The red line
(#4) 📍 Tamsui // at once familiar and strange
Tamsui is a seaside district at the end of the red MRT line running through Taipei. I went there on the penultimate day of my solo trip to Taiwan. Four days later, I would move back to the UK, leaving Hong Kong behind for good.
The trip had been mostly successful. I had made friends at the hostel and on various free walking tours, worked on my novel in cafés, wandered around the different night markets. A friend who had recently visited Taiwan had told me not to bother with Tamsui: she said it was like the outlying island of Cheung Chau in Hong Kong, only less interesting.
But by now I was running out of things to do. The name ‘Tamsui’ stuck in my head, making me curious. That morning, I had visited Longshan Temple, and the tour guide had spoken of a Chinese legend in which the little fingers of two lovers were tied together with invisible red string. Even if they didn’t know each other yet, they were bound together by fate. I thought of this red thread as I followed the MRT line from central Taipei all the way out to the coast, to Tamsui.
When I arrived, I bought fried chicken and ate it overlooking the sea. I walked along the promenade, beneath a drooping canopy of banyan trees, past statues of an old man praying and a cross-legged girl looking over her shoulder. Across the water was a mountain, with a few high-rises framing the shoreline.
The heat was intense and I soon turned inland, to streets of quirky souvenir shops; a church painted terracotta-red; a brick wall plastered with Chinese landscapes and calligraphy.
My friend was right: it wasn’t all that different from Cheung Chau. And as I wandered the streets, I found myself thinking more and more about Hong Kong: the mountains fringed with skyscrapers, the cheerful street art in Sai Ying Pun, the rows of banyan trees on Nathan Road. I took it all for granted now, but soon it would be unfamiliar - strange to walk in the heat and wish I were indoors, to see a mountain and think of home.
The following day, I flew back to Hong Kong. I changed trains at the red station in Central and got the blue line home.
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