Back in Jiaoxi

Jiaoxi from our hotel windowOur Treasure Island Honeymoon, having left Taipei's gravity, has brought us to the hot-spring town of Jiaoxi in Yilan county ("The county next door", I once called it).  A few words on blog-book-project order are in order, because necessity is the mother of invention (and Zappa's Mothers of Invention shaped my childhood). 
The travel writer experience and creation cycle is a tricky balance. Many years ago I had the good fortune to travel alongside Michael Palin as he researched a small chunk of his book & TV show Himalaya, and was most impressed with his diligence, specifically with how he sat and took notes before dinner each day.
But Michael did his schooling in Britain, whereas I'm the product of City-As-School, the alternative high school in New York City that produced two of the three Beastie Boys, a band well known for taking ample time for creative stewing between musical projects. 
Cavern-themed rooftop spaSuffice to say that a) Stephanie, a good mid-western girl, is taking notes the old fashioned way (with pen and ink), and b) this blog may wind up being less than sequential, like a Vonnegut novel.
With this in mind, we have now been in Taiwan for nine days, and awoke this morning at a quite pleasant hot spring hotel called Tian Long Hotel. (Here's their website - the cavern-themed rooftop spa is quite groovy.)
I've been coming to Jiaoxi for more years than I can remember. One of my earliest visits was when I was still inspecting factories for a living, and it was to Jiaoxi (or however they were spelling it back in 1999), when I stumbled to town drunkenly after a particularly memorable drinking binge in Yilan City. I'd decided to make a game of stopping into every restaurant offering Japanese food for a small bottle of sake and a piece of sea urchin to see how far I'd get. (The answer, for readers interested in this sort of thing, was the bathtub of a hotel in Jiaoxi. The hotel no longer seems to be open, saving me from having to return to apologize to the maid).
Jiaoxi is known for hot springs, and was a favorite spot for the Japanese military (their appreciation of hot springs was one of their more benign traits in the early 20th century) during the occupation years, and is also one of mine. It seemed a natural first stop outside of Taipei for the journey, both for logistic and seduction purposes, since the main purpose of the trip is to get Stephanie to fall in love with Taiwan.
But Jiaoxi has changed much since I sought drunken refuge here on a dark evening in the late nineties. It has grown, upwards and outwards, with new high-rise buildings - some hotels, and some apartments - spreading out both north and south.
Jiaoxi, like many areas in Taiwan traditionally considered tourism areas, has found tourism to be a double-edged sword. The town underwent a major building boom to accommodate the rising tide of tourists from China during the Ma Ying-jeou years. But the steady stream dried to a trickle after the inauguration of Tsai Ing-wen last year, Beijing having decided to show their displeasure with the new administration by applying pressure on Taiwan's tourism industry, and now vacancies are high. To make matters worse for Jiaoxi's hoteliers (at least according to the owner of the Tian Long), many of the newer luxury apartment buildings on the eastern edge of town are filled with AirBnB rentals, putting further pressure on hotels both old and new.
Some say that Jiaoxi has lost its small town charm. Not Stephanie, though. Having just spent a week in Taipei (which she confessed to finding overwhelmingat times), Jiaoxi feels downright sedate to her.
Just another afternoon in Jiaoxi parkAfter checking into our hotel, we soaked our feet along with a few dozen other people in the public park next to our hotel before heading into town for lunch. Though seafood (and pressed smoked duck) are the area's specialties, I was enticed by a sign in the window of a hot-pot place advertising farm-to-table organic vegetables at a che dao bao  (eat until full) price of NT268. ) We stopped in, and were greeted by a youngish man lacking a farmer's bearing who directed us to a long table on which a wide variety of local vegetables was laid.
"Did you grow these?" I asked him.
"No, my grandmother did." The young man said, pointing to a wizened old woman clipping vegetables on one of the restaurants tables. "All the vegetables are from our family farm, 100% organic."
The meal was good and a welcome breath of wholesomeness after several days of extremely rich hotel fare at the Grand Hyatt (write-up of this experience pending), and the restaurant's farm-to-table nature fit in well with the theme of agricultural tourism, which, in addition to being a current buzz-phrase in Yilan, is also one of the themes we'll be exploring in Formosa Moon. That and puppetry of course.
More on all this later, in the book itself, to be published by Things Asian Press, 2018.  In the meantime, some practical information from this post, lest I be accused of neglecting my duty as a guidebook writer.
The Website for the Tien Long Hotel is in Chinese, but we got our room from Hotels.com for about USD$62 a night.

And here, a handy photo collage with Chinese name and phone number of the farm-to-table Hot Pot place in Jiaoxi.