The Women of Dazhai, China

As I mentioned earlier, after realizing I would not get the rice field shots I'd come for I made a decision to concentrate my last 24 hours on photographing the [famous] women of the village.  They are famous because they don't cut their hair, except when they have a baby.  But the hair that is cut after the baby is kept and wrapped up top with the rest of the hair.  The unofficial starting date for hair collecting is at age 18.  The woman below had two cut lengths of hair included in that big blob.  She washes it often in the post rice-cleaning water, which apparently keeps the hair very healthy?  She's been putting the same hair back on top of her head for 30-40 years so I guess there must be something to it?

The women are used to being photographed (for a fee - about $.80-1.60), but got restless after 10 frames so I learned to be quick.  This was tough in a few low light situations, where I was happy for all the photography learning I've done so I could react properly while working on the very edge of what my camera's capability (ISO1600, f/2.8, 1/100sec.).

In the order I photographed them:

Houses of Dazhai, China

The houses/buildings of Dazhai, which is one of the two regions of high altitude rice terraces in the area above Longsheng, China, are amazing.  They are made entirely of wood and from what I could gather, are mostly made without nails.  Also, there aren't roads...  I think donkeys must be used to bring in the wood, but I'm not really sure.  I don't even know where the timber is coming from, except maybe way up on the mountains above?  It would be fun to live in the region for a month (and speak Chinese) to watch the progress of putting up one of these buildings.

You'll see a school and a basketball court in the lower right of this picture [above], so a concrete truck may have driven up the road at the bottom of the village, but I watched the top-most 'resort' building being put together with concrete and there was no road for miles.  The sand for the concrete was being run up a gondola on a neighboring ridge, but the concrete was mixed by hand.

[they cut out a couple of rice terraces to put this one up]

I heard word that a gondola is being built into the area so customers no longer have to hike up the mountains to get to their hotels (which is part of the allure, if you ask me).  If this is true, I imagine it's why I saw no less than a dozen new buildings (hotels,?) being raised.

Staying in one of these buildings was not a typical hotel experience.  The floors creaked and and the walls were thin, but I really enjoyed this little bit of unexpected traditional architecture.

Dazhai, China B&W Two

Dazhai, China B&W One

China - Overview

I went to China over Golden Week.  The main goal was to build my photography portfolio with some landscapes.  I'm pretty sure I've got some winners, but I've barely begun sorting through the ~4000 photos from the trip, so I'll post them slowly as I process over the next couple of weeks.  Between this trip and the photo project on Zamami, I've got a huge backlog of unprocessed photos and more coming as I have a lot of shoots scheduled for this month.

In order to get to my desired hub (Guilin) I had to travel through Beijing on the front end of the trip and Shanghai on the back end.  While I was only in Beijing briefly, I was not impressed.  Shanghai was another story.

[I was staying very close to Tiananmen Square so I decided to wake up at 4am to go catch the guards raising the flag.  It was.. meh, but I was impressed by its importance to Chinese tourists.]

[Getting the requisite pictures in front of Mao's portrait, though soon after I took this shot I became a more popular figure for parents to take their children's photos with.  I'm not kidding - I had hundreds of pictures snapped of me in the Square.]

[I flew to Guilin the first morning, then took minibuses for 5-6 hours to reach my destination]

[These ladies are relentless in trying to get you to pay them to carry your luggage the 30 minutes up the mountain to your hotel (the entire village exists as a series of trails - no roads))

My first destination was Dazhai Village near Longsheng.  This is waaay up in the mountains and it's famous for these rice terraces which were carved into the sides of mountains many thousands of years ago by people who apparently could not find flat land.  Unfortunately for me they hadn't really started flooding the fields yet for the spring planting, so I I didn't get the awesome morning reflection shot I'd hoped for.

[I was up here with a couple dozen other tripods at dawn, but as the sun rose I realized there was no shot to be had]

 [Since the fields were a bust I made a snap decision to concentrate my efforts on photography some of the old people who inhabit the village.  This lady let me put my arm around her for this photo because I just paid her 10 yuan to take her portrait.  Nothing is free in China.  More of these portraits soon.]

[A typical setup for me.  I did still photograph the fields and I got a few shots with nice black-and-white potential.]

[My hotel room which cost just $16/night for double occupancy.  (I was alone.))

[View from the front of the hotel]

[China's take on protecting the environment at a construction site]

 Next I made my way to Xingping, which is close to it's far-more-famous cousin, Yangshuo.  This area is known for the limestone karsts that you can see below.  It was very beautiful and I was happy to have three nights there.  I chose well on my hostel and the location and really enjoyed the company of other hostel-goers.  That's honestly a not-insignificant part of the appeal to traveling through SE and Eastern Asia.  Backpackers are cool.

[On the first evening I climbed this karst with a couple of French girls, only to find a throng of photographers set up for the nonexistent sunset.  Mediocre-to-good photos from here will come later.]

[REAL Chinese Ringneck pheasants!  I hunt these in America..]

[Xingping market fare]

[Prepping another one]

[This is a nicer picture, eh?]

[Market haircuts]

[Chinese medicine]

[Stones that look like bacon]

After Xingping I made my way back to Guilin before flying to Shanghai, where I had an afternoon/evening and morning to kill.  I quite liked the portion of Shanghai where I stayed (The Bund).  I walked around and played inside a Gap, H&M, and Uniqlo, realizing that I haven't clothes-shopped in the U.S. (or really 'anything-shopped') in over five years.  I attended the Shanghai Acrobatics Troupe's show in the evening, which was pretty cool (though a Chinese friend later told me I missed out by not doing this in Beijing.  Shanghai is apparently for the rejects).  I walked along The Bund at night which was nice, if a little lonely (it's very much a romantic, couples' activity).

[This was the only time during the week that I was separated from my big camera, but these are pretty nice for a point-and-shoot, I think]

[Me on my last morning on The Bund, killing time so well that I almost missed my plane (I arrived after the gate had closed).]

Overall it was a great trip.  I had about $1000 into the flights and another $250 into the visa, which was quite a bit more than I'd expected when I originally planned the trip, but thankfully the in-country expenses were very low and I  spent less than $300 for everything for a week.  I really liked the places I went but I was also inspired by other travelers to look into some different parts of China.  I still have one more visa entry I can use in the next 11 months so we'll see if I can find a gap in my schedule somewhere.

Zamami People Project - Old People

The Zamami People Project (working title?) is still coming along, albeit slower than I'd hoped.  We've had a very wet spring, which has canceled many outdoor shoots.  I am over halfway through the total shots I want to get (~40-50) and some of them cannot be shot until we get the beautiful May weather and turquoise colors in the ocean, but I think the mid-week evenings are going to be crowded with as many miscellaneous shoots as I can fit in.

Three of my four shoots for this week have been canceled, but fortunately one of the most important shoots of the whole project happened today without a hitch.  I'm hoping to get black-and-white portraits of most of the old people from Zamami, so I coordinated with their weekly Wednesday luncheons and set up a mini portrait studio next to a window and cycled through the ten elderly folks who showed up.

I had a lot of helpful support from the staff who work with the old people, which seems to be a theme throughout the project.  Although I struggle a little to explain what the project is about (in Japanese), most everybody has been very generous with their time and scheduling to accommodate a shoot for me.  There has been much less "I don't want my picture taken" than I was expecting.

The evolution of the project is interesting.  I started off with a bang doing the firedancing shot last fall, but recently many of the shots I've taken are more "documentary" than creative challenges.  There will hopefully be 5-10 'stand out' images during the show, but there are far more shots that I can't really figure out how to make interesting beyond having the subjects dress in nice clothes and try to smile in front of a not-ugly backdrop.

I have a lot of processing to do to get through all the 'old people' shots, but here is an example of the effect I'm trying to achieve:

Cooking the Chickens

I used this recipe for the chickens, but even though I went on the low end of the suggested baking times, I think it was still too long.  The meat was really tough, maybe even a hair dry.  I can't imagine that 6-8 month old chickens would have tough meat, but maybe I'm wrong?

First I made the brine, then I filled plastic bags with it.  I use potatoes to push in on the corners of the bags to make sure the brine completely submerged the chicken.  I let it soak overnight inside my refrigerator.  The next morning I emptied the brine and then let the chickens 'dry out' all day long inside the fridge.

Next I baked the chickens for 15 minutes at about 450F, then reduced the temperature and baked them for 30 minutes:

Then I made roasted garlic potatoes:

Then I tried to eat everything.  The chicken would not 'fall off' the bones as I'd envisioned so I had to ditch the fork and knife and go at it caveman style.  I ended up eating the whole dinner with my fingers and a lot of teeth gnawing.  The taste was good-ish, but I'm excited to experiment with this a little more with some pheasants someday.