6/28: Bunun Tribe Leisure Farm, Rice Fields

 Today was a lot of driving as we visited the Bunun Tribe Leisure Farm and took a pull car ride through rice fields on our way to Hualien. 

The Bunun Tribe is one of the mountain tribes of Taiwan. They are one of the largest remaining tribes and were among the last tribe to be forced out of the high mountains by the Japanese during their occupation. Taiwan was occupied by Japan from 1895-1945 and the Japanese spent a lot of time bringing the aboriginal tribes out of the mountains to "pacify" them. In doing so, they caused the tribes to lose their traditional ways of life and the entire social structure. The Bunun have fought hard to keep those traditions and this Leisure Farm is one way they do it. The younger generation is working on learning their history and preserving their language and stories. 

This is one of the few days on the trip where I wore my hair down...the humidity was either great for my curls or just made them a giant mess, today was a pretty good day for them! I had full on corkscrews by the end of the day. 

This sculpture represents the struggle to preserve culture. The man in the front is the grandfather who is showing the traditional culture. He wears the clothes and shoes of the old days, and on the beam are symbols representing the planting seasons. The saying of the Bunun people is that you know them by their calfs (from all the mountain walking) so his calves are enormous. The man at the back is the modern Bunun, more concerned with modern technology than tradition. He carries a cell phone and wears Nike, and the symbols on the beam are mathematics and English. It was a very powerful piece. 

These are other examples of the artwork around the village, I loved the little creature especially. It was carved into the base of the remains of a chimney near the animals. 

Traditional homes were fairly open but protected firewood and food. The more firewood a person had in their home, the more wealthy they were because it showed they were prepared and had time to think about the future. A home that was left empty without firewood was considered to be up for grabs and anyone could move into it. The skulls are the animals that were killed for food, and they had a lot of dried vegetables and spices hanging by the fire. 

The goats were adorable, one of them in typical goat fashion was climbing the roof of the hut in their pasture. 

This carved snake was at the entrance to the Farm showing the importance of snakes in their culture. 

After lunch we went outside the restaurant and took a ride in these pull cars. The tractor was pretty funny, at one point he didn't have enough power to get up the hill so we all had to walk up and then re-board. They also called for a kid from town who spoke a little English because at first we got a great tour in Chinese, which no one understood. 

They were in the midst of the harvest for rice, so about half the fields were full of plants and half were cut down. It was interesting to see the flooded fields and the process of harvesting rice. 

 I don't quite know what was going on with the giant fish here, but you could walk down through the gullet to a dead end at the bottom. It was kind of funny. 

Mangos in the trees! These were green mango which is not an unripe mango, it's a different type. They're really good, probably my favorite new thing I had on the whole trip. We may have picked a couple and I ate mine before heading to Vietnam. It wasn't quite ready to eat but it was still tasty. 

This rock wall reminded me of New England. It was mortar free and looked so similar to the old walls built as the rocks come up out of the ground on farms. I'm guessing it was made in a similar fashion. 

We took a long drive out through the rice paddies and ended up at this particular tree. It's very famous in Taiwan because a commercial was filmed here. It became a popular spot with tourists, to the point where after it was knocked down in the typhoon of 2014 they put it back up, splinted up the broken limbs, and have specialists fly in from Japan a couple of times a year to see if it is healthy. They happened to be there when we were, so it was interesting to see them measuring and checking it out. 

When walking through rice paddies in the rain, one must always have a photo shoot with friends.