STEVEN’S BOOKS AND APPS
Taiwan for Culture Vultures (app)

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Steven Crook, who’s lived in Taiwan for 20 years, grew up in England. He’s been writing travel and other kinds of feature articles for newspapers and magazines since 1996, and has had three books published. His most recently works include Taiwan: The Bradt Travel Guide and Taiwan For Culture Vultures, a smartphone travel app released by GuideGecko.

You’ve recently moved from freelance journalism into both guidebook and guide app writing. How did your experiences on these projects differ from your normal routine?

My routine didn’t change that much. I do most of my writing in the morning, a bit in the afternoon, and very little or none in the evening. Usually I’m working on half-a-dozen different things. Usually, that means about four articles and maybe two or three themes which, hopefully, will become ideas that win over an editor. With the guidebook and the app, I was still working on half-a-dozen things – just one was significantly more time-consuming that the other five. I’m used to putting aside and then returning to projects; for a feature article, six months from initial idea to publication isn’t unusual. Something I now make sure happens (and this is very important for anyone trying to make a living from freelance writing, I think), is that my projects cannibalize each other. Sizable chunks of both the guidebook and the app were based on old articles (the information had to be updated, of course, and rewritten to suit the format). Before the guidebook hit the shelves, I was selling feature articles based on the research I’d done for the book. Doing the app wasn’t so different. When I’m on a multi-day research trips, the schedule is more like this: Write from 5am to breakfast, then outside until 9pm or so, then write for an hour or more before sleeping.

App writing is a very new genre of writing. How does it differ from other forms of writing?

When I began talking to GuideGecko and examining the structure of their apps, two things appealed to me right away. The first is that each entry can be as long or short as you want – as long or as short as the destination deserves. With a print guidebook you’re always struggling to stay within the overall word limit, and to maintain some kind of balance between the various places and regions covered by the book. With an app you needn’t worry about this, because there’s really no size restriction. Secondly, you can add links from one attraction to another, or to background articles (my app has one about popular deities, for instance, and another about personalities in Taiwan’s history). This saves both writer and reader from repetition. The entries on individual destinations are leaner and meaner as a result.

I write a blog, but rarely read them. After writing a guide app, would you consider using one?
Absolutely yes! An app is almost certainly going to be more up-to-date than a printed guidebook. It’s also a lot lighter to carry around, and cheaper.

What are some of the better sights from the Guide Gecko app that you’d recommend?

I enjoyed writing about some new attractions which opened after I’d finished researching my guidebook. Houtong Coal Ecological Park offers a bit of history and a good outdoors experience. The Magic School of Green Technology showcases sustainable architecture, a field in which Taiwan leads Asia. If you’re interested in Taiwan’s religious culture and traditional arts, then Tainan and Lugang are must-sees.
You write for some print-only publications like inflight magazines, and some web-only publications. How do you feel that these two markets differ?

Web-only publications seem to pay less than print newspapers and magazines. I assume that’s because almost anyone can set up a website, whereas a print magazine requires more investment and certain skills, such as building a distribution network.

Last year you finished your first guidebook and this year your first app. Do you have any big plans for next year?

I’d love to write another book, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. (That’s a hint to publishers: I’m available!) Certainly I’ll be updating and expanding the app, and continuing to write feature articles.

A performance at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre | Photo: TGIGreeny

London’s Incredible Venues

London has some of the best-known entertainment venues in Europe. Some famous for their history and others for their modernity. Some of the best-known theaters in London include the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and London’s theatre district (around Shaftesbury Avenue, the Strand, and the West End) includes dozens more. For Opera and dance one would visit the Royal Opera House, the London Coliseum, Sadler’s Wells, or the Savoy. Some of the most popular music venues include the world-renowned O2 Stadium, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wembly Stadium, and many, many more. It’s safe to say that in London one can find a world-class act to suit any taste.

Bloc Party at the Somerset House | Photo: Luke Robinson

Theatre, Plays, Concerts, and More

As families flock to the city for the holidays, it will be best to book tickets early. Whether you’re looking for the eighties rock stylings of Canadian rocker Bryan Adams (playing at the 02 Arena this December) or Duran Duran (who will also be playing the venue this month), Legally Blonde the play, or an exhibition focusing on Degas’s portrayal of ballet in his paintings, there will be no shortage of cultural events in London this holiday season.

Lead image by stumayhew

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My friend Garret Clarke went to Sri Lanka for two weeks this summer to shoot a reclusive and rarely photographed tribe called the Dambana Vedda, but he came back from the trip with five sweet series’.  Personally, I like the train ride series the best.  But his outdoor studio portraits of the Dambana Vedda hanging out in the jungle wearing loincloths and carrying spears are pretty damned NatGeo.  And the tea farming series is just plain pretty.

He just finished doing the post processing and has posted them to his website. He’s also looking for writers in Sri Lanka who are looking for pictures for their stories, or would like to write one based on his.

Check them out: http://www.garretmclarke.com

We Canadians are overwhelmingly proud of our country. Why shouldn’t we be?  For all of its shortcomings Canada has often (although not always)  shown itself to be a fair country, especially when dealing with civil disturbances and inner conflicts.

The police reaction to the recent G20 protests in Toronto, however, was shameful.  They used excessive force dealing with protesters that were overwhelmingly peaceful and arrested hundreds of protesters that showed no aggression whatsoever.  Consider the following videos.

In this video, the police attack a group of protestors without provocation (except for singing our national anthem).

And in this video the police surround and close in on a large group of protesters, also all exercising their rights to non-violent protest. The don’t allow anyone to leave and then arrest them.

It is a sad day for Canada.  Tonight I will go out to a Canada Day party and, like most Canadians, drink a ridiculous amount of beer.  This time though, I will not drink to celebrate.  I will drink to forget.

Below is a gallery of pictures from the 2010 Yenshuei Fireworks Festival.  You can navigate the gallery using the thumbnails, by clicking on the image, or by using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

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I tipped back my cowboy hat, which I had brought to wave in the air while riding the crocodile, and sized up the dinosaur-like behemoth. His head looked like that of a crocodile, but his body looked more like it belonged to giant mutant toad.  His belly spread out on the pavement beneath him like a green leather sack of water.

“Are you ready?” I asked my girlfriend.

“No way.  You first.”

“It looks pretty safe.  I don’t think he can move.”

I pointed at the crocodile and asked the owner, Chiu ‘the Crocodile King’ Hsi-ho, “Ke yi zuo ma? (Can I sit on it?)?”

He nodded.  I took a deep breath and started to walk towards it.

We were in the Crocodile King Animal Farm, a small zoo of exotic and mutant animals in a small town called Madou in rural southern Taiwan.

The crocodile that I was about to mount had been imported from Thailand two-and-a-half years earlier.  Since then he had lived on the farm in a children’s wading pool that was only about one meter longer than his body in either direction. His life consisted of eating, sleeping, and being sat on by Taiwanese locals so that they could pose for novelty photographs. He had gained 500 kg since arriving at the zoo and he was now so fat that he looked like he couldn’t even walk.

He was, in fact, so fat that he may have been a record breaker. Later I did some research into famous large crocodiles. The heaviest crocodile I was able to find an official record of was Yai, a 6m, 1114kg, Thai croc. I also learned that some extremely large wild crocodiles could possibly weigh over 1300kg, but that crocodiles of that size would normally be over 6m long.  So, if the crocodile in the Crocodile King Animal Farm was, as the sign on the wall claimed, 1250 kg and only 5.2 m long, it’s very likely that he was the fattest crocodile in the world.  He sure as hell looked like he was.

As a person who likes animals and…uh, you know, freedom and stuff, I was disturbed by the croc’s cramped living space. But thinking about it later, I realized that I have lots of friends in North America who live in mobile homes with abnormally large televisions that have made it their life’s goal to eat as much and move as little as possible.  So, as much as I hated the idea of the croc being forced into this lifestyle, it seemed possible that the he may not have minded the arrangement.  If they laid him across a paisley couch in front of a TV and stuck a Marlboro in his mouth, he would have somewhat resembled my friend’s unemployed uncle who bought beer for us in high school.

Christine and I took pictures of each other sitting on the über-obese amphibian and I waved my cowboy hat in the air.  Afterwards we felt ashamed. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Our day really took a nosedive a few minutes later when Chiu gave us an extra show.  There was a smaller female crocodile living in the adjoining pen.  Chiu shook and kicked her until she defecated in fear.  Then he scooped up the feces with a large metal pan and fed it to the giant croc.  After the croc finished eating, Chiu turned around shot us a game show host smile and an enthusiastic thumbs up.

“Xie xie (thank you).” We stuttered and walked away, dumfounded.

The Crocodile King Farm is a walled compound on about three-quarters of an acre.  The middle is occupied by large pond smothered in lily pads and encircled by a trail lined with animal cages and pens.

We followed the trail around the pond.  We saw a lama and a miniature pony in a fenced-in area the size of a small studio apartment.  In another small pen was a group of Formosan deer. In a separate cage, with barely enough room to turn around, lived an albino deer. One aquarium contained a cute-as-a-button little two-headed turtle. There were several varieties of exotic birds including an ostrich, an emu, a cassowary, and an oddly large number of featherless mutant chickens, all living in areas too small to afford much movement. The most incredible birds, however, were the mutant ducks, which had clumps of feet growing out of their butts like bouquets of webbed yellow flowers. They were super cute.

On the final leg of our tour we encountered the most disturbing of the mutants: the mutant goats. The two of them lived in separate pens. One was a three-legged cripple with horns growing out its front left foot. The other had a bone-like protrusion the size of a wine bottle growing from the center of its chest. While we stood there the three-legged goat jumped up on its hind legs and got its horned foot stuck high between the bars of the cage.

As I watched the goat wrestle with its entangled deformity I wondered about its life prospects beyond the freak farm.  The goats had probably come from normal Taiwanese farms. Had they stayed on those farms they’d probably have been killed to prevent them from passing on their abnormalities to their offspring. Perhaps the Crocodile King Farm had saved the goats from prejudicial slaughter.  Perhaps it had also saved the featherless chickens and foot-butted ducks.  It was a comforting idea.

Opposite the goats was a door to a hall lined with windows looking in on various exotic reptiles and snakes.  Each cage occupied about the same area as two single mattresses laid end to end.  Some of those cages contained single crocodiles. Some contained several lying a heap.  The latter looked kind of like the pictures they showed us in high school of the mass graves at Auschwitz—haphazard mounds of flesh. After seeing that we left.

As a traveler, I try to think of exhibits like the Crocodile King Farm as cultural artifacts. I mentally filed the Crocodile King Farm with the other unseemly attractions that tourists flock to: Thai ‘ping-pong’ sex shows, Filipino cockfights, the Spanish running of the bulls, and so on.  However, since our visit I’ve thought a lot about the ethics of the Crocodile King Farm and I’ve concluded that, despite it’s obvious ethical shortcomings, it’s neither good nor bad, but lies in a moral grey area.

I offer the following explanation.

If we want to live in a world where people understand and respect nature, it’s necessary to have places where people can experience nature’s infinite variety.  Pictures and words simply cannot replace the psychological connection that occurs between two conscious beings that occupy the same space at the same time.

The problem is that, as a business, the Crocodile King Farm’s ability to provide quality accommodations to animals is limited.  If customers demanded to see larger, cleaner pens, management would have to comply. But they would also have to raise their prices. Would the farm’s patrons, mostly residents of rural Taiwan, be willing to pay, say, double the current price ($6.50USD per adult) to ensure the humane treatment of the animals?  Sadly, they probably wouldn’t.

Unfortunately, ideas about the ethical treatment of animals in Asia are very different from those in the West.  Taiwan’s government is aware of the Crocodile King Animal Farm and it does nothing.  The same can be said of local Animal Rights NGOs. That’s a situation one can do little to change.  But, if I had my way, the government would subsidize and farm so that conditions could be improved and fair treatment of the animals could be ensured.  That way the farm could continue to educate people about the strange and fascinating creatures that inhabit our world, and, hopefully, offer those animals a place they can live happily.

Although my trip to the Crocodile King Animal Farm wasn’t exactly what you would call fun, it was educational.  I learned about nature’s limits, or, more specifically, her lack thereof. That night lying in bed, as I thought of those animals in their tiny cages, I imagined my favorite of them roaming free.  He was in a swamp. He plodded awkwardly along the shore and slid into the water. In the water he moved quickly and gracefully.  He plunged downwards looking for food and zoomed into the depths. I had first thought him to be a freak, but now I saw him for what he really was: the product of millions of years of natures genetic tinkering—a natural being existing among all of the other haphazardly created genetic lottery winners. Then he returned to the surface, popped out of the water, and sat there majestically, bobbing up and down, the water streaming off his snowy white feathers. He’s a pinnacle of evolution in his own way, that cute little butt-footed duck.

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This year Spring Scream featured more than 200 bands on seven stages in three days. No reviewer, no matter how diligent, could watch more than a small selection of the acts. So, rather than pretend that I was able to see everything and write a review of the whole festival, I’m going to write about those performers that I actually saw that really nailed s#*t to the wall.

I’ve lived in Taiwan for several years and know the music scene fairly well.  Most of the bands that I expected to kick ass, totally kicked ass. There were also several bands that I didn’t like before, or hadn’t heard of, that surprised me. Also, many aspects of the festival other than music were awesome.  So, I’ve written three best of Spring Scream top-three lists: bands that kicked ass that I expected to kick ass, bands that took me by surprise, and non-musical aspects of Spring Scream that made it fantabulous.

Read the full article on Waakao.com here: http://waakao.com/en/component/content/article/39-rokfeature/653-my-spring-scream-2010-the-top-three-top-threes

On February 28th, 2010 I was in Yenshuei Township in southern Taiwan facing a several hives containing tens of thousands of fireworks set to fire into the hundreds of people that were crowded around it–on purpose.

If one thing can be said for Chinese people, it’s that they love fireworks.

I climbed atop a concrete wall about 25 meters away to get a better view. I knew that I would be more exposed than if I were in the crowd on the street, but this was a much better place from which to photograph and record the eruption of fire. The only barrier between me and the the enormous hives of firworks, which combined were about the size of a semi-trailer cut in half, was a telephone pole. I heard a crackling and fireworks began to shoot up into the air. Then there were several ear-popping booms, like cannons going off, and with each boom a pair of large yellow fireworks rocketed into the night sky like anti-aircraft shells. Then, the noise faded away. There was a short silence, and the crowd began bouncing.  Everyone was hopping from one foot to the other. There was a  loud screech and fireworks began firing in all directions–including into the crowd. I pushed my body against the telephone pole my iPhone in one hand recording the spectacle on video, my Nikon D80 in the other snapping pictures as fast as possible. I could feel the fireworks glancing off of my hands and arms.  This is the video that I shot.

The  Yenshuei Fireworks Festival, also known as the Beehive Fireworks Festival, is an annual celebration commemorating the end of a 17th century cholera plague.  During the celebration, which takes place on the 15th day of the first month of the lunar year in the Yenshuei township, sedans carrying Guan Yu, the Chinese god of war, are paraded through the streets from temple to temple where enormous hives, which contain up to 60,000 fireworks each, are set off, shooting fireworks rapidly in all directions.  Festival goers clad in heavy clothing and full-face motorcycle helmets crowd around the hives to stand in the barrage of firworks.  When the hives are ignited everyone jumps up and down to prevent fireworks from becoming lodged in their clothes and burning through them.  Despite the precautions, people are hurt every year.  The worst injuries occur when a firework enters a reveler’s helmet from below and explodes inside.  Many people wrap a towel around their neck to cover the gap between the helmet and their neck, but many still do not.

Probably the most common problem, though, is the one from which several of my friends suffered.  They began vomiting after inhaling too much of the acrid smoke given off by the firecrackers.

The Yensuei Fireworks Festival is Taiwan’s answer to the running of the bulls.  It’s very popular in Taiwan and getting more popular every year.  To bring in more tourist dollars officials have been making the festival bigger and bigger. The strategy has paid off.  An estimated 350,000 people attended last year, a huge increase over an estimated 50,000 just a few years ago, and a huge tourism boost for a township with a population of just 28,000.

A friend once told me a story about how the festival was conceived.  I can’t guarantee its veracity, but it’s an interesting story nevertheless.  Sometime in the 17th century Yenshuei was stricken by a cholera epidemic that lasted 20 years. That part of the story is widely accepted to be true.  Desperate and frustrated, the mayor of the town enlisted the help of a spirit medium.  The medium told the mayor that ghosts inhabiting the city were responsible for the epidemic (ghosts causing disease and misfortune is common in Chinese folklore).  The medium suggested that the city invoke the help of Guan Yu, the war god, and set off massive numbers of fireworks to scare the troublesome spirits out of town (using firecrackers to scare ghosts is also common practice). The plan worked, and now the Yenshuei township celebrates every year by shooting millions of fireworks and deliberately at spectators. I’m don’t quite understand the logical connection between scaring ghosts and shooting fireworks into crowds of people, but there are many facets of Chinese culture that confuse me even more.  Take for example pickled chicken feet.

This year was my third visit to the festival, and I noticed some differences from years previous.  First, I noticed many men in the streets who would wait until several revelers in protective gear were standing nearby.  Then the men would hold one end of a string of fireworks several meters long, light the other end, and then run down the street towards the crowd dragging the exploding string behind them.  When they neared the crowd they would start swinging the increasingly short exploding string around over their head.

I saw one man finish this display by bolting into a nearby doorway with the last of the firecrackers, scaring the bejeezuz out of everyone in the house.  He came out bellowing laughter, his face bright red.

The second new display I noticed was mainly performed by teenagers. They would wrap themselves up in strings of fireworks and then set them off.  Below is a video of a young guy I met lighting himself up.  Please be patient watching the video. He had to abort his first two attempts and move out of the street when firetrucks with their sirens on came roaring by.  The third time, though, was a charm.

Here is a picture of two friends wrapped in fireworks, just before they light themselves up, and as the fireworks exploded.

Although the Yenshuei Fireworks Festival is still relatively unknown, it’s destined to become a famous cultural attraction.  It is, as far as I know, the only festival of its kind in the world.  It is completely unique.  It’s loud, destructive, wasteful, and dangerous.  It’s Taiwan’s running of the bulls and it deserves the same international attention, and I hope to make sure that it receives it.  I hope to popularize it in my first novel about expatriates in Taiwan the same way Hemingway brought attention to the running of the bulls in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.

If you like this article, be sure to check out my Yenshuei Fireworks Festival 2010 Photo Gallery.