For one stretch of red, the mountain detour is worth it

The car climbs spiralling up to Aowanda, the altitude rising inch by inch, the ears blocking once and clearing again. The air slipping in through the window gap grows cooler and cooler, carrying damp earth and the clean scent of some conifer's resin. The green that filled the window starts to take in a little red, and higher still the red grows and grows, as if someone had added the colour stroke by stroke along the mountain road.

This is the Aowanda National Forest Recreation Area in Ren'ai, Nantou. Taiwan lies in the subtropics, and maple-viewing was never this island's affair; yet Aowanda holds a rare, intact stand of native sweetgum maples, forcing the temperate idea of momijigari, red-leaf hunting, into a mid-elevation valley — so from November to January, on this subtropical island, there is a patch of temperate autumn earnestly turning red.

The true red is not at noon, but just after dawn breaks, or when a rain has just stopped. Light slants into the maples and the red deepens, almost unlike orange; fallen leaves underfoot are wet and soft, giving with a muffled press, none of the north's crisp crunch. On the suspension bridge an old man with a camera on his back stood a long while at the centre, not shooting, just looking; following his gaze, the whole sheet of red lay quietly across the valley below.

Beyond the maples, this park rests on a whole expanse of mid-elevation broadleaf forest and over a hundred bird species. The stream murmurs low at the valley floor, birdsong drops from some unseen tree, cutting clear through the cold air. The dawn air is cold and clean — one deep breath and the chest goes cool, the mind a few degrees clearer. The step slows without noticing — not from tiredness, but from being loath to finish this path too soon.

The wind comes in gusts, the maple leaves fall in gusts, onto shoulders, onto an open palm, pausing a moment before the next gust carries them off. A leaf pinched up to look at: its veins like a small open hand, the edges already dried to brittleness. The whole forested mountain is quiet enough that one's own breathing is heard clearly — a quiet almost impossible to own in a city.

No need to hurry. The virtue of this place is precisely that it is off the main itinerary, a stop one would go out of one's way for. What I remember in the end is not only that red, but the quiet of the whole forested mountain on a December dawn. I think, taking this detour up the mountain road, what you carry away in the end will be this too — not a photo of red maple, but that long-missed quiet in which even breathing can be heard.