Botel Tobago

      The reality is not quite what the tourism folks portray. The Yami all wear Western clothes; the g-string, so fascinating to tourism boosters, I saw only on the very oldest elders. It may be that, like other partially assimilated cultures, the younger Yami don their traditional garb mainly for the benefit of tourists. Walk through one of today's Yami villages, and you will see simply another tropical village of the developing world, with modern but generally poor buildings, motor scooters, and wandering dogs and pigs. A partial exception is Yehyin Village, where one section is still composed of the traditional underground houses of stone. In Yehyin also was the only traditional tower veranda I managed to find.
      The Yami language has done better, though perhaps not for long: adults spoke Yami among themselves and Chinese to me, but I heard children speaking Chinese even among themselves. There are still road signs in the Yami language though (I would love to hear from you if you or someone you know can translate this one). Still, the canoes remain, for offshore fishing, and the staple crop, taro, still grows in stone-walled fields. I even found a genuine local cultural event -- a youth basketball tournament held at the village school in Red Head, with teams from each of the six villages. I stayed for part of the opening ceremonies, but was eager to see more of the island.
      As to the rock formations, they are nothing about which to get excited, although Taiwanese like to be photographed standing in front of them. They are simply lava rock eroded by the sea, and, with imagination, can vaguely look like their names. Much of the shoreline is jagged coral rock, indicating past geological uplift -- the present beach was once a submerged coral reef. This fossilized reef still had a fossilized giant clam shell wedged into a crevice, and several kinds of coral could be seen forming the rock. Shells were sparse, but I did find a few, including a nerite with a purple mouth. I tried a brief swim, but given the jaggedness of the coral rock, and the fact that I did not know for sure whether hazards like stonefish might be present, I did not stay long. These are not very good swimming beaches.

      So, given that the Yami culture, as sold to tourists, is fast becoming a thing of the past, the beaches lackluster, and the rock formations not very interesting to the Westerner, why do I love Botel Tobago?

      My fondness for Botel Tobago is personal, coming from the earliest yearnings of my formative years, and perhaps not understandable to most readers. I grew up on books about the flora and fauna of faraway places, many of these books with color photographs and/or paintings of wild landscapes and creatures. These were my inspiration throughout childhood, into adult life, and are the reason I studied biology at university. Yet in the course of my travels, every place I visited turned out to be a lot less wild and unspoiled than I had imagined it, the hand of man lying heavily on the land even on the tropical frontiers.
      Then I reached Botel Tobago. Here, at last, was a place such as I had feared existed only in books. All settlements are on the coast, no roads penetrate its rain forests, and the tourist maps show only one trail. Even along the cultivated roadsides were curiosities like these black flowers, related to our dayflower and the familiar wandering-Jew. But the Vagabond knows how to navigate off-trail, and is used to poking about in less-accessible places.
      The southern massif is called Dasenshan in Chinese, which translates as "Big Forest Mountain." The name fits. In the deep ravines of Botel Tobago, finally felt that sublime peace I had always imagined Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace felt in the remote places they explored. I noticed even the tiniest things of nature: the perfect urn-shaped mud nests of a potter wasp, tucked into nooks in the rock; the little gunmetal-blue beetles in the act of reproduction; the freshwater crabs in the barely-trickling stream -- genuine freshwater crabs, not the crayfish which go by that name in some places.
      I was looking in particular for Araceae -- that family of plants encompassing the familiar arum lily and Jack-in-the-pulpit. Botel has its own endemic species, Scihsmatoglottis kotoensis (Koto seems to have been the name of this island during the Japanese occupation between the World Wars). In my search for this elusive species, I explored the trail to Heavenly Lake, and a slot-canyon or two off to the side. One canyon was the same coral rock as the beach, but further inland, the substrate became lava rock. If there were any differences in vegetation between these formations, it was not visible.
      I never did find the Schismatoglottis kotoensis. Instead, I found several other Araceae, including Homalomena philippinensis with an abundance of white blooms, visited by clouds of Nesiodrosophila flies. Although my search for Schismatoglottis was unsuccessful, I was still able to gather enough notes to publish in Aroideana -- a small journal, with a circulation of probably no more than 500, but still, peer-reviewed and considered primary literature. This was my first contribution to science, and I owe it in part to being in an obscure place where less scientific work has been done.

      For some strange reason, travellers to tropical rain forest areas often express worry about venomous snakes, even though these are among the least-likely hazards to encounter. Probably the movies have much to do with it. Nevertheless, I have seen at least one on almost every trip to the tropics. Botel Tobago was no exception, as this bamboo viper took its ease not far off the trail. Having worked with snakes before, I knew that a snake can strike no more than half its body-length away; so, I simply stayed further back than that as I watched the viper. Most snakebite victims were messing with the snake in one way or another before being bitten, so I just watched and did not bother it. Eventually, it crawled away into the forest. This was the largest wildlife I saw, despite the apparently nearly pristine interior of virgin rainforest. Small islands -- with a few notable exceptions -- seldom support populatons of large animals.

      And what of the Yami? Are they doomed to the fate of countless other indiginous peoples across the globe -- become assimilated, marginalized, or extinct? What are we to make of the motor scooters, concrete buildings, Chinese writing, and New Taiwan dollars? When the children of my generation come here, will they still find a distinct Yami people? Or will Botel have become a poorer version of mainstream Taiwan? Will the traditional ceremonies (and g-strings) have become historical museum pieces, relics of a dead past? Will Yami culture have become just a kitchy tourist attraction, like the horrid little wooden figurines of the canoes sold in the souvenir shop?
      Fortunately, at least some of the Yami knowledge will be preserved, at least for those who can read Chinese. Botel Tobago, Yami, and Plants records an anthropologist's researches in Yami ethnobotany, with pictures of the plants, and accounts of the traditional and current uses. We may hope that the Yami may live on other than just in books like this.