone cooked and looking in a way that made us think they were mushrooms until we ate them. I had a very large shrimp, and when I asked where they may have come from, thinking it may be Vietnam as I'd heard they grow big shrimp there, someone said maybe Japan, which I think then generated a little nervous laughter! We had some baked pigeon, a leg/thigh, that was tasty enough, and I asked Peter why we didn't eat pigeon in the US, and he didn't really know, other than just a culture belief that it is sort of a dirty bird or something. The one thing in the meal that I was least keen on eating was the sea cucumber. A sea cucumber has sort of a gelatinous texture to it, soft and squishy, and despite its name I guess it's actually a member of the animal kingdom and not the plant kingdom. I've tried it before, I took a bite last night, but really, I just don't need to eat that.
The table was too big to try to maintain a single common conversation, so invariably there were lots of little side conversations going on, which meant that Peter and I got to chat a little here and there throughout the dinner. I knew he was head of the botanical gardens, but I assumed from his presence in this academic crowd that he must have a university affiliation too, so I asked if he was at the Univ. of Missouri at St. Louis, or at Washington University, and he answered by explaining that, since 1880-something, the head of the gardens has to be a faculty member at Washington U. I learned that Prof. Chiang and at least one other Taiwenese man at the table were students of his sometime back. When I asked what had brought him to Tainan, knowing that he had spent a little time up in Taipei too, he explained that he was getting an honorary degree from NCKU the next day. Aha! Now the whole dinner made sense, the nice place, the big crowd, the coats and ties (and me still in my cargo pants, t-shirts, and tennis shoes), the Dean springing for an expensive spread...
So, after spending a chilly afternoon together in the Taijiang wetlands, I inadvertently sat next to the guest of honor at our 5-star dinner, Dr. Peter H. Raven, George Engelmann Professor of Botany at Washington University-St. Louis, and President Emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden. After dinner was over, and everyone had said good-bye to everyone, Yungnane drove me back home where I went upstairs and took the nice hot shower that had been in the back of my mind for many hours. I didn't last much longer after that, and soon laid down for a good night's sleep.
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