日月潭萬人泳渡 SML Swim

Ever since I biked around the gorgeous Sun Moon Lake last year, I'd always wanted to return to swim in it.  Swimming in the mountain lake is permitted exactly one day a year, during the Mid-Autumn Festival Swimming Carnival 日月潭萬人泳渡.  From even the process of registering, it was no easy feat.  The swim is not open to foreign tourists, but technically foreign residents (me!) count as Taiwanese enough to participate.  Even then, I wasn't allowed to organize my own team as a noncitizen.  Since fifty thousand people travel to the only non-coastal county of Taiwan for the event, it was extremely difficult to find housing for the night before, even months in advance.

Due to COVID and other health diagnoses, our original team of seven was whittled down to a mere three. Abandoned last minute by all our Taiwanese friends, my two besties and I ended up winging it.  Matters were further complicated by an incoming typhoon, the first since I've been in Taiwan.  The tropical storm looked about six times as large as the entire island of Taiwan on the weather maps and was predicted to touch down on the exact day we were planning to swim.  The government had issued an open water advisory, but not a land advisory (when this happens, all the Taiwanese schoolchildren are overjoyed because they don't have to go to class).  The open water advisory warned people not to go into the ocean but did not apply to lakes, and amidst much national media coverage, the huge swimming event (which didn't take place last year due to COVID) was due to continue as scheduled.

My friends and I had originally planned to go to Sun Moon Lake early the day before to bike, but the typhoon made the windy mountainous roads way too dangerous.  So, the afternoon before, we headed out through an alternating rainy and sunny Taipei (the arms of the typhoon as they swung around across the island) to go to the bus station, each carrying a torpedo buoy, as would be required for the swim.

As a typhoon is incoming, sometimes surfers will still go out because the waves are larger, but this is seen as very selfish by Taiwanese society, because they are risking the resources and lives of the Coast Guard who might have to rescue them.  As three white foreigners carrying bright orange buoys larger than our torsos on the Taipei MRT during a typhoon, we felt very self-conscious.  Once we got to the bus station, we knew we were in the right place (and that others believed the race was still going to happen) because everyone waiting in line also had ginormous torpedo buoys.

We ended up taking a cross-country bus (think Greyhound but called 客運 here) to our hostel in a town named 埔里 Puli, a little ways from the lake.  In the rush to get off said cross-country bus at the right stop, I left my Kindle on the seat.  I was heartbroken at first, but in the miracle that is Taiwanese culture regarding lost items, it was returned to me within two hours at a bus depot right near our hostel.

That perfect mixture of luck and Taiwanese generosity set the theme of the weekend.  When I was asking around in the hostel for which public buses we would need to take to reach the lake, some kind Taiwanese people heard a foreigner speaking Chinese and took interest.  When they learned we were Master's students at NTU, the best university in Taiwan, where their daughter just so happened to have graduated with her Master's from the exact same department of public health, they started calling friends to be able to get us a ride.  It was a crazy pre-race morning as we rode in their car all the way to the start, along the mountainside roads, in the pouring rain, looking down at the gray lake we would soon be entering.

As we creeped towards the lake, the typhoon hurled away towards Japan, so the weather was actually much better for the bulk of the day, just slight rain on and off that was really only a brief drizzle by the time our heat was in the water.  The water temperature was perfectly warm, and I was comfortable the whole time.  Despite it being a literal typhoon, I still had a sunburn outlining the racerback of my swimsuit by that evening.

Race start

Arriving at Sun Moon Lake, we checked in, stashed our stuff in a hotel lobby (of which the staff generously took pity on us foreigners who didn't have a car, didn't have onsite lodging, and didn't have family/friends spectating), and took the ferry across the lake to the start.  Seeing a three kilometer-long continuous line of swimmers, each holding a torpedo buoy, really put the emphasis on carnival.  As foreign language websites put it, no other country in the world attempted to put on a swimming event involving tens of thousands of participants, many of whom do not know how to swim.  It was a spectacle of crowd control that only Taiwan could pull off.  As per usual, the emphasis was slightly more on photos than athleticism--we were the only women wearing racing swimsuits rather than long-sleeves, and one of few without a waterproof case for our phones to hang around our necks.  A modified breaststroke while balanced on one's floaty was definitely the national stroke of choice.  We'd originally been worried about getting bored or needing things to take our mind off the long-distance swim, but that was certainly not the case.  We were the last heat, so possibly as a result, it was so crowded that we were constantly dodging people floating along as if it were a lazy river, trailing their waterproof bag of snacks along with them.  If it were the US, there would have been six-packs floating behind everyone.

Race finish

My friend and I who trained together all this year managed to stay together for the whole race.  It took us about an hour and forty-five minutes--the former president of Taiwan took two hours and fifty minutes this year.  We availed ourselves of a couple brief pitstops to hang off the floating rest docks and be hand-fed candies and squirts of water like little baby seals being nourished back to life.  Everyone who had registered got a bento box post-race, so the three of us finishers helped ourselves to seven bento boxes on behalf of the team.