Alternative Medicine: You're killing the sharks

A giant, loving Fuck You to the entire shark cartilage industry.









Those are freezers right beside it. Where the fish to be eaten is stored. Kept fresh.

Four massive doors of ice, temperature regulation and the intention keeping food fresh. The sharks could have been in there, too. Only, nobody wants them. They only want their fins for soup and pills in the false belief that it will cure cancer and make men more potent.

Fuck you.

We approached the fisheries police, regulators, men in bright orange jackets....'in Taiwan we eat all" was their response. But these two sharks sat here all night, were covered in flies and starting to rot. Nobody was going to eat them. They were, check for yourself, a body length away from a freezer.

Killed in the name of pseudo-science, mythology and untethered belief.

Guess what words come to mind....?

Shi Ti Ping: Bike Trip to the Ocean

This tale takes place on this chunk of rock, the love child of two tectonic plates in the tempermental south pacific. If you look to the right side of the island (Taiwan) you can see a grey valley. This is the Eastern Rift Valley, and this is where we live. To the right - East - of that is a mountain range. That is what we biked across. To the right of that is a whack of blue stuff...confoundingly uncountable billions of trillions of molecules of hydrogen and oxygen that have a mighty affliction for one another. That is what we went to see. Here are the details.

The winter chill is in the air and the days of sunshine are no longer sweat inducing. Instead, the winter here feels like a chilled summer day in Canada. When it is sunny, shorts are apt and you can get yourself a hefty suntan. When it is cloudy or foggy, it is better to wear a sweater and a thicker pair of socks. The snow will come to the higher mountains in the next few months and then as our chunk of rock tilts its northern tip back towards the sun it will become unrelentingly hot once again. Enjoy the chill. We must!

And now that the winter nights are here it is once again camping season...so we packed our bikes full of food, our tent and sweaters (and sandals!) for another bike trip to the coast. The salty taste on our lips, the crashing of waves on rocks, the breeze, the lovely oceanic beauty. This time we took a new cross-mountain road to get to the ocean, and returned on the same one we took last time. A nice circuit. From valley to mountain tops to ocean and back. All by the power of our legs.

We started in RueiSuei (stayed there Friday night) and biked north along the rift valley to a quaint town called Guang Fu. Here we grabbed a coffee, checked the weather report (actually, the report we got was "it hasn't rained yet"....thanks....thanks for the obvious report!). We debated two different destinations - stay inland and go to a lake (with fireflies, a killer hike and a nice view, or to the ocean and epic geology and fresh fish to oggle at the harbour as fishing boats unload their catch...and an epic bike through the mountains), but decided to keep going to the coast, never mind the weather or the clouds beaming above the mountains we were destined to enter (it never actually rained!!!).

We grabbed some lunch here, a nice cafe/buffet style place where you always get exactly what you want and the price is always affordable...nice now and then to have such luxuries. After lunch...to the mountains...up, up, up!


Along the cross-mountain road we saw all the pretty sights, the flowers, the birds and the geologic winders that we have gotten used to throughout this area and noticed that the uphill finished sooner than we imagined ... "I think thats all the up parts" we noted with glee. Legs ok, lungs ok, brakes ...check....down, down, down. The road we took last time was much more undulating and once you had reached what you thought was the climax of the climb and as you prepared yourself for a nice downhill to the ocean you realized that the downhill ended with another steep climb...over, and over, and over again!! This road, although crossing very close to the other was much more forgiving and was a constant slog up (but a wonderful slog!) and a nice coast down. Simple.

Six hearty hours later we arrived at the coast, at the shores of the Pacific, at our campsite and at one of the geologic gems of Taiwan - Shi Ti Ping Harbour. Not the most beautiful - although it is stunningly so, but one that is quite interesting and highly researched by local scientists. It has a tale to tell of the violence of the past!

Set up camp, praned about in the harbour and on the coast for a while, then headed into town for dinner. After a full day of biking and the prospect of fresh food on our plates, the idea of freeze-dried chili and veggie powder didnt seem to hold the wieght it did when we were packing. No matter, it will be needed in the Central mountains later on in the year, so save our camp food we decided.

After dinner we wandered back to our campsite, grabbed a few cans of Taiwan Beer and a bag of peanuts and headed back out to the rocky outcrops on the shore to sit and watch the furious ocean batter the coast relentlessly and chat about the day, life and such. A few hours later we picked ourselves up (so hard to leave such a spot!!) and called it a night. To the tent....sleep. Perfect sleep. Windy...crazy windy....tent shaking violently....but we still managed excellent sleep.

Morning came, we woke up to the sounds of....wind. And birds. And a slight glimmer of sunlight through the clouds. Once again to the shore and to the volcanic rocks (it was so tuff to leave that place, andesites were so beautiful! Someone, somewhere, is laughing with me here...)and then to the road.

Homeward bound. This time we biked south to DaGongKou and turned westward back into the mountains towards RueiSuei. This was the aformentioned road that is super up and down, and out legs had a better workout on this one. Not that the other 6 hour crossing was easy....it was long and hard, but this one was intense and shorter. However, this is, of the three cross-mountain roads that we have traveled from the rift valley to the ocean, the most beautiful and scenic. So, there is much to see as you sweat and strain your way up and down!

Then, home. Ish. To RueiSuei, and to a Hot Pot place for a warm lunch. Then coffee...more coffee...then home.

Click on all pics to get the real size version. Totally worth it. Totally. Fully. Comple...

Alternative Medicine: Your killing me

I was recently guided by one of my principals to seek out acupuncture for a nagging illness of sorts. You see, I was discussing with another teacher that I chose the Tzu-Chi Buddhist Hospital over the other options, the Christian Hospital or the night clinic, and he - being a church going, god fearing, pseudo-science loving, alternative medicine taking, homeopathic enforcing christian looked at me with subtle dismay and asked of me:

"have you tried acupuncture? It fixes everything".

Stifling a laugh, tinged with anger and a long scientific and evidence based diatribe starting in my throat (that I would give to an English speaker without hesitation) about the uselessness of acupuncture, chiropractic, gogi berries, pomegranate juice, tai-chi, shark cartilage, tiger penis, detox, colon cleansing, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, naturopathy, nutritionists claims, anti-oxidants, vitamin pills, reiki, prayer, prayer healing, psychic surgery...this unfortunate list goes on and on...in most cases these actually account for more harm than good, and at best they are - at best - the absolute best that any of these have reached in any analysis, meta-analyses in double blind controlled studies....is the placebo effect. None are better than doing nothing. This is not the place to get into regression to the mean, psychological improvement, etc. I want to get to the funny pictures....but I'm not done with acupuncture yet. It whores itself out with a guise of science, when in reality it is nothing but...nothing. Relaxing, but I can do that at home, for free, with a good book and a glass of wine. Or a nap. Or, reading journal articles and reviews of journal articles that examine (with100% negative results I add) the efficacy of pseudo-scientific claims of supernatural medicine...

So, acupuncture to cure that cut that is a little infected? I'm better off saving time and getting a dog to bite me (canis-puncture...I can sell that to the new-age crowd!). Equally useless, and in fact imparting harm. The British Chiropractic association just, in a battle dealing with Simon Singh, had to make a public request of all their practitioners to take down all claims of efficacy from their website. The leader of a mystic medicine actually asked those who practice it to stop telling people it works, because if the scientists got a hold of it, they would be ruined.

Hmm....


But I digress. I told none of this to my principal, instead I uttered "ill stick with real medicine" and turned my back and ran away from him and his sewing kit (OK, he wasn't actually going to do the acupuncture himself....he could have used toothpicks, at random places in my body, as a real study did to test it out...perhaps he could slap me with his shoes.....his hat...but I digress...all equally as effective as the pins in your skin theory). Its not that a few pins in your face, with nice music in the background and a soft light on will hurt you or give you a chronic illness....but it is the negating of other cures in lieu of this that can, will and has for myriad people caused harm or death.


Anyhow, that got my blood boiling, my skeptic-metre flashing, the scientific nerves peaked... and then I went out to buy oats. I need me some oats.

And found these curious claims. Something totally got lost in translation...totally!

G'day.

click on them to get a better read. Worth the time!

Green Island

As usual, click on a picture to make it enlargenated. Yes, elargenated.

A train (Taiwans finest), a plane (a 20 seater) and an automobile (scooter) got us to, and around, Green Island this weekend. Green Island - Lu Dao - is an island off the south-east coast of Taiwan that is about a 15 minute flight , 40 minute ferry ride, 2.5 day swim away from the main Island of Taiwan. It is dripping with historical and biological wonder, enough to keep anyone busy for the entire weekend. And, yup, we were busied....slowing only to, um, let the wildlife have their way on the road....

Political - It was the site of the White Terror prisons of Taiwanese (Chinese military rule period) history in the mid to late 1900's, where political dissenters, human rights advocates, artists, pro-free speech advocates, outspoken political pundits, anti-government thinkers, university professors, lawyers, poets... were taken to to serve time in hard labour, re-education to side with the communist party and total segregation from all friends, past lives. This was actually the lucky option...the real biography of this prison system reads as follows "political advocates and those opposing the matrial law of the Chinese government who were not executed for their politcal crimes were taken to the prison system on Green Island". The prison now stands as a human rights memorial, with the prison itself a place you can enter, explore, and read about the 40-ish year hell that was Oasis Villa on Green Island.

Biological - Where to begin? An extinct volcanic island, separated from the main Taiwanese island by enough space to force speciation (and the evolution of sub-phyletic endemic species, original even compared to Taiwan island itself); volcanic soil that is highly variable across the island, from red to yellow to grey to black, but all sand and exemplifying the deterioration of volcanic rock; lush tropical forests in the lowlands, arid spacious forests on the mountain peaks; tide zones (and thus extensive tide pools) that host a different array of biodiversity on each side of the island; amazing plants, bugs, flying critters, barking deer, vines, spiders (massive!!), etc.

And, of course, all of this on an island you can scooter around completely in about 30 minutes. Super small, densely packed with biological and geological wonders, diverse and utterly amazing. Its hard to put words to paper and try to describe places. It was not paradise, I would never want to give anyone that impression....of anywhere. But it is damn pretty, warm in the winter and quite slowed down compared to everywhere else on Earth. Yes, Earth. I said it.

Here is our weekend:

The Sun was beating down on us for, lets say, 70% of the time, cloudy and a spittle of rain for the rest. Nothing too wet, but neither was it too hot - just perfect. During the summer this island leaves you sopping wet from just sleeping, let along walking, hiking or eating, so it was a nice change to experience it during the winter for the first time. Extinct volcanoes, lava soil, lush tropical forests, dry ground and a wind that could, literally, take the scooter away from under you (or us...on that hill....turning the corner....yowza). Green Island at its best.

We started in Taitung, Friday night. It is a one hour train ride from Yuli (where our home is...kinda). We took a train, a taxi into town and settled into a nice little hotel for the night.

In the morning we woke early, walked through the market stalls, peered at the veggies and the fish, the clothes and the herbs, and sat and watched the sunrise and blanket the city in heat with a cup of coffee. Then..to the airport for our 8:20 am flight.

At the airport we had little time to kill, so we walked about...and the Taitung Airport is one of the nicest, prettiest there is around here so it was a nice spell of time. Then...into the feverishly windy confines of the sky! A bit of a scary ride, winds so strong, and landing was a bit of an ordeal. But, it was much better than we (I) would have fared on the ferry...known for its vomit inducing nature in the best of times, let alone such fierce winds. So, a choppy flight was a nice alternative in this case.

Landed.

Got our bags.

Left airport.

Rented scooter....the lady was a bit weirded out by us I think, decided to let us rent, and then tried to take us around the island. We had to part ways, forcefully, and pretend that we were needed somewhere....nice lady, but...um....I think she wanted to follow us the whole weekend. Not in our list of chores for the weekend!

Then, straight to the tide pools. Well, breakfast, coffee and a quick lap of the island, then to the tide pools. They, once again, gave us a long stretch of quality biological time. Critters of all sorts - brittle stars, snails, clams, limpets, crabs (dead and alive), vegetable species that I have no clue about...milky clear kelp looking things..., algae, flowering plants on the non-tidal areas of the bigger rocks, birds poking around for lunch (and avoiding our camera quite professionally), and of course the geological wonder of a lava/coral tidal zone. Absolutely stunning, and telling the tale of hundreds of thousands of years of geological and biological development, evolution and giving itself an identity separate from Taiwan itself, and the rest of Asia too. Pretty cool...secluded....

Lunch.

There is so much to see and do, so much to explore, on such a small chunk of rock. But, we focused on the heavyweights. A cross-island hiking trail fitted this quite nicely. It was a heavy uphill trek, but 3/4 of the way we saw....a deer! A pygmy barking deer. Not too common, but common enough...if that makes sense. It is only the 3rd or 4th one we have seen in all of Taiwan, so it toally sparked our interest. We caught a glimpse of it, noticed that it ran into the woods and said region of the woods was a definite 'deer' area - it had deer trails, bedding areas, scratching areas, well trodden zones....it was deer city. So, we waited. Then sneaked into the woods deeper, climbed a tree and waited some more. Then we thought to do a little deer chasing, so we treked into the forest, through the vines and spiders following the min-trails left by the pygmy. Deeper, deeper, we heard its call...deeper, deeper, saw scat, heard its call again...deeper, deeper..then we hit the wall of dense tropical forest, and it was approaching unpenetrable. So, we waited some more, tried a second trail, found no deer...and returned back to the main trail. What a totally awsome little sidetrack! What started as a slight meander into the woods turned out to be the highlight of the weekend...adventure and exploration has its way on us, it seems.

Dinner.

Apparently "Sea Mushrooms" are nothing of the sort. They are, instead, the flesh on the top of the heads of flying fish. They actually do, though, look like mushrooms when they are prepared on a plate with sprigs of basil and hot peppers...lesson learned. Also, this one dinner joint electrifies its fence to keep birds away. Not something to lean on to take a picture...lesson learned. Or, not something to grab afterwards to test your 'electrified' hypothesis. Nor is it worth trying for the next 20 minutes to get your dinner parnter (Crystal) to touch it to see how they feel if they grab it...it wont work. But it's worth a try.

Grabbed a few drinks, headed to the beach to watch the sunset and pine away the evening hours listening to the surf beside a lighthouse, watching the lights of Taiwan in the distance illuminate the evening and chat about life. Fierce winds, chilly evening, but perfect.

Sleep....sleep.....

Wake....wake.....

Coffee, porridge, the usual. We went on another little hike up a hill (an old military outlook) that was home to myriad goats and the place of, perhaps, the best views on Green Island. So, we took pictures. Many. And found a bug that looked like it was made of velvet. Weird. Green velvet. We also returned to the military turrett where snipers would sit and wait for ocean-faring enemies. It is an honestly awsome outlook, so it makes sense that in times of war it is used as such. This is a very tangible part of Taiwan - so much of the infrastructure is due to necessity, and not due to peoples wants. A trail? You better bet that it was built for military purposes or as a link between mountain tribes many years ago. A bike path? You better bet that it was built as a transportation route between two fledgling villages. And so on... . Here Crystal looks out of the sniper pocket, a place that many nervous 20 year old Chinese soldiers once peered out of and hoped that they would make it through the day alive....

After lunch it was to the Prison, mentioned above, and a long appraisal of Taiwanese history, then back to the tide pools. This time we went to the oppposite side of the island and saw totally different critters. Evolution....you beautiful thing you.

And then, Le Fin du Monde. Well, the end of our day, at least. A caldera, long since dormant and had the erosive power of time to take it down a notch, but not without leaving clues to its past. Now it is both a viable fishin area, a killer beach (that is very hard to get to so it is basically not used at all) and a view of views.

Green Island. Fucking beautiful.

Now, back to work.......