It is a clear blue morning on Taiwan's southeastern shore. I'm standing at the foot of the dock in Fukang. A preternaturally pale middle-aged Taiwanese man wearing lipstick and eye-liner hands me my ferry ticket. It's my second trip to Green Island, home of Taiwan's once-feared political prison, and once again a transvestite is involved.
Two years before, I'd broken into the courtyard of the Oasis Hotel, the facetiously nicknamed political prison. Once a fearsome symbol of repression, it now stood in disrepair. I was prepared for ghosts, but nothing living. So I was doubly startled to run into Taiwanese Vice-President Annette Lu Hsiu-lien, with a television crew in tow. She spotted me before I could skulk back into the shadows, so I decided to make the most of it. 'Madam Vice-President,' I said, 'I'm a foreign journalist and I'm here researching a book on Taiwan's history.' She laughed.
'Then you must know I was put behind these very walls for advocating democracy.' Smelling an interview, I suggested it must be bittersweet to revisit the place where she had suffered. 'Oh, I suffered all right,' she replied. 'Room service was terrible!' Giggling came from her entourage, but the man behind the camera was less amused, grunting: 'Why is this foreigner on the set?'
'You have to leave now, darling,' the vice-president told me. 'I'm working.' It was then I noticed that Annette Lu's Adam's apple was bigger than mine. The tearful return of former political detainee to her place of captivity was a sham, part of a comedy sketch. The woman to whom I'd been directing my obsequiousness was neither woman nor politician, but a transvestite who made a tidy living impersonating the famous for laughs on late-night television. Perhaps the urge to cross-dress as women springs from the decades of jailhouse repression suffered by a large, confined, mostly male population. What a difference a few decades free from martial law can make to a once-uptight society.
Back to the present day, and my latest encounter with gender-benders is behind me, along with mainland Taiwan. It's low season on Green Island and, disembarking from the ferry, I have my pick of scooters. I score a 125cc Sanyang for NT$200 ($50) and the old woman renting the bikes doesn't ask to see my passport. 'Why bother?' she says with a laugh. 'You can't get the bike off the island.' Nor is there much chance of hiding it: circumnavigation takes 45 minutes on the one coastal road, which meanders like a drunken snake in pursuit of its own tail. It also offers some of the most gorgeous scenery in Taiwan: beautiful coves, lush windswept hills and rocks named after mythical animals and fairytale characters. The only other road on the island leads up Amei Mountain, a peak with a 360-degree view of the ocean.
Low season also means I have my pick of hotels. I settle on the Lu Yie Shan Zhuan, a yellow-tiled, newly built five-storey establishment overlooking scenic Kungkuan Cape, a steal at NT$1,000 a night. After a dinner of wild-deer hotpot at a nearby restaurant, I set off for the famed seawater hot springs on the island's southern tip.