Why the Cat Village?

A friend of mine who heard of my imminent trip to Taiwan told me that I should visit the Houtong Cat village, sending me this link from Tripadvisor. One of the great things about traveling alone is that you do not have to answer to anyone else’s needs other than your own. I looked at the page and within a few minutes determined that this has got to be a village that is to be visited.

(The thing that is not so great about traveling alone is that … you are traveling alone and there is no one with whom to which you can share the experience. But such is the nature of solo travel.)

I did not think much about the difficulty of getting out to the village though and as the day for me to visit rolled around, I realized that I had not thought much about it. I had the slight concern that maybe it would be that easy. Perhaps I would have to get a cab and then drive into the sticks! Or rent a car or something. In the end though, I found the travel arrangements to be really simple. I will say it again: Taiwan’s public transportation system is truly a modern marvel.

Getting There

You start out by taking a train trip (not the high speed rail) out there. Starting from the main train station in Taipei, it takes about an hour, which sounds like a whole lot (especially to the Taiwanese themselves) but to me, the person who has to take the CalTrain, it is virtually nothing.

The train itself looks a lot older than the High Speed Rail and it certainly offers a lot less legspace. It feels about 20-30 years old, whereas the High Speed Rail train has got to be less than 10 or so. You can tell because when you go into the bathroom the toilets are just holes (I did not take photographs of those, sorry). Even so, the train ride is smooth and comfortable. It has a vintage, old-time homey feel.

(I like that the train windows have curtains. That is the sort of nice touch that a train in the US can’t provide because there would inevitably be some drunken heathen tugging at it, stripping it off, and then wearing it as a Roman toga around the train.)

The most troubling issue I had was when to actually get off at my stop. The lady on the announcement horn speaks relatively quickly and while occasionally she does a double-call (English and Chinese), her English is not that great. Getting lost is usually ok, but today I had a bit of a tight schedule, needing to get to Kee-lung city in Taiwan by around 6. I needed some way to track my progress. This is where I should mention an interesting app that I picked up. Before I left, I came across Nokia’s map application, Here. I would highly recommend it for any sort of future travel. You can download specific countries (Taiwan for example) and even without a mobile connection (and on airplane mode), your iPhone is able to pinpoint your location - how it does that I have no idea. With this app, I was able to track my way towards Houtong.

I think there is something fascinating about watching the progression of the surroundings as you travel outside the cities and into the sticks. You at first see sights of urban sprawl, with towering apartment buildings.

But as you get further and further away from Taipei, the landscape visibly changes until you get sights like the one below. It reminds you that even though Taiwan is one of the most developed places in the world that there are still places out there on that tiny island that remain relatively untouched by man.

I saw other villages on the way to Houtong. They vary in terms of their urbanization - with big blocky buildings amidst large patches of green vegetation. Some of them seem almost as if they are struggling to beat back the encroaching strangler vines of nature, about to be swallowed up by the native Taiwanese jungle.

In perhaps another life, when I have more time, I would like to visit these villages and experience everyday life there. What do these people do for a living? How do they pass their time? Do they have a lot of friends around them? Are they happy with their lives in this tiny settlement that few other people would think twice about other than this random American?

Alas, I don’t think these can be answered. On to Houtong Village.

The Village Downtown

As soon as you get off the train and hand your train ticket to the middle aged lady manning the station for inspection, you see a cat.

Just kidding. There is a real cat here too at the station, getting petted and fawned over by all the visitors to the village. She (I am going to refer to all cats here as girls but I really have no idea what gender they actually all are) is black and white and extremely chill.

The train station has a very big map that I cannot read at all but have posted here for posterity. This reflects the village’s general trend of adorable cat-oriented materials. Many of these anthropomorphized cats are incredibly cute.

The village itself is bifurcated by the train station. One half is kind of like the downtown. It has a plaza and a bunch of different shops and stores. Some of them sell food while the others sell trinkets. They are all heavily populated by the “kitteh”.

These shops offer touristy trinkets that you can buy for your friends. If you continue on, you can enter the village’s city hall. The city’s original angle when it came to tourism was to give people a sense of what it was like to live as a coal miner back in its coal mining days. The city hall/museum has photographs of coal miners and a sample of coal from its now defunct mine. You can also visit the now fenced-off coal processing plant.

It is in literal ruins so I would not recommend you go in there. The cats seem to have no problem with it though. I saw a few ducking inside.

While I appreciate the hard life that the coal miners had back then, it is not what people are coming out here for. Still, it is worth looking at and pondering over. Come for the kitties, stay for the crippling modern-day guilt for our ancestors.

The Village Terraces

There is a connecting bridge that takes you over the tracks onto the village terraces, the name I gave for the part of the collection of old homes situated on the cliffs of the valley. The landscape is very dense with vegetation and while a few individual homes have been converted into shops most of them have remained residential areas.

These homes have solid metal doors that they left wide open for ventilation during the duration of my stay. I had visited in the mid to late afternoon, when the sun was at its peak and most everyone was wilting under the heat and humidity (including as you will see, the cats themselves). You can peek in and see what the inside of people’s houses look like (spoiler alert: they look like any other Taiwan dude’s home). They do not seem to mind. For the most part, the villagers are nonplussed by the gawking visitors (or the kitties in their midst). I think they are over it.

The village terraces have a haunting, back-to-the-basics look about them. The homes are super simple and look old, about the same as when they were first built. And occasionally you would find tucked in between two standing homes the stray ruins of what used to be. It makes me wonder what happened to cause them to simply demolish the house and never bother with building anything else on top of the bricks.

The fellow tourists seemed to have come from either the city of Taipei or its surrounding suburbs. They are right there with you snapping pics of the kitties, maybe petting a few too, and frequenting the shops. Occasionally they can offer some unintentional humor like this one below and her horrendous excuse of a “meow”.

They range all sorts of types - middle aged women in cute kitty hats, young high school couples out on a shy cannot-look-at-each-other-in-the-eyes date, and hip mid-thirties couples with baby strollers unable to get away for more than a night. They don’t really bother you. I followed a few and let them find new paths and places to go.

Overall, there is no denying that this village terrace section is stunningly beautiful and a perfect tourist trap. The funny truth of it is that this idyllic scene, which seems to come right out of a cheesy Asian drama flick, is itself another show for the tourists. It appears that the actual residential area of the village - where the shopkeepers live and all - is situated across the tracks and the river far away from the tourists.

I tried to cross over and snap a few pictures but it appears to be a totally normal urban collection of flats and suites. Nothing out of the ordinary and certainly nothing as breath taking as the views you see back on the terrace.

The Cats

Of course I should say something about the cats. They are absolutely adorable and tame. As I mentioned, you start seeing cats the second you pass through the train gates and into the village proper.

Many of the cats pictured here have collars, which indicate that they are owned and cared for by the village. They tend to be the friendliest, cutest, and healthiest looking kitties. The ones without collars - true strays - are super shy. I don’t have a lot of photographs of them and the ones that I do are blurry so you won’t see them here but I assure you they do exist.

Maybe it is because I arrived at the time of day that I did (when the sun was at its peak and the humidity was at its worst) but it seemed like the cats were absolutely uninterested in even wasting the energy to bother thinking about us. I’d be the same too if I were born with a big thick coat of fur surrounding my body.

Beyond just laying around with their legs splayed about, they had a funny habit of cozying up to stone walls - which I presume were cooler than the surrounding air.

The cats are very comfortable around you and good thing too because the tourists have no shame when it comes to getting right up in their grills even as they are doing important hygienic things like licking their nether regions.

Despite the heat, there still are some absolutely beautiful cats that did a fine job of mugging for the camera. I loved this photo below with its stunning background view. The un-cropped version has a much broader view of the valley terrace behind. Where in America can you get a shot like this?

The eyes on the one below are piercing into my very soul. I actually have like a dozen images of this particular cat, just trying to get its attention and look at me. Caught it for a briefest of moments.

There is no need to try to feed these cats so don’t bother bringing any. They are already more than well-fed. There seems to be bowls of food laying around all over the village and the cats just run over to eat whenever they get hungry.

The cats have gotten into every part of the village. I did my best to photograph each one wherever I may have found them but sometimes they manage to find themselves in the most inaccessible ledges, corners, and crevices. They seem to think it a game and regard you with a curious pique when you manage to invade their hidey-holes.

The cats’ tendency to chill out under benches as well as out in the middle of the footpaths means that it is fairly likely that you might step on one’s tail. You should be careful not to trip over them. I have had to execute a few ballet-like maneuvers to avoid doing so.

And for our final shot, let’s put some tongue into it.

Back to Taipei

There is a regular train that brings you back from the village about every 15-20 minutes. For a place out in the sticks, this is great. Imagine if you had to take the BART from Walnut Creek where the train comes once every 45 minutes! You would have to ride with a whole bunch of high school youths though, I warn you.

All in all, I took 341 photos in Houtong Cat Village. If you would like to page through the raw, unedited data dump, here’s the link to the Flickr album.

Below is the last photograph I have of Houtong Cat Village. I came for the cats but loved it for the beautiful sights as well as the calm and peaceful life the people seem to live there. I hope to come back someday (with better sweat-resistant clothing).