mists

An unexpected journey, the tomb sweeping holiday upon us, a surprise trip down to Hualien and the Taroko national park. So an early morning ride to the bus station. The metro's quiet once again, it's early and a public holiday, but even so this isn’t expected. The bus station’s the same, hardly anyone here, so few travelling that the earlier bus is half empty and so we clamber on board, out through the becalmed streets until we leave the city, heading east and south.


The road remains quiet for the first couple of hour before things change and the journey becomes an endless sequence of jerks, pauses interspersed with small movements, a traffic jam began at around 0100 this morning, a line of cars twisting slowly across the hillsides, tail lights static in tunnels while a three and a half hour journey takes almost six and yet, on arrival, the place is quiet. Shops are closed, streets almost empty, the visitor center for the park containing a smattering of people, not the flood which would be expected, the pandemic lingering, unspoken, upon the edge of everything. Stopping for a coffee, an oddity, flavoured with mango for some reason and then we wander off towards a trail for a wander. It's too late for a long walk and the weather, if not inclement is singularly lacking in sunshine but it's the kind of day that a forest trail holds a certain appeal, the sounds and scents a balm upon the weariness of the journey.


There's mist rising towards descending cloud, slopes and apparitions floating between, a rising path leading into secluded heights. Unable to resist the final climb to the trail end I ditch my backpack and continue alone, a dank figure drenched in sweat and condensation as the landscape vanishes around me, trees extend a few branches stretching into the white, a huge banyan clings to a rockface, roots falling through air towards the slope below. It's something about mountains, the scale of ages realigning perspective, reminding us of how fragile and small we are in the scheme of things and yet there's always something else, an undercurrent of ego that we, in these few years within which we move through, are an audience of sorts, spectators of the spectacular array of wonders which surround us, intertwined participants in something so far beyond our capacity for understanding that we forget our place and swap symbiosis for predation. But, up here, in the solitude of clouds the world seems a long way away, these thoughts for another time...


Earlier, in a moment that I was soon to regret upon the extended bus journey, I scanned the news, I really have to kick the addiction, caught the headline that only 2000 frontline nhs staff had been tested so far, shameful and idiotic but believable. The pantomime prime minister, Alexander de pifflepaffle (© John Crace at the Guardian) continues to vomit pallid soundbites in lieu of policy, the way forward supposedly, now, the path that he ignored weeks ago when the plan seemed to be herd immunity and mass graves to preserve the purity of that ideology which redefines humanity as merely a resource in thrall to the twisted psyche of the market. And then I began to wonder if it's all part of a cunning plan, could it be possible that a hitherto unknown descendant of Baldrick stalks the corridors of power? Allow it to spread reckoning that due to its demographic preference it might kill off a disproportionate number of Tory/Brexit voters and ensure that they lose the next election in the hope that some of the blame for both can be passed over to the next government - they managed to deflect the damage that they've done over the last decade, could they double up?