The year 2021 started with a bang…of fireworks! In case Taipei 101 was not iconic enough, the colorful images that photographers have been capable of producing during these few minutes at the beginning of every year make for beautiful postcards in every souvenir shop. With many parks around the city, watching the fireworks is a very popular plan for the end of the year. The key is to either camp hours earlier in order to hold a good spot, or just find a less known, high place to relax, enjoy the lights, and let the camera do its job.
Yet another year without international traveling
It is a safe bet to say that the year 2021 has been like no other for the human beings in the world alive at this time. Words like “pandemic”, “social distancing”, “lockdown” have become part of the daily language by force since early 2020. As the editor of this blog, I have avoided such words, and anything related to the covid-19 pandemic for that matter, because after all, the focus of this humble virtual space is “budget traveling and photography” content.
What can I do, however, when traveling has been impacted so significantly by the spread of a virus for which we have no defenses to fight against, and rendered a catastrophe so global as this one? After years of solid growth, the tourism industry encountered this major roadblock that no one was expecting. Flight cancellations and travel bans from one country to another have become the current normal for two years now in the name of “flattening” or “bending down” the relentless curve of infections.
In a long list of losses of this pandemic, planes staying on the ground, I dare to say, is the least worrying of all. Many people have been fatal victims, and those who are still alive fight yet another battle on top of others they were already fighting. The hope of normality that has been so easily shaken so many times since the beginning of it all with the appearance of new virus variants and waves of infections here and there.
All those who crave for reaching new places, breathing foreign air, and regaining their strengths by finding themselves lost somewhere on planet earth, have found themselves forcibly deprived. Myself included, naturally.
A year for local discoveries. A time for Taipei City.
Many times throughout the year, I saw a sunset like this from the balcony of my apartment, saying to myself “I will take a photo of these lovely afternoon tones one day”. Finally, I found some determination to get my camera and shoot it right when the day was sinking into the night with pink-cotton clouds bidding it farewell.
Although most of the world struggled in such magnitude, Taiwan has remained a very safe place to be during the pandemic. This evident success is due to several factors. Partly because isolating an island from international travel is easier than controlling land borders. Also because of the notorious collective sentiment of the population (not to mention the place where this virus emerged from), and, very importantly, due to the ironclad restrictions for visitors entering the island.
Protecting the local population and economy with such intensity has certainly been a high cost to pay. Both outbound and inbound travelers of the island are discouraged to get on a plane due to the significant PCR test and two weeks worth of quarantine hotel fees to be paid in order to go traveling abroad or visiting the island. The time and money spent on isolating for two weeks when entering Taiwan have been the perfect filter to avoid overwhelming the much needed healthcare system.
The resulting phenomena is that travel enthusiasts in Taiwan, in their desperation to travel, are rediscovering these 36,000 square kilometers of territory with an enthusiasm that was given only to foreign destinations. Even people who did not travel much before are finally getting familiar with it. Throughout the year, the local tourism industry has benefited from this greatly.
During 2021, I had my fair share of internal traveling, combining one-day weekend road trips, multi-day mountain camping and normal hiking adventures. But I have put special efforts to have sensitive eyes for life within the city of Taipei. After all, living in a city and traveling to the same city can be two very different experiences. The intention has been to leave the routine aside for a few hours, and go back to see normal scenes with the eyes of an outsider. To make justice to all the amazing portraits one can find locally in the alleys, from bridges, lookouts, and landmarks. I did this exercise as much as I could in 2021.
Looking forward to the day of going abroad again in 2022
Like a tiny window to admire a landscape without gray buildings and moody weather, my sight escaped many times through that narrow free space that stretches far beyond sight available right from my kitchen window. On a day with good weather, the afternoon sunlight ignites the sky for a good half hour in tones of orange and pink until the soft purple sinks into the dark of the night. It constantly reminded me of the joy of traveling to distant lands.
The adjective “everyday” doesn’t have to be a synonym of mundane, boring, unattractive, or monotonous. It can be a vindication for the frequently-overlooked utter beauty that smiles so easily from any angle of the daily commute. What can be so easily ignored by commuters, can be exactly the photo that provides a window for the weary, located in distant latitudes wishing to go abroad and have a break from the extra challenges they have had to fight for two years of pandemic.
This is a collection of images from my everyday life in Taipei throughout the year 2021. A selection of images taken during my walks in the city. To curate it, I intentionally avoided any photo out of the city, whether road trip or drone imagery. This gallery is the product of the casual roaming around Taipei. To my surprise, I realized that I went out exploring quite a few times after the sun went down, playing with long exposures and wide apertures.
As many others, it is my hope that we can once more be allowed to travel freely where our hearts desire. This time, however, with a renewed mind, being mindful of the environmental impacts our traveling produces, and being thankful for the precious opportunity of being part of a foreign reality at least for a little while. Perhaps, as a silver lining of all this pandemic nightmare, this forced stop in the travel industry can also stop us from traveling just for the sake of traveling, and make us appreciate what we have and accept the lack of what we do not.
After the first two months of 2020 of a local sanitary emergency in China, it didn’t take long for it to become an epidemic that then evolved into a pandemic. International (air) traveling was the perfect “vector” for this swift spread around the world, and travelers and their plans were frontline victims. It was time to take traveling photography to a local scale.A traditional “Calamondin” orange tree found while hunting for photos within the alleys of the city. These are popular plants placed at the front door of apartment buildings, and their bright orange color is a reminder of the Lunar New Year celebrations across Asia.
Buildings that are hardly attractive are not a sight to look forward to in Taipei City, but oftentimes I forget that what looks ordinary for me as a resident, can result very appealing to the eyes that gaze from distant latitudes.
Christmas lights remain on display in many places of the city for a few months after the celebrations of December are over. I took this photo of a group of lanterns hanging from a tunnel made of overdue festive lights. With some experimentation with the refresh rate of the lights and camera shutter speed, the resulting image seems like a star cluster trapped inside some kind of cosmic tube.The unequivocal proof that spring has arrived to town is the vivid pink tone of the cherry trees scattered around the city parks and alleys. This happens between February and March (or so I have observed).I thanked myself many times this year for carrying my camera around even when not having anything in particular to take pictures of. Despite the rain and the extra weight on the backpack, I was happy to finally get a night photo of a store like this one, somewhere in Banqiao, New Taipei. The warm tungsten light and the distinctive Asian cramming of the products has always caught my eyes’ attention.The area around Taipei Main Station is full of scenes and angles for photography experimentation, day and night. I head east of the station, for this night street composition. The emblematic Taipei 101 is hard to miss due to its dominant height, standing as a silent giant overseeing the capitalist progress.Beimen (北門) is this historical building that once was the “north entrance” of the city of Taipei, when city walls were still a way of protection against foreign threats. It’s awesome to sit around and recreate those scenes of old, when people would cross those gates as part of their daily routines. These days, it is a tourist magnet, quite easy to find near Taipei Main Station. With so few tourists swarming the place this year, it was easy to find the right spot, set a small tripod, and wait for the right vehicle at the right time to paint this long exposure image at night.I have always had a fascination for back alleys or “nooks”. They forgo all the formalities, aesthetics and architectural style, to give way to a rather genuine and anonymous angle of the city they belong to. I realized that this year I found myself quite a few times around Taipei’s main train and bus neighborhood at night, famous for its lively and busy atmosphere.Between June and July, the setting sun aligns with the east-west streets of the Taipei street grid (unofficially known as “Taipeihenge”). Smart photography enthusiasts and professional photographers alike stop by for an hour or so in the afternoon, and roam around trying to get the perfect angle and capture this unique image. A popular pedestrian bridge is crowded with tripods that wait standing from as early as lunchtime. On a weekday, with fairly clear weather, I made it to that bridge and planted my tripod. From all the shots taken, this particular shot is the one that I liked the most due to its saturation of elements from corner to corner.
Not so long after a new park near my place was inaugurated, I had to get there and explore the area. I discovered this interesting composition, right where the mountains meet with the suburbs, that includes the hard-to-miss Taipei 101 skyscraper, the metro tracks right, and the light trails of one of the four-car trains that come and go along the brown line of the Taipei metro system.
Living surrounded by mountains definitely has its perks. This year, I tried to quench the thirst for exploration with short hikes, many times. Intentionally, I hiked all the way up at different times of the day to explore with different light conditions. This view of the city skyline was quite regular in every season. Being able to capture the glow from the streets reflecting upwards in contrast with the early evening was certainly a photographic achievement.Living in Taiwan during the ongoing pandemic made it hard to believe that in most other places it was an utter catastrophe during 2021. Besides a hiccup in May that made even the most reluctant companies send their employees back home to work remotely, Taiwan was something like a gold standard in containing the crisis. I can just wonder what would have been of most people’s sanity had we all had to stay indoors for longer.My best guess is that this pandemic will not be gone from one day to the next. Instead, it will gradually lose its grip as the years pass, and as we all get more educated about it, and more effective antidotes are developed. The buzzwords and the experiences will haunt us, however, for the rest of our lives. It is easy to imagine that it’ll be a story that we will share with other travelers once we start embarking ourselves on new adventures to distant lands.
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