“Xiamen, this morning? We just heard there’s no boat service available,” the bike rental woman tells me as I hand the scooter’s key back.

It is my last buffer day in Kinmen, a Taiwan Strait island a couple of kilometres off Fujian, China’s coast — and an unlikely but heavily used marine border crossing into the island city of Xiamen, where my flight home should depart the next day at noon.

A black hole of apprehension begins devouring my soul. I have never, ever, ever missed a flight because of my negligence. But this time, it isn’t my fault — it is cyclone Champi’s.

The largest typhoon the Pacific has seen this year is supposed to ravage Taiwan’s eastern coast in the next couple of days, then head north to Japan’s southern coast. And, of course, I am in its wake at the end of an almost perfect two-week guidebook-research stint hopping Taiwan’s Strait Islands.

As agreed, the rental company drops me at the Shuitou modern ferry terminal, where the scene doesn’t lift my spirits. Hundreds of people and their carry-ons sprawl across the terminal’s seating and floor, waiting for an announcement that services are resuming.

I feel the precaution is exaggerated. The gusts of wind outside are not that crazy, and the waves that curl the sea between Kinmen’s coast and Xiamen’s barrage of skyscrapers, which I can clearly see so close, across a straitful of sea, to me does not warrant shutting off all the boat services.

I wait, scrambling with my limited Mandarin to try to understand what is going on until about noon, when a crackling loudspeaker announces that no boat service will run for the whole day. My hope of getting home the day after shatters like a large sheet of glass hitting a dirty floor.

In those few frantic hours, I make a friend, Vicky — an English-speaking Taiwanese woman who has flown in the same morning from Taitung to hop on a ferry and reach Xiamen to holiday with her mother and sister.

“Maybe the boats will go tomorrow, but probably not,” she explains, “as usually in these cases the Taiwanese Government declares an emergency and everything shuts for a day . . . or two . . . or three.” She smiles to ease the awkwardness.

I jump in a taxi with her and family, head back to the island’s main town of Kincheng, and then sit on a bench to ponder my options. The Clash made a song about something similar: Should I Stay Or Should I Go. I don’t know.

With the limited hope that resumed boat services may just give me a slight chance of making my flight the next midday, and following the advice of a friend who’s been a resident of Taiwan for two decades, I decide that “being stuck on that island for a week may not be an easy way out” and decide to use the last Taiwanese dollars I have left to get to the airport and see if I can fly out to the Taiwanese mainland. From there, there will certainly be more chances of getting a flight home.

“It’d be a total mess if they shut air traffic tomorrow and for a few days,” my friend mentions.

I stumble to Kinmen Airport’s Uni Air desk, keeping the attendant waiting as I try to decide whether to fly to the southern city of Kaohsiung, from where I can hopefully catch a not-too-expensive last-minute flight to Malaysia in the next couple of days, or to the northern capital of Taipei.

This is because I have found an affordable connecting flight home, leaving that same night from the latter, and I am confident I can make it work.

I go for it, booking the two flights: one to Taipei’s Songshan Airport and one from Taoyuan to Kuala Lumpur.

I leave for Taipei with a sour taste in my mouth because the second connection is paid for, but not yet confirmed. As soon as I turn off airplane mode on landing in Taipei, after the plane has pierced a menacing layer of grey-to-black clouds for more than five minutes straight, I get the merry news that my payment has been refunded, with no flight home secured.

Powerless, spent and hungry (I haven’t had the time or desire to eat all day), I slide like a confused rat into the metro line connecting Songshan Airport to Taipei Main Station, occasionally bouncing off the hundreds of people going about their business regardless of the impending doomsday.

“Get on a train south, as tomorrow everything is probably going to be shut,” the same friend advises me in a series of quickfire WhatsApp messages. It is 7pm. There are only two slow trains to take me 400km south to where I could have already been (paying half a hundred dollars less).

My mind curses a whole pantheon of international gods as I pay for a slow train ticket to Kaohsiung and scramble up a packed staircase to platform 3 with less than 10 minutes to make the connection.

Some of those deities must have listened, for I made it (without a confirmed seat) and let myself sink onto the floor between two carriages and a dozen commuting legs. As we leave Taipei, each time the train’s door opens, I can now see the wind rocking things, shaking metallic signs around their poles, and reminding us all that something big is coming up north . . . as we all escape south.

I arrive in Kaohsiung past midnight, and the only place I find to stay is a dormitory hotel with a quirky onsite sauna and a lot of night business. I am given a bunk right by the door of a 40-person dorm hall.

I spend a terrible night waking every time one of the many guests opens the door.

After such a day, I convince myself I am already dead and a greenhorn in purgatory.

The next day, I get up and immediately book a return flight for two days later — today is supposed to be the worst, and who knows what will happen tomorrow?

I take care of stuff and get things organised for most of the morning, and when I head out of that crazy hostel around noon, the tail end of the winds that are rattling Taipei up north are howling through the streets of Kaohsiung.

I move to a better guesthouse, nearly ripping an umbrella as it turns inside-out, and sink onto a couch, overhearing conversations for most of the afternoon. I check Google Flights and see that my original flight from Xiamen has left regardless of a slight delay, and, as Murphy made into law, boat service from Kinmen resumed from 8am to 10am, which makes me think I probably could’ve made it.

But it is time to stop beating myself up.

I plan to explore some of Kaohsiung with some new acquaintances, then go out to find food. Light rain and occasional gusts of wind make it clear we are safe in a buffer zone, but elsewhere, as I see on the news while wolfing down a plate of pork dumplings, huge waves have destroyed things on the east coast, and the wind has even pushed people off their scooters elsewhere.

No matter how I look at it all, in haste and danger, there is no way to assess what the “best decision” is.