One morning a few months ago we checked the weather app in the morning and learnt that we’d missed eight earthquakes overnight. There were two more before breakfast.
This was unusual.
Normally, we feel an earthquake once a week or so, though in reality there are hundreds every day. Most are too small for the app to record.
Sometimes, it’s just a strange feeling of queasiness, like you’ve spun around too fast, and one of us will say “was that an earthquake?”. At other times, the furniture will shudder, the bed will wobble as if sat on by an elephant, and the wine glasses will rattle a terrified tune. Only the decorative porcelain doesn’t move, but that’s because it’s blue-tacked down.
By now, we know the drill. When the shaking begins, one of us will run to the front door and open it wide. If the frame warped we might get trapped inside. Then we cower under the table until the rattles are over. If we are not at home, we have an agreed place to meet if the apartment with blue-tack has been reduced to rubble.
This was all new to us when we moved here and we’ll never get used to it. Even though the statistics show that the personal risks are small, and all Taiwan’s modern buildings have extra reinforcements, the quakes are unsettling.
They are not the only worry.
A few years ago, we woke one morning to the news that the island was about to be whacked by a “Super Typhoon”, though what they meant by super was unclear. We don’t think they meant wonderful. The “Beast”, according to CNN, had been hovering off the coast for a week, swirling ever faster, like a discus thrower preparing for the hurl.
Taiwan was the target. Packing wind gusts of more than 260kph it was no butterfly and it brought us fallen trees and bucketfuls of billowing rain.
And the volcanoes
There are other natural phenomena.
Last winter, we took a bus ride around one of the mountains north of Taipei. We got off with plans for a hike. As the bus disappeared around the bend, we noticed smoke coming from a puddle at the side of the road, and a curious smell.
When we spotted the hot pools of water belching gas behind the long grass, we realised the scent was of sulphur. The mountain we were standing on was part of a group of active volcanoes.
We found it a little unnerving to discover that all this bubbling and smoking was happening barely 15km from the city centre (and even closer to a nuclear power station).
About 30km further east, just off the coast, sits another volcano which generates clouds of white gas most days. You can take a boat ride to check it out.
Beneath all of them is liquid magma and, according to volcanologists, although they have been dormant for thousands of years the possibility of an eruption “has not been completely dismissed”. The nuclear power station actually runs safety drills just in case.
An upside is that there are lots of hot springs in the area and, thanks to the Japanese who occupied Taiwan for most of the first half of the 20th century, lots of hot spring baths.
One of the other great pleasures of living in Taipei is that you can take a subway train direct from the city centre to a small town in the north, called Beitou. You can rent a room with a private tub, or go to the public baths and relax in the steaming milky water that flows out of the mountain at an average temperature of 40ºC.
In the winter, when the air temperature is lower, you can watch the clouds of water vapour billowing through the trees as it rises from the river, steaming its way to the sea.
Last on the list of nature’s thrills here is the rain and the heat.
The weather app classifies the rain into four categories. First comes ‘heavy rain’ (like a massive end-of-summer downpour in Europe), and ‘extremely heavy rain’ (like a bucket of water being endlessly poured over your head). Then there’s ‘torrential rain’ (like trying to walk in a swimming pool) and, lastly, there’s ‘extremely torrential rain’, which is shown on the app in the dark purple of a bishop’s clothing, just to emphasise how biblical it is.
We have not experienced ‘extremely torrential rain’ …. so far.
And then there’s the heat. The summers here are hot. For months, the daily temperature hovers in the low 30s – and often reaches 35 or 36 degrees, with a ‘feels like’ of over 40ºC.
Thankfully, the winters are cool. There was even snow on the volcano outside the city last winter, and we climbed 1,000 meters to see it. After so many hot days, we thought it was super – though not in a typhoon sort of way.