On the night of the Moon Festival, the Catholic Sisters invited me to their barbecue. All I had done the whole day, which I took as a holiday, was to sleep, eat, drink fluids, and sleep again. I had only just woken up when the fireworks started. The Sisters forced perfectly grilled meat down my throat until I heard my arteries clog. My left ventricle actually made a sound like firing a gun, as it slammed shut. I was thinking, after eating all that fat in one sitting, maybe I should take up a diet and exercise program. Maybe I should start bike riding. Ah, but I would never stick with it. I'd probably buy a bike, and it would wind up rusting out in the garage, unused.

It is 3:03 PM, and I made it to Suao. The mountains from Hualien to here were absolutely dreadful. I really thought I was going to die of exertion. The one good thing about high mountains is that they give my saddle sores a chance to heel, as I have to push the bike most of the way. I wonder why you never see guys pushing their bikes in the Tour De France. But now I have blisters on my feet. You just can't win. I would push my bike, straining every muscle, like the Grinch, when he was trying to keep the sled from falling off the cliff. Every step of the way, I recited poetry to keep myself going. I would take one step and say "Half a league." Then another step, "Half a league." Another step. "Half a league onward." It worked pretty well, but then I remembered the next line was "Into the valley of death."

Valley of death?

I don't want to go into the valley of death. In fact, if there were one place I wanted to avoid it would be the valley of death. My travel agent said, "Scenic mountain roads, and ocean views." There was no mention of valley of death. I would have remembered valley of death.

The other problem was the one everyone had warned me about, the traffic. I purposely left the Sisters at about 5:00 AM, to get as much of the mountain passes done, as early as possible, before the cars and trucks began coming en masse.

There were parts of the road where the shoulder was literally a few inches, and where trucks and buses passed within centimeters of my body. At those times I was wishing I had lost more weight, so I would be a smaller target. I think that some of the mountains may have been beautiful, but I didn't bother to look. I was too worried about having a second coronary, or being hit by a truck. I did take one horrifying picture of the inside of a tunnel. The way from Hualien was pocked by tunnels, some of them so narrow, that there was only one and a half lanes open for traffic. They all had warning signs, reading, "no bicycles." I took this to mean that they didn't have any bicycles, but that they wanted one, so I went ahead and rode in the tunnels anyway. After all, what could happen inside a tunnel?

The tunnels reminded me of the Mines of Moria from JRR Tolkien. They were dark, scary places, often a kilometer long, where every car, coming from either direction was a potential threat. Having no other recourse, I fell back on the advice the nuns had given me when I was a kid, in Catholic school. "If the bullies bother you, just ignore them, and they will go away." I stared down at the ground chanting. "There are no cars. There are no cars. There are no cars." But then one of them would almost brush against me and I would have to admit that they did in fact exist.

As I mentioned before, I am not carrying my gear in panniers, rather in one of those plastic tubs that well organized single mothers use for their children's toys. I like to refer to mine as the pickle tub, and my bike, as the pickle tub express. Unfortunately, as I also mentioned, the pickle tub makes my bike very top heavy. I often have to wrestle with it, like Kenny Shamrock, using my considerable upper body strength, to keep it from flipping over. And, as I get very tired on these trips, it does flip over periodically. Each time it hits the deck, the pickle tub breaks a little bit. Today, while I was riding on one of those narrow passes, my bike suddenly veered right, and I crashed into the guard rail. I was unhurt. Luckily my very expensive camera absorbed most of the impact. But the bike then flipped again, this time, for the last time. The pickle tub shattered when it hit the ground. And once again, strangers could see my underwear. "I see London, I see France, I see Antonio's underpants."

My first instinct was to bend over, and start picking things up, but a car blew on his horn, reminding me that I was holding up a line of twenty vehicles on a busy mountain pass. Gingerly, I plastered my body to the wall, crouched down, and carefully gathered my things. I tied them, half-assedly, to my bike and made it to a rest stop, luckily, only two hundred meters away.

What now? I wondered. There was a gaping hole in the bottom of my pickle tub. I considered taking my film, diary, and autographed picture of Jimmy Buffet, and leaving everything else for the aborigines. But just then, as a weird stroke of luck, I noticed a plastic egg crate sitting behind a drink stand. It wasn't just any crate, it was THE crate. It didn't have a lid, but it was one of those crates which already had holes in it. The lady at the drink stand gave it to me, and soon I had it tied on my bike. It is infinitely more stable than my pickle tub, and has a lower center of gravity. I wrapped up all my belongings in my blanket, and tied them to the crate. Everything fit, except my tent. No worries, I gave it to the aboriginal woman selling Nai Cha. Eventually, I think I won't even miss my pickle crate.

The rest stop, the egg crate... it was all a lot of good luck. Almost too good to believe. Like Samuel L Jackson, in Pulp Fiction, I believe it was divine intervention. Perhaps this was a sign that I should change my ways, and live my life wandering the Earth.

My body is doing much better after my long rest, yesterday. I guess that's why people train and stuff. My arms, however are so sunburned that they look like perfectly scorched, fried chicken. They bubbled up, the bubbles popped, and then new bubbles formed on the pink skin below. I look like the victim of a biological warfare agent. Now, in addition to being filthy, and smelling badly, I have skin dripping off of me like the Swamp Thing. It peels off in huge shreds, like Gold Member, in the Austin Powers movies.

Check back next week for part 3 of Antonio's trip...

This is part 2 of Antonio's adventure cycling around Taiwan.

See also:
Part 1 - Kaohsiung to Hualien
Part 3 - Suao to Taipei
Part 4 - Taipei to Taichung
Part 5 – The Final Chapter
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