Taitung, a Hundred and Seventy Kilometres Long, in No Hurry to Be Seen

There are landscapes that announce themselves and landscapes that simply go on, and Taitung is one of the great goers-on. For something close to a hundred and seventy kilometres it lies pressed between two absolutes — the Pacific on the one hand, the wall of the Central Mountains and the long trough of the Rift Valley on the other — a county squeezed so thin and drawn so far that to drive down it feels less like arriving anywhere than like being handed, mile after mile, more of the same magnificent room. I have known coast roads in Wales and in California that behave like this, opening and opening; but few of them will let a single blue ridge stand at your shoulder for half an hour together, or let the clouds loaf along quite so idly overhead.

Nothing here is in any hurry to be admired. The famous openings are real enough — the balloons going up off the Luye plateau, the shoreline, the unforced tempo of the town — but the pleasures that keep you are smaller, and set deeper inside all that space: a market smelling of swordfish and new rice, a shop unbolting its shutters at its own pace, a mountain colour holding along the horizon like a note that will not fall. The sky is what most visitors carry home. The ground is the better story — the paddy, the coast highway, the singing that comes up out of the Amis villages at festival time, and a slowness that has less to do with idleness than with sheer length, for stretch any day this far and it learns not to rush.

It is a county easy to mistake for scenery. But the grain of Amis and Puyuma life, the long geography of the east coast, and the tempo of farming in the valley have between them kept something here that most beautiful places mislay, so that the harvest festivals and the summer balloons and the moon coming up over the water read not as attractions laid on for a season but as things the land itself has extended into time.

And it feeds you with conviction. The rice, the wood-smoked swordfish, the mountain greens, the custard-apples heavy as fists — nothing showy in any of it, and all of it arriving on the palate with a countryman's solidity, the taste of a place that grows its own and sees no reason to apologise for it.

Leaving, you run north or south along the very coast that let you in, the mountains keeping station on one side and the Pacific on the other, and Taitung takes its own unhurried time about seeing you off. It is the length that stays with you afterward, the sheer unhurried length of the place — a country so long that, somewhere along the way, you had quietly given up any intention of reaching the end of it.