Road trippin' with my favorite allies.

It is pretty hard to try to remember and recount happy moments when you feel as shitty as I do right now but I am going to try. (I have gone back to feeling like a six year old again with not one but two ear infections. It doesn't feel good at all but I supposed I would be really dizzy if was only sick in one ear.) I think it is going to be a really long time before I can actually be sick and have any idea as to what I am supposed to do with myself. Most of my sick moments have been eased by my mother patting me on the head while serving me any type of feel good material I have would have need for. Now I am in China land and it makes going to the doctor about as appealing as drowning while getting kicked in the nuts by a steal toed boot. I went into the doctor's office today and was roughly told that it was a Chinese medicine place. Maybe they could give me some sort of tea and a cockroach to crawl around my brain eating up the illness. Who knows?

DAY ONE

Now I don't want to end up depressing you fellow readers so I will give you the details of my first weekend spent outside of Taipei. I and several of my comrades assembled a hodge podge of scooters and took ourselves a road trip into the mountains. We had wanted to go somewhere for the "vacation," and when all the buses to the beach were sold out we picked the music festival in the waterfall littered forest option. We were not disappointed in the end.

After an invigorating and beautiful 2 hour cruise up into the heart of the island we arrived at a makeshift campsite where we would spend the next three days doing all the fun, wild, and horrible things one does at a music festival. (Rest assured though, it was a drug free weekend. Not for everyone else, but yes for us.) We set up our tents under the designated "camp site" and deplorably awaited the time when we would decide to retire to our homes resting under a concrete foundation. We all decided that this weekend would just have to be about something else besides sleep.

Some of the features included in this "festival" as they would like to call it were a 18, no-name, but often talented, band lineup, 24 hour bar, three swimming pools, two hot springs, lots of girls, and all for the low low price of 20 dollars for the whole weekend. (camping included.) Not too bad if you think about it. Hell even you don't!

The first night was like any first night of a three day binge: way too much alcohol, dancing and making an ass out of one's self in front of all sorts (good and bad) of girls. In general we call it overexertion. It would sort of be like running a marathon the day before you do the iron man except there is no honor in what we did. We told jokes and stories, pushed people we didn't know into pools, and watched others on hallucinogens run around climbing trees and trying to tell you which star was their favorite. Oh by the way, you know which group was the easy majority at this hippy festival in the mountains?........that's right, the wi go ren as they call us, or as we are more commonly know: dirtbag white folk.

DAY TWO

Going to bed at 330 am in a tent laying on a concrete foundation turned out to be just a terrible idea on our part. This was because only 2.5 hours later while taking a quick one tenth awake pee break I ran into a group of crazed out South African Asian bitches screaming at me while laughing at the same time. These girls were claiming that I had both thrown up on them and into the pool in some sort of drunken rage. Now I know for a fact that this was not me because I was sleeping at the time and I also was still clear headed enough to know what I had or hadn't done. That and the fact that these girls were acting like they had eaten horse tranquilizer hamburgers before talking to me so I wasn't sure their judgement could be trusted.

Luckily the daemon women left me and what do you know? I couldn't return to my slumber. I don't know if it was the general discomfort of the rock hard tent or the fact that I was frighteningly shivering under my Kleenex blanket, of which was my only sleeping material at the time and now still, but I just couldn't go back to dream land. So I ran barefoot on the gravel filled ground as pathetically as I could to the hot springs where I spent the next 1.5 hours watching the crap end of the party people crashing over each other and the dudes in the collared shirts still trying to muster up the courage to simply say to their girls, "so you wanna check out my tent?"

My saving grace was in those hot springs where I met the only other person awake for the morning. It was a friendly 30 something woman and her 7 year old daughter. I split my time talking to her about her life in New Zealand and throwing her daughter into the air much to the wee one's delight. The best moment was when a Taiwanese woman who had joined the fun said, "why don't you get your daddy to play with us?" in reference to yours truly. Ever so politely I shouted, "oh oh ah ah ah no she isn't mine!" (oops) The best part was the Asian woman not wondering how two white people would make a half black child like the one in question. I guess she wasn't paying attention.

After my "bath" I went and tried to rouse my compatriots once again (only 7:30 now) to the same "what the hell are you doing awake?" and a nice middle finger for a finish. I thought instead, since the sun had risen, I would take a nice scooter ride to get some well deserved coffee. Only about 800 metres into my ride I saw a girl walking on the side of the road, and what do you think I did? I pulled right over and said nothing more than, "hop on and lets have some coffee baby." I even added baby just so I could tell it in the story later. Cheese dick to the rescue!!!

I thought maybe I recognized her from the party and when she screamed from behind my hog, "you're Andrew right?" I knew I probably had met her. Me and my meeting too many people at parties. So we took a nice ride down the mountain, stood by the water falls, talked about our families and music and got some coffee and lunch. I must say, it all made for a nice morning and I was delighted to have risen at such an early hour.

The rest of the day I tried to cling to some sort of deep rooted energy no one thought I had. I continued to jest and have fun with everyone as I always do. Sure, I was a little loopy but no more than anyone else who had slept little or none that night. After a while we thought we would take a break from the party world and scoot on down into town and visit our French friend Guillame.

Andrew and Graeme (the South Africans), Dunkle, David and Jennifer (the cool work couple), Francheska (the girl who made fun of me all weekend for some reason), Leslie (the new girl from the campground), and myself strapped on our helmets and peaced up out for the day.

We ate and we walked around, took pictures (which I will eventually post), and I quickly became the foot dragging complainer I can sometimes be after nights like the previous one. The highlight of the day was when Guillame and his friend took us down to the locals only hot springs. Man let me tell you, walking in there I could not have felt more out of place. Half naked Asians taking hot showers and laying in boiling pools of water, and they all couldn't stop looking at us, the wi go rens. But this feeling only stayed for a brief moment until I took a shower while using old laundry detergent bottles to pour scalding water all over myself. I think the most fun we had was when all of us poured twelve bottles of lava water onto one person. You could have cooked a lobster in this stuff and off course we are throwing it around and laughing like a bunch of idiots. I probably laughed the most when I helped an old man by pouring water on him while another Asian guy poured water on me. Maybe we are descended from monkeys. It was great and once again we realized that getting all the attention here really is pretty great.

After that we ate at a place where they serve you whole cooked chickens and then you wear gardening gloves to aid in ripping the shit out of the recently diseased bird. Graeme, my new partner in crime, saw how quickly we were fading after dinner and made an affirmative decision. There was no way we could try to soberly sleep on the concrete tents again, so we would simply have to go out wild again techno dancing in the rain with any girl and all girls. We also got squirt guns that turned out to be rather effective ice breakers.

So that was the weekend and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact I enjoyed reliving it so much that I actually feel a lot better. I mean my ears still feel like someone took a shit in them while jabbing a hot poker in my brain, but no worries. That was the first really good weekend I have had since Thailand and it reminds me that maybe a person can adapt to any place.