Not long into my wife’s one year contract at a small school here in Penghu we both realized we were desperate to leave.
I know what you’re thinking: If this is a travel article, we’re off to a bad start. Travel articles are supposed to make readers want to visit the place being written about, and here I am confessing to wanting nothing more than to see Penghu shrink into a singularity from the window of a Taipei-bound airplane. But the reader will hopefully forgive a writer’s indulgence, with the promise that this article will elucidate as it complains.
Love at first sight is great inspiration for song lyrics; picking a spot in which to live on said impulse may not, however, be the brightest idea. Hence, that we fell in love with Penghu when we first saw it might well have given us pause. We’d come to Penghu to research the archipelago’s tourist-lure factor for a chapter in the soon to be released seventh edition of Lonely Planet:Taiwan. But in the back of my mind – and that of my fiancé – was a vague idea that if Penghu had enough on the ball to lure tourists, it might have enough to keep us there for a year or so as I finished writing the guide and began whatever future projects might come up the pike. When we first saw the archipelago, a sandy string-of-pearls floating on a sapphire-blue sea, we knew we’d found a contender. The shape of the main land mass – a somewhat mangled horse-shoe, thicker on one side, surrounding a clear blue bay – promised endless beaches to explore and long roads for bicycling. We were nearly sold before we’d even landed at Magong airport.
Early explorations did nothing to diminish our enthusiasm. The beaches – long strips of white sand butting up against ocean – were as tropically idyllic up close as they’d been from the air, and even in late October, the water was still fine for swimming. Beaches aside, we were struck by how culture-steeped the place seemed; every hamlet we passed seemed to have at least one temple, if not two. And importantly, Magong – Penghu’s only city – appeared to boast a strong enough local economy (based on a combination of fishing and tourism) to support numerous restaurants, a movie theatre, and a few English schools where my wife-to-be might find employment as I got down into the nitty-gritty of chopping up months of notes into the 80,000 words that would become my half of the Taiwan guide.
So we both said why not? to a year on these islands promising beaches, culture, and seemingly excellent weather. Landing a teaching job was easy enough for my fiancée, though it was the outgoing teacher who provided the first hint that our new island home might not be the paradise it seemed at first.
“Penghu is nice,” she told us as she packed her suitcase, perhaps a bit too eagerly. “But you’ll get tired of fish, noodles and wind before too long. Trust me.”
But before going past the halcyon early days of our year in Penghu and into the long months of near constant typhoon-speed winds, endless stares and culinary boredom, a reasonable condensation of the archipelago’s long and storied history – just enough to justify its being run in this magazine’s ‘travel and culture’ section – is in order.
(to be continued)
