Surf & Ruins along Taiwan’s JinShan Northern Coast

Surf & Ruins along Taiwan’s JinShan Northern Coast

Surf & Ruins along Taiwan’s JinShan Northern Coast

Surf & Ruins along Taiwan’s JinShan Northern Coast

Coffee vans and straight-up surf shops dot the JinShan coast on the northern coast of Taiwan.  Just about an hour or so north of metropolitan Taipei, a stretch of solemn highway that snakes past nuclear generation plants and hill-top wind turbine farms forms a small surfing retreat.  

Perhaps the crumbling facades of  the dormant hotels in the JinShan region can be attributed to a summer that has not quite arrived, but regardless of commercial fanfare, the surf community here is reflected in the two surf shops I poked into—no fancy marketing posters, none of the commercial strongholds of the idea of surfing overshadowing the act of surfing itself.  Racks of wetsuits and cramped walls of boards arranged by length.  A fold up counter display that once housed Zinka sticks represented it best—-reappropriated to hold business cards of the surf shop.  The surfing lifestyle is just a faded poster here.  Shops aren’t for shopping—-they’re here to get sized up for the right gear just prior to getting sent toward the tide-break.

Coffee vans line the stretch of highways here and every few kilometers, an actual standalone building that doubles as coffee-shop and surf watch spot.  I stopped at one coffee house that crouched on the shore, a ghost of something that once stood in Santorini, itself waiting for a chance in the lineup, feeling like a home I once read about somewhere.

Here’s an excerpt from Brad Melekian’s terrific article, “Freedom,” an interview with surfer-turned-pro-turned-normal-surfer-again, Alex Gray.  He has a really introspective take on why surf lifestyle even exists as a journalistic form.  Like other means of written inspiration—-seeing others push and succeed in their own definition of success becomes that internal braid of energy that inspires readers, armchair surfers, and tourist wipe out artists to climb back on when we’ve gnarled ourselves into a reef bank, to paddle out one more time when our shoulders are already burning from an uneventful day in the lineup.  This immerse-interact-inspire experience of the reader with the idea of surfing really does evoke that “transcendent power” Melekian refers to.  Inspiring read.

“The celebrity profile is an almost unreadable thing. The reason this is true is because the writer of the celebrity profile almost always tries to take the life of someone whose special talent is really only a skill, and to turn the application of that skill into a metaphor, and to transform that metaphor into a lesson.  The celebrity isnt’ a person, that is, but rather a chimera upon which the writer suggests he and his reader might rest all of their hopes and fears, which is why the celebrity profile always ends on a hopeful upswing, affirming our collective human need to believe that redemption is always close at hand.  

The surf magazine profile is the same, only more so. Written primarily by a surfer, for a surfer, the surf magazine profile contains a certain dynamic between writer and reader regarding the meaning of surfing itself, and our abiding belief, as surfers, in the transcendent power of our surfing experiences. We write and read these profiles to confirm to each other that what we do in the water carries meaning, creating character sketches about people who havebeen fundamentally altered by the dact that they ride waves.  In this way, we’re affirming not just the profile’s subject, but the humanity of our surfing expriences. “

Consistent domination.