Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

I found a website that calculates distances on Google Maps. I thought this might be a cool way to visualize the my trip to China.

It shows the distance traveled as being about 32,681 km (including flights to and from Toronto), but I’m sure it was more than that. The distances were “as the crow flies,” so didn’t account for the winding, weaving roads and railroads between places. The trip started with a flight in to Shanghai, located around the center of the image, and ended when I left Hong Kong to return to Toronto. Looking at this stark map, it brings to mind vivid memories of those places and experiences represented by the magenta pins and lines.

It’s been a long day! I started shooting around 9:30 this morning, and just got back now. It’s just after midnight and I’m ready to finally pack it in. This was my full day in China, and I felt rewarded with this gorgeous weather. After I shot those blue sky photos from the previous entry, Dad and I departed to explore the city a bit. We hit a hutong neighborhood, which is a classic Chinese residential area built in a series of alleys. I’m caught off guard by things that make perfect sense to the very pragmatic Chinese, like a leg of pork hanging to dry with the laundry. I mean, why not?

We wandered for hours, eventually finding ourselves in a major tourist area and then at a bus stop. After studying the various out-of-date maps posted for everyone’s inconvenience, we worked out how to get back to the hostel on the bus. I find these little adventures to be rewarding.

Dinner tonight was Peking duck. No visit to Beijing would be complete without the city’s famous roast duck recipe. The food was so good last night that we decided to eat at the same restaurant again. The chef and owner of this restaurant clearly appreciates that having good Chinese food doesn’t mean you need to have a dismal dining experience to go along with it. The presentation and service were top-notch, and the price was very reasonable. There was even a dude who stood by our table and patiently wrapped and served us the traditional “duck burritos” that are an essential part of the Peking duck experience. I remembered to bring my camera this time. No, the wriggling still-alive scorpion skewers are not from our dinner. They were from a local street-food market. I was gratified to note that everyone, including domestic Chinese tourists seemed grossed out by the scorpions.

Immediately after dinner, I set out to the Olympic park to try again at shooting the “Birds Nest” stadium and “Water Cube” aquatics centre. This time, I had better luck and managed to score a few shots of these iconic structures. That’s good, because between walking and the subway, it’s about two hours each way to get to the Olympic park.

Now it’s time for bed. I’m leaving for Bangkok tomorrow. More thoughts about China later.

Beijing was determined to prove me wrong after what I said about pollution yesterday. The rain and wind blew away the haze, and we were treated to an absolutely spectacular day today.

I did a little walking around Beijing today. During the day, the smog is astounding. China has made some truly impressive efforts to reduce pollution and energy consumption, and the message is constantly hammered home by the media: use less energy and water, live in harmony with the environment, use public transit. However, the fact remains that there are just too many people here, and despite the fact that each person uses far less than we do in North America, the cumulative effect of so many crammed into such a small space is catastrophic to air quality. Anyway, as it pertains to me, it’s hard to take photos during the day, because everything more than 50 feet from you is shrouded in a hazy white veil.

Tonight after a delicious and artfully prepared meal at a restaurant down the street (sorry, I wasn’t expecting it to be so good, so no photos), I went out to see what I could shoot. I decided to hop on the subway and try to get myself over to the Olympic park to have some fun with all those celebrity buildings, like the National Stadium. I’m truly amazed at the changes to the subway system in the last two years. When I was here in 2007, I had to battle a crowd to get to this little cage containing a woman selling paper tickets. You then had to battle a crowd to get to a guy who would punch a hole in the ticket and let you down the stairs to the trains. There were four very limited subway lines open, covering a small part of the city. That’s all changed. Now, you buy your re-usable plastic subway tickets from a bank of bilingual touch-screen terminals, and pass through automated gates to get to the trains. There are nine lines now, with 147 stations all over the city. The cost has also changed. Instead of three to five Yuan (about 50-80 cents) that it cost in 2007, it’s now 2 Yuan (about 36 cents) to ride anywhere this massive system goes. According to Wikipedia, the system is still under massive expansion, with plans to double its current size by 2012. This is why I’m baffled that Toronto can’t build proper public transit to Pearson airport. It’s all about priorities.

So, I rode the subway for quite a long time, transferring a couple of times to get to Olympic park. It took about an hour to get there because it’s pretty far, and I kept missing my connecting trains. By the time I arrived at the Olympic park station, it was about 9:35pm. I was surprised to discover that the Olympic park closes at 9:30pm, so I was just in time to see the security guards let the last people out, and slam the gate shut. Also, it started raining.

I chalked it up to experience, and comforted myself in that I’d at least figured out where the airport express subway line started, and headed back to the hostel. When I came out of the subway, the rain had pretty much stopped. The reflections of the buildings in the wet pavement made me feel like doing some long exposures. Earlier in the night, I’d been shooting this old church that was sandwiched between a giant hotel and a mega-ultra-modern department store in the busy Wangfujing shopping area. It looked amazing reflected in the wet pavement.

Just as I was getting into shooting this, and finding some interesting angles, someone abruptly turned out all the lights on the building. It took a moment for me to realize how awesome this was. I truly believe that to get great night shots, you have to shoot what seems impossible to shoot. There are so many photographers who can easily recognize the photographic potential of brightly lit night scenes, and will get out the tripod to take some very ordinary shots. However, I want to make it my mission to capture those rarest of photons, because the fewer there are, the more potential they have to make night photos that really shine. After the lights went out, those remarkable photons were reflecting off of the moving clouds, creating a surreal backdrop. The sparse light from the shops across the street provided ample fill for the building itself, even though the scene at the time looked almost totally dark.

I only have one more night left here in China before I head over to Thailand. In some ways, this trip has seemed to have flown by so fast. In other ways, I feel like I’ve been here a lifetime. In either case, I’ve done my best to make it memorable.

Our adventure to the grasslands of Xilamuren was a lot of fun. Not a lot of tourists go there after the beginning of October, because the grass turns yellow, and it gets kind of cold. But, being the hardy Canadians that we are, we decided it would be no problem. Plus, we are here now, not in July, so it’s not like there is any other choice, right?

Our mini bus picked us up at the hotel at 8:30am. It was a rickety old thing, and the driver seemed a bit nervous that it wouldn’t make the trip in one piece. He phoned ahead, and we did a bus and driver swap with some Spanish tourists who were returning from the grasslands. Both the new bus and the driver seemed more comfortable. The tourists advised us to ask for a heater when we got to the grasslands.

The drive to the grasslands is spectacular, over a couple of hours of winding roads through desolate mountains, ascending to a plateau of wide grassy fields and crisp blue skies. The smog and pollution that blankets most of China doesn’t exist here. The fresh air was very welcome indeed. There was a pleasant absence of most everything except for the golden grass on the wide plains. Once in a while, we’d see someone galloping on a horse, but that was pretty much it. At once, it was easy to imagine Genghis Khan rallying the Mongol warriors on horseback to take over all of Asia and part of Europe back in the 13th century, but also difficult to imagine how such a desolate land could produce enough of those warriors to hold such a massive territory.

There were some interesting moments during the drive. At one point, there was a toll booth ahead, charging 10 Yuan to pass through on the highway. Our driver had a mischievous grin as he pulled off the road into a tiny village made of dirt. That village was conveniently located around the toll booth, so by giving the locals about 2 yuan to pass through their rocky dirt roads and coming out on the other side of the booth, we avoided paying the full toll. This extremely rough shortcut made it obvious that the toll money the locals collected was not being spent on road maintenance. Also, I’m certain the driver caused more than 8 Yuan of damage to his suspension during that little trip. But, it clearly gave him great joy to “stick it to the man,” so that has to be worth something.

We ended up staying at the home of a Mongol family. When we arrived, there were some Chinese tourists there. No one spoke any English, but they were eager to communicate. Dad can read a bit, so one of the guys wrote down his questions in Chinese, and we had fun struggling to answer them in our limited vocabulary. It never ceases to amaze me how you can make friends despite the barriers of language.

Our new friends were not staying overnight, so they left after a couple of hours. We spent the rest of the day just wandering around the property, taking in the fresh air and the bright sun. The wind was blowing constantly and strongly. It was so strong that often it was hard to hold the camera steady because the wind pushed on the lens hood like a sail.

We enjoyed traditional Mongolian meals, which were about 90% carbs, including moon cakes, shredded potato, noodles, etc. That pretty much trashed my caveman diet, but I was in no position to refuse, because our hosts were so warm and friendly, and there really wasn’t anything else to eat anyway.

Dad and I slept in a “yurt,” which is a circular tent traditionally used by the nomadic Mongol tribes. Our host family kindly set up that little heater for us. It was fueled by coal, and started by lighting up a wad of dried cow and sheep dung. I’ll tell you now that the smell of that was not entirely pleasant, but in the middle of the night, the heat was well worth it.

Anyway, I enjoyed the stay there very much. I felt like such a city slicker, amazed at the farm animals that wandered around us at will. I’m sure they must have rolled their eyes every time I snapped a picture of one of the shaggy little horses, their eyes squinted shut against the blowing wind and grit.

The next morning, we said goodbye to our Mongolian family and headed back to Hohhot. Because we had many hours to kill before our evening flight to Beijing, we left our luggage at the train station and took a cab to the brand new Mongolian museum. This super-modern structure had just opened, and was offering free admission to the first 3000 guests every day. The exhibits were well presented and informative, and as with all Chinese museum exhibits, had a political bent that glorified the achievements and benefits of the Communist revolution.

At night, we took a cab to the Hohhot airport, which is brand new and very nice, and flew to Beijing. We’ll be riding out the rest of our stay in China here in the capital, after which I head to Thailand, and Dad goes home to Canada.