Instagram already showed me this waterfall

I went there anyway

It’s a crowded Saturday afternoon. Bhav Sharma and I are in line to snap a photo of ourselves in front of the Shifen waterfalls - the widest waterfall in Taiwan. To get here, we woke up early, got on a bus from Taipei, then switched to what seemed like the slowest train ride of our lives to Shifen. And we weren’t even done. Because from there we had to trek about 30 minutes under the sweltering sun till we reached the splashing waters along with a slew of sojourners.

Which is how we got here. Waiting patiently in a makeshift line for our turn to hurriedly snap a photo that won’t have any other tourists in our shot and will be good enough to look back on.

Truth be told, having the same picture as everyone else is lowkey revolting to my photographer self. There is no uniqueness to the shot. Same frame, same composition, same smartphone as the fifty people queuing behind me. It’s tacky. This is why I don’t have many photos of myself in things and instead try to find some twist for a landscape shot because that’s inherently more “me” than a typical tourist shot (she thinks she’s better than everyone else).

There’s a second thing, too. Before the night market visits, I got pulled into what every modern tourist does: I looked at the guides. The Reels, the blogs, the Google Maps that my friends sent (thank goodness for organised friends). By the time we got to the Ningxia night market, I was spotting stalls like checkpoints in a video game. There’s the Taiwanese sausage from the video. There’s the fried squid. I wasn’t really discovering anything. I was just following the walkthrough.

And yet.

When our turn finally came at the waterfall - when Bhav raised her phone, we squeezed our faces in front of a view the algorithm had already shown me a dozen times - I didn’t feel revulsion. I watched a grumpy kid being dragged into the frame by his parents, and some aunties doing the classic thumbs up in front of the waterfall.

And I thought: in a world of high-speed internet, 4K YouTube videos, Dolby Surround Sound (All Around You), VR… we still drag ourselves, sweating, to the real thing. We still want the tacky photo in front of the waterfall. We still want the iconic angle of the Ah-Mei Tea House in Jiufen. We still want to eat the famous shaved peanut and coriander ice cream just because we’re there.

We still want to feel alive.

Which isn’t the same as saying we get the awe of when people first discovered the wonder of the waterfall. I can’t stumble into Shifen the way someone stumbled into it fifty years ago, because fifty years ago nobody was filming it at golden hour with a DJI drone. What I can do is go to the spot anyway, knowing it’s been seen, and let the being-there do the magic that my little tiny glass squares couldn’t.

My small resistance to all of this lives in my back pocket. A Field Notes book I pull out at train stations to collect the little rubber stamps they leave for tourists. Business cards taped to grid pages with masking tape. Cash spent, recorded in pen and highlighted in bright blue so it doesn’t get lost in my salient scrawls. In a week where I could generate anything digital I wanted with Claude Code, I am becoming stubbornly drawn to the analog - the tactile, the smudged, the slow.

And even that, I know, is a tourist cliché. I’m not a non-mainstream tourist. But I still choose to go.

So yes perhaps 90% of what I did in Taipei is what everyone else did in Taipei. I stood in the lines. I took the photo. I followed the signs that experienced travellers asked the tourism board to put up, pointing toward places that many people have stood before me, and many will stand after.

I don’t think I’m better than any of them. I think I’m one of them. And on a hot Saturday at the widest waterfall in Taiwan, with a photo printed on a thermal printer that folds in my Taiwan-dedicated Field Note… what a great experience it is to be a tourist. What a great experience it is to be a human on this earth at this point in time.

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Update log:

• 🎂 I turned 30!

• 🤯 Discovered that my name is printed in Angie Wang 安吉’s book!!!

• 👩🏻‍💻 Shared my webdev Claude skills as a kit that’s free to download

• 🖊️ Learned that TWSBI (a favourite fountain pen brand) stands for Taiwan’s 筆 (bǐ = pen in mandarin). Mind! blown!

• 🔥 Rebecca F. Kuang’s Katabasis has really stayed with me since reading it. I didn’t go through literal hell but the story reminded me that the world - as hellish as it is - is not hell. And that the earth in its liveliness is so beautiful.

• 📞 Unplugged so much that I forgot how to join a Zoom call today. Life is good.

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