12 Days in Taiwan – Day 12 – Taipei and Returning Home

Taiwan is a really popular vacation destination for Singaporeans, and a quick look at my Facebook feed attests to that. There was an ex-NTU class-mate who was in Taiwan with his family during our period of travel and broadly covering more or less the same itinerary, and a Minton neighbor who was also visiting Taipei at the same time. At work, I have two colleagues also visiting Taiwan this month, and my cousin was also just in the same island with her family and returned back to Singapore just before we left. I was a bit more selective in deciding what photos to show on Facebook. In part it’s because a lot of the places we went to aren’t finally different from where everyone else has/is/will be going, and also – and this is just me – I wonder how effective is it to dump three dozen photos each Facebook post and expect your friends to wade through all of them to find the really nice ones. To that end, I tried keeping the photos per FB post to no more than 5-6 per post, and added commentary to each photo whenever I could too.

Our last day was sedate, though we didn’t have a lot of time left to spend in Taipei before we had to head to Taoyuan International Airport for our flights home. Our mid-morning ride in a pre-arranged cab from Taipei to the Airport uneventful. There was somewhat slow traffic from our place in Zhongshan to the highways, but once we were on the latter, the cab sped along at 110km/h and we got to the airport after a quick 35 minute ride over the 42km distance. As we had a pile of unused Taiwanese currency still left, so the wife went on a mini-spree to buy local pastries and also Christmas gifts, while I dug out my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and started drafting out my reflection and retrospection posts.

From my Facebook feed, most people seem to have opted for direct flights, and the budget airlines do offer quite a range of them. I didn’t find their timings as suitable though, so – 6 months ago – booked us in for a full-service airline at good rates and would be arriving and departing Taipei at good timings too. Only that this will be a flight with a stopover at Hong Kong. As luck would have it, our arrival into Taipei 12 days ago was delayed by two hours because of congestion at Hong Kong International Airport, which ate significantly away from the advantage I’d hoped for. Funnily, we had the same plane on both legs – Taipei => HK, HK => Singapore – on our return flights and sat in exactly the same seats even haha.

The return flight home was smooth for the most part, but an incident during our transfer between flights at HK International Airport again reminded me how much I do not want to visit Hong Kong. Putting aside the perpetual congestion at its International Airport, I’d expected the airport terminal staff displayed the same cool manner that I remarked during my trip there in September this year. What additional thing happened then? Well, after having our baggage and persons scanned, I accidentally walked down the wrong queue – I always thought you walk straight at a junction instead of taking a detour if you don’t know any better – and was yelled at by a staff who snarled in Chinese “Can’t you see you’re in the wrong way?? DON’T WANT YOUR LUGGAGE IS IT??”

Now, if this was an elderly uncle or auntie who was skewering me for my oversight, I’d be fine. It’s an Asian respect for your elders thing, and they’ve lived a longer life than you do. But this was a young bespectacled lass barely in her mid-twenties who just shouted at me. If this is the manners of young adult Hong Kongers, how much worse will it be when their in their cranky 50s and 60s 30 years from hence?

OK, maybe it was just my manly pride being intruded on by someone half my age, all because I was unfamiliar with this particular screening system. But just about everyone we’ve met in Taiwan had been polite, warm, and happy to return a greeting and a hello. Compared to the pushing, shoving and cold hard stares I received everywhere in Hong Kong. It’s incredible that there’s just 715km between the residents of these two islands, and while they largely speak the same language and can’t be easily differentiated by physical appearances, they can yet be so different in manners. So no thanks Hong Kong – you can take your island and shove it. I’ll happily bring my vacation money to visit Taiwan soon again.

Pictures! And not of the nasty lady in Hong Kong.

That’s a wrap of the day by day posts. I’ve got several more posts queued up: about itineraries, reflections and a commentary on equipment used this trip, starting with a two part commentary on the itinerary we had.