WHERE I LIVE IN ALISHAN

[BLACKCRUSADER]

Here are some youtube clips of chopper flights overr my home village in Alishan by one of the ROC's best pilots.

They wont allow many of the chopper pilots to land on our basketball court. The flight leaving our village you can see the roads below the vilage are completely covered over.

That pilot by the way, she's a real hottie. Also where the road bridges to my mountain home used to be shot from an overhead footbridge... and the main road up in Alishan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQkFj5sKQw&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFBnUenxM38

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms5FJJ6s_nU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzDX5mSt2AM&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyAczXbzHJ0&feature=fvw

[ROBERT MUCHA MAN KELLY]

As for mountain environment, I hope the gov finally passes a land use bill that has been languishing in the legislative for 6 years. Many of these villages won't and shouldn't be rebuilt. . Local people are morons unfortunately.

They'll try to come back. The gangsters they vote for will be more than willing to build new roads into the areas. What's the nicest looking building in any aboriginal community? The community centre where the chief works. The rest of the place usually looks like shit.

As for where are they supposed to live, well, they have to be relocated. The Taiwanese gov has been trying to shut down high mountain communities for years. There isn't any choice. If you don't understand the country you are living in I will be happy to take you around.

In any case, I'm not saying anything the least bit controversial.

1. A lot of mountain communities shouldn't be there as Taiwan is prone to landslides and earthquakes.
2. People continue to live and return to dangerous areas even when relocated.
3. Hundreds of aboriginal villages were relocated from the higher mountains during japanese and early KMT times.
4. Local village chiefs and politicians in the south are corrupt and too many have proven criminal records.
5. Aborginal communities are marked by their lavish public construction projects that do little to improve the community.
5. Rural people in taiwan continue to vote in gangsters, people with proven criminal records. This is stupid.

Lavish is a relative term in Taiwan. By local village standards some of the community centres, halls, "cultural centres" and arches are indeed lavish and certainty wasted funds. I can think of one centre in particular in that area that must have cost a pretty penny and sits idle everytime I have been by.

Sad to say but most aboriginals haven't the foggiest clue how to build a sustainable dwelling in the mountains.

[BLACKCRUSADER]

Local people are morons unfortunately.

What's the nicest looking building in any aboriginal community? The community centre where the chief works. The rest of the place usually looks like shit.

Sad to say but most aboriginals haven't the foggiest clue how to build a sustainable dwelling in the mountains.

Really. Well I will pass all this information back to our Village Chief. Certainly you wont be welcome in our village with comments like that. Or your comments that people can camp illegaly in Alishan on your say so. Or that the locals are morons.

[ROBERT MUCHA MAN KELLY]

Re: Alishan
by Mucha Man » 01 Dec 2011, 11:51

I was at Tatajia two weeks ago at an event sponsored by the national park. They said camping is permittable in the parking lot at Tatajia (not off the trails). We talked to some of the campers and no one mentioned needing permission.

I need to get back up to Alishan soon. It was just hammered when I was there doing research in 2010 and half the region was closed. Heard a lot of villages are trying to refocus themselves now.

[BLACKCRUSADER]

Re: Alishan by Mucha Man » 01 Dec 2011, 11:51

I was at Tatajia two weeks ago at an event sponsored by the national park. They said camping is permittable in the parking lot at Tatajia (not off the trails). We talked to some of the campers and no one mentioned needing permission. I need to get back up to Alishan soon. It was just hammered when I was there doing research in 2010 and half the region was closed. Heard a lot of villages are trying to refocus themselves now.

Really? Nobody noticed the signs all over the place forbidding camping. Actually after you were there we got calls from a park ranger at that time who is a relative of my wife's complaining about how the Tatajia car park was left with garbage all over it after some foreigner asked about camping there. He was told its not possible. So you asked other campers who were also getting "hammered". CAMPING IS NOT ALLOWED

It's no wonder they put up warning signs and MPEG4 camera's after people like you just decide what laws to ignore. It's why people get killed in rock slides.

This is the sign in the Tatajia car park. I know your Chinese is shit but you do read English yes? Its not like the signs are not hard to understand is it?

[ROBERT MUCHA MAN KELLY]

Like I said, I was there for an official event and we were told it was fine to camp. Not for us, but for anyone.

It's the same on the way up to Daxueshan. Officially the parking lots say no camping but it is allowed if groups behave themselves.

Anyway, it's Taiwan: you know we're both right. Even in Taiwan you'd be lying to say that the average aboriginal village is a good place to live, or raise children. Alcoholism is rife, as is domestic abuse, poverty, low education standards, lack of social mobility or opportunities. What's a government to do?

So while preserving native culture is in some sense a noble venture, it is in others a willful turning away from the very great problems we cause by allowing a traditional culture based on subsistence to try and co-exist with a modern society.

After Morakot though all we heard was aboriginals complaining about how the government was at fault and nothing about their own complicity in damaging the local environment.

[tainancowboy]

I shall never cease to be amused by the foreigners, of which I am one, who come to Asia, live here (or there) for a number of years, and still fail completely to grasp the delicate social/political/economical/cultural eco-system that have evolved here(there).

There are reasons for why things continue along as they do. Reasons that have scant to do with how "you" think it should be done Mr./Ms./Mrs. round eye foreigner.

I particularly enjoy chortling at the 'experts' chiming in with their ruffled feathers and social angst - Do get over yourself. This place existed before you and will exist after you.

Now go read Kipling...or something useful...for a change.

[JIMIPRESLEY]

I think the aboriginal people should set traps in Carrefour.

[ROBERT MUCHA MAN KELLY]

I shall never cease to be amused by the foreigners, of which I am one, who come to Asia, live here (or there) for a number of years, and still fail completely to grasp the delicate social/political/economical/cultural eco-system that have evolved here(there).

There are reasons for why things continue along as they do. Reasons that have scant to do with how "you" think it should be done Mr./Ms./Mrs. round eye foreigner.

I particularly enjoy chortling at the 'experts' chiming in with their ruffled feathers and social angst - Do get over yourself. This place existed before you and will exist after you.

Now go read Kipling...or something useful...for a change.

Is that the best you can do to against a Lonely Planet writer

I really enjoyed reading that. It was a clear distillation of the old Fcom right guard: it had Fred's snark; Chewie's great wind up...and miss; Tainan Cowboy's incoherence; all slathered with that special sour sauce you patented years ago.

Excellent work, sir. Now tell us what you really think of that racist diatribe? Are you okay with an ad hominen that stretches back to one's grandfather who worked as banker for the Nazis?

[BLACKCRUSADER]

We don't think much at all about you calling the locals morons. But hey if that's what you normally do in this foreign country then so be it.