The Other Side of the World

When I was a kid, my mom used to say that China was on the other side of the world. She said if you dug a hole deep enough, straight through the Earth, you’d pop out in China. Turns out, that’s not quite how it works—if you start digging from North Carolina, you’d actually end up somewhere in the Indian Ocean. But hey, she wasn’t exactly giving a geography lesson. What she meant was that China felt like the farthest place you could imagine.

And in a way, she was right.

We’re back in China—or technically, the Republic of China, on the island of Taiwan—and everything really does feel different. The language, the people, the pace of life. It’s a whole different world.

I thought about Mom’s description today when we visited Taroko Gorge, which you might call Taiwan’s version of the Grand Canyon. It has dug down into the earth through marble mountains a couple of thousand feet. It’s not as massive or as deep as the American one, but it’s still a stunner. For six million years, a river heavy with silt has been grinding its way through solid marble, carving out a landscape that looks almost unreal. Take a color photo, and it still comes out black and white—the marble is that stark and dramatic. The Buddhist monks put a monastery here because they figured that way out in this canyon nobody else would bother them. Guess they’ve had to rethink that. This gorge has become quite an attraction. Honestly, if the Renaissance sculptors had known about this place, they’d have camped here for centuries with chisels in hand.

Makes me wonder: if the river keeps cutting long enough, will it finally make its way through to North Carolina?Read more