Dan and Sachie are off to Taiwan for a 12-day adventure. Today it’s landing and first impressions.
DING DING DING! You’re a Winner! I didn’t know what to say. I stood speechless to thundering applause from a live studio audience and presenter in his tacky tuxedo. Through a shoe-dry mouth I choked, “I… I’d like to thank everyone who made this possible. Mrs Sachie.”
Slowly the mist cleared and I found myself back where I started, Arrivals at Taoyan International Airport, Taipei. The spinning wheel had come to a stop on… money. But wait, how did I get here?
Sachie is 50 today. The love of my life is no longer a girl and finally enters womanhood and has done Sachie’s favourite thing and boarded a plane for distant lands.
Not that far though, Taipei is only three hours away but we were up at 4am. Sachie is still on crutches from her hippo-attack so got wheeled around the airport by a bored teenager. Normally that would see us straight to the Air Oman lounge (proper Champagne, great food) but, in their wisdom, Airports of Thailand have dictated that we Priority Pass holders (and other programmes) must endure the Miracle and Coral lounges, no airline lounges for us. Disappointing.
Turns out we are departing from the new satellite terminal and it’s the first-class Miracle lounge. I didn’t see any statues spontaneously weeping or bleeding from their hands so I think the miracle-marketing is a bit overblown but it’s better than the one in the main terminal and the sparkling wine was decent if not remarkable.
One flight later.
Sachie got into a wheelchair on arrival in Taiwan and I’m just going to say this:
- The staff know what they are doing.
- Taipei is the most mobility accessible city I have ever seen.
- The airport put Sachie in a wheelchair.
- Handed her off at the airport train station and into another wheelchair.
- Then another wheeler and wheelchair on the local public transport, who groaned when she heard our destination and would involve a train-change but she got us to the lobby of the hotel. That’s end-to-end service.
But back to the airport. For a couple of years Taiwan was running a programme to drum up a bit of tourism, in the form of bribery. You sign up before departure (to Taiwan) and once you clear customs you queue up at a booth, flash the QR code on your phone and are invited to try your luck. It’s not gambling, which I don’t do, as you don’t put up a stake. You spin the wheel and walk away a happy winner or weeping loser.
It turns out that the programme was ending in a month and they had budget to blow so everybody was a winner. The prize? Hotel chits or cash. We’re not stupid and our hotels were already booked so opted for the filthy lucre. But it’s not cash, or gold, it’s a stored-value card. Ok, where can we use them? Trains, check, busses, check, 7/11s and participating supermarkets. Well that raises some possibilities…
The long and short of it, and it’s already long, is that each of us got a card with TWD5,000 on it. That’s about THB5,000 or USD150. Result. We will get back to the fate of these cards later. No wait! We immediately used them on the metro! Sachie’s obsessive planning is paying off already.
I’ve got to hand it to them, the Taiwanese really look after their old folks and mobility-impaired people. We were not the only wheelchair people on the commuter line and I saw more than one fellow driving his own electric one. Either there are loads of handicapped people in Taipei or they get out a lot. Or maybe both.
Another observation about the trains, they’re fun. The ticket barrier doesn’t go ‘beep’ when you go through, it’s a music sample. A piano trill for concession-card holders and something more subdued for us. Also, when the train is about to arrive, festive music plays and lights in the floor of the platform flash. It’s very civilised. I wrote in my notes that Taipei is “Tokyo-lite” but it’s more like an evolution than that. By the time we arrived at our hotel and our pissed-off wheelchair pusher handed us off in the lobby I was already in love with the place. We probably should have tipped her but we didn’t have any local cash. Didn’t need any with these cards in our pockets.
Taipei is clean, orderly and clearly rich. It’s not a big country but they have a high per-capita GDP and I’m impressed that they spend it on keeping things running and apparently helping folks out. More on that in later chapters. The room is nice.
The view is OK, it’s a forested hillside. There are a lot of these in Taiwan, from this height the fuzzy hills look like a landscape crafted the polystyrene and green floc that I would use to decorate model trainsets in my youth.
Speaking of model landscapes and train-sets this one looks pretty good but a huge fiberglass cat has sprawled upon it to air his balls. This is just out the hotel lobby and in the shopping centre… atrium? Forecourt? The tail waves back and forth. I would like to hang out to adsorb the intent behind this elaborate art installation but there is no time to lose, it’s on to a train to Din Tai Fung in Xinyi shopping district for Sachie’s birthday dinner.
A quick trip and we’re at the dumpling shop in a shopping centre basement. The place has a lot of American chains and a lot of Americans frequenting them.
The restaurant is highly automated, with a queuing system to get in, online ordering and a robot brings your meal of exquisite xaiolongbao, or soup-dumplings. But we couldn’t hang about as it was cocktail-time at the hotel.
Choking down the last of our dumplings we jogged to the lift and up to the lounge. Unfortunately, the lounge is a bit rubbish. No service, no scotch — only Jimmy-B, no sparkling and indifferent snacks. And it’s Sachie’s birthday! I guess we are pretty spoilt in Bangkok but this is a Courtyard so we’re lucky there’s a lounge at all.
We got up at 4am and I’d only had a few hours sleep at night and another one on the plane so by this time we were very tired. It was time to change into our matching pyjamas retire early, because tomorrow was a big day. We need to be first in line when Taipei zoo opens.
