Brief thoughts from the middle

Five months is by far the longest time I’ve ever been off work since I started working full time. Before that, the longest time off I’ve ever had was the six weeks between leaving Paris and starting a new job in Berlin.

I think I needed start and end dates to have something to hold on to, but this was all purely arbitrary. I’m about halfway through the initial time period I gave myself for this trip, but I also have the complete flexibility to decide that I still haven’t reached the halfway point of my journey. So this may not be it, in the end.

This idea is a little scary but I’m getting comfortable with it.

Today is my last day in Taiwan.

A stranger I met in a bar in Bangkok told me that a week was more than enough to see the entire island. He couldn’t really understand why I wanted to stay there for an entire month, and I couldn’t either, to be honest. I didn’t know back then if this would be too short or too long, but not knowing has been my thing on this trip, so I didn’t worry too much.

My bike trip took me all the way to the south of the island, and I could have gone back to Taipei in about three hours, but decided to stop in Kaohsiung, Tainan and Taichung on the west coast instead. I stayed in each of these cities for a couple of days, with very little research to back my decision, and no schedule or to-do list. I just wanted to be there and see what life was like in smaller cities.

Staying in places fewer people visit was weirdly enjoyable. Nothing outstanding really happened while visiting these cities, and I’m glad I slowed down and stayed for longer than needed to experience that.

My sense of direction was defeated at the Taipei Main Station.

After getting off the train from Taichung, all I wanted to do was exit the station, and get back to street level. From here, I knew I could easily find my way to my next hotel, just a few of streets north of the station.

It wasn’t even my first time being in this station. I was there less than a month ago, and I didn’t remember it as a particularly traumatic experience. I didn’t exit exactly where I wanted, but at least I was able to exit the station. This time, all I could see around me was the access to the MRT, the access to the airport link, and the platforms to other regional and local trains. The exit signs might might have been there, but for some reason I just wasn’t able to spot them. I walked around in circles for a good fifteen minutes, before being able to see the daylight.

I couldn’t help but think about how foreigners must feel when they need to exit or transfer in Châtelet-les Halles or Alexanderplatz on their first visit in what is a new country to them.

Online travel content feels off.

The necessary “research” about where to go and what to do in different locations has impacted what platforms put forward, and I don’t like what I’m getting. I don’t like being the ideal target of “how I spent a day in [city]”, “unmissable sights in [country]”, “become a content creator and finance your travels“, and other types of viral content that make people like and subscribe. I don’t feel like I get a lot of value out of it, but other travellers may feel differently about it.

I now see a clear difference between content produced by travellers and content produced by local people, and I think I prefer the latter, even if the content may not be labelled as “travel content”. Maybe another way to put it is that I’m way more confident in telling you about Berlin than telling you about any of the places I’ve visited on my trip so far.

Most of the online travel content seems to be written by someone who’s travelled there (and likely based their content on other travellers’ experiences and content), and not by someone who lives there. By definition, I definitely have something in common with travel content producers, and their content should feel more relatable to me, but for a reason that I’m still trying to explain, I think switching up the roles would make a ton of sense.

Thanks for reading one way flight! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.