Why the title?

I'm a cyclist who lives in Taiwan. I was born in Taichung City. When I picked up the sport during my 3rd year in highschool, I used to ride my $120 bicycle up a hill know as the Big Belly (大肚山, Da-Du Shan) in the nearby Taichung County. That name Big Belly, in turn, came from the name of a misterious aborigionee tribe (papora). It's been said they were one of the major dominating forces of flat-land aborigonate clans in the central part of this island before we Chinese people (the Han nationality to be precise) immigrated during the 18th centry. Not much is known about them, and probably nobody nowadays knows what the word "Dwa Do" in their language really means, but the name survived.

Taiwan is a mountainous island. We don't have many flat lands to begine with. My hometown Taichung City, for example, is not really a plane but more a kind of basin, central of the western part of Taiwan. At the west of this basin lie the Da-Du Hills, although from the habit of the Mandarin language you might hear it mentioned as Da-Du "Mountains" or something like that. At the eastern part we got Da-Keng, and the south-western we got Ba-Gua "Mountains." People who cycle in central Taiwan must be familiar with these areas.

Right. What about me? Well, I first learned to climb on one of the roads in the Da-Du hills. Not that I was an excellent climber... but to get a taste of it, nothing beats a 10% gradient, 500-meter-long, unforgiving, two-lane, you-can-only-see-sky-at-the-end deserted paved road in the middle of nowhere. Between the heavy breathing and hard pedaling action you find yourself a sort of rhythm, with the burning sensations in your legs, sweat forming on your forehead, and heart rate rocketing sky hight at a rate far greater than you are physically going upwards. And of course, the satisfactions that came after conquering it.

(Below are links to three photos of this very climb:

Chung-Tai Road overview;

Mid Sections of the climb;

and School of Theology at the roadside;

courtesy of Edinman)

Funny thing is I gave a name of that small nasty road all those years back, and it was adopted by the people riding around ever since. Although they might not know the origin (and would probably never bother anyway). If you understand the Chinese language, the nickname came from the School of Theology at the roadside, third link above. 神召天梯 means a ladder towards heaven, for those who have received God's call.

Of course from a competitive cyclist point of view it's nothing to brag about, but considering that it was my very first climb, an accent which I managed to finish without stopping on only the second attempt (stopped three times the previous day), it was still quite an achievement. And the stories pretty much started from here.