View allAll Photos Tagged Narrative
Narrative Photo Assignment
Design Principal: Emphasis - I wanted to draw attention to the flower in front of the headstone by showing contrast in color between B&W and the reddish color of the flowers.
Camara Settings:
Canon PowerShot SX510 HS
1/25 s
f/8.0
ISO 200
Editing:
B&W focal which made the flower retain it's color and everything else B&W. Also cropped the photo.
This was created for my narrative strand in my available light brief. I constructed this in a studio and edited it A LOT.
This was created for my narrative strand in my available light brief. I constructed this in a studio and edited it A LOT.
This was created for my narrative strand in my available light brief. I constructed this in a studio and edited it A LOT.
The wraps have come off London’s largest ever urban art work, a vast mural on two sides of a six-storey building in King’s Cross.
Four street graffiti artists worked for three weeks to create the geometric design on the outside of a block on the corners of Euston Road and Belgrove Street.
The artists — London based Remi/Rough, Edinburgh’s Steve More, LX.One from Paris and LA-based Augustine Kofie — used 160 litres of spray paint and 150 litres of emulsion.
Mark Wilkie, of design agency The Narrative, which organised the project, said: “We wanted to celebrate everything great about this urban environment.”
The work was commissioned to mark the opening of a new “urban diner” in the building called Karpo.
from the Evening News 29 March 2012
Comics
1st & 2nd pictures
Eisenstein's montage, the juxtaposition of images considered how the essence of the film. Understanding of the formula 1 +1 = 3 is often described as two consecutive images total effect of a new report is taken to a report in itself does not contain one image.
True, this is not a film that I made, because only two images. Two separate photos. They themselves do not say anything. However, along with a narrative story.
Availabale @ the Narrative Event
Opening on Ocotber , 15th 2021
Your Taxi : maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Murdock%20Heights/197/152/755
And so to the 54th and final East Anglian church of the autumn.
One of the many joys of churchcrawling is not knowing what you might find inside. Even if the exterior is of a single narrative, inside it might be a different story. Or not.
You might meet no one, or a welcoming rector, vicar or warden, another photographer, or, whoever knows.
Which brings us to Aldringham. We had left the delights of Thorpness and were heading in a northerly direction. Past the golf course, empty of golfers. Passing over the heath, we come to a junction and I see a sign pointing the way to Aldringham church.
Down a long lane, lined with trees, to a row of almshouses and opposite a small church with a bellcote. It looked so unpromising, and to make it perfect, a gentle rain had begun to fall. This was clearly going to be a waste of time, either it would be locked or there would be nothing of interest to see.
Inside was a long nave with no chancel arch, or one I can recall. At the west end there was a raised section like the slope of a theatre with a few rows of seats. Above that a very fine stained glass window, and one similar at the east in the chancel.
Two ladies were busy cleaning the carpets and dusting surfaces, all ready for the decorating of the building.
They were pleased to see me, and I was told in very positive terms the greatness of the church and that is is much older than it looks.
But the church is dying, I was told. Not many locals use it, not many tourists come here either.
We talk about Thorpness: visitors leave their brains at the village sign I was told. People park anywhere and let children run everywhere and you can't say anything.
She said she doesn't go to Thorpness in the summer months due to the visitors, and the fact they don't use the local shops. Locals can't afford to live there; a story from almost all the EA coast. You can't tell visitors anything, I was told, if you do you get a mouthful back.
She doesn't like the bright lights of Thorpness and its attractions. What do you think of Aldeburgh I asked. I never go there, she said. Never.
We talked more about young people not being able to afford to live in the area, outsiders buying houses for holiday use once or twice a year, killing the local economy.
I had been inside the church for half an hour and not taken a shot, time was getting on and Jools was waiting outside, although she was reading The Book of Dust, so was alright.
------------------------------------------
Aldringham is the posh end of Leiston these days, I suppose. It merges into the agro-industrial greyness towards Coldfair Green; as you head into it from central Leiston, you pass the Ogilvie almshouses, a name we will meet again later.
If the village is rather mundane, then the same cannot be said of St Andrew. You head out across the heath towards the fantasy holiday village of Thorpeness, which we will also come back to, and then turn southwards on a track through the forest, out into the pines and broom. Incongruously, a row of 19th century almshouses looms into view, looking for all the world as if it had been picked up from the terraces of east Ipswich and dumped here. And there, at the western end, is the delightful church of St Andrew, looking very pretty among the pine trees. I had first seen it on a dull, dark, dismal day in November 2000, and so it was a pleasure to come back on the hottest day so far of 2010 in bright sunshine. At first sight, the church is entirely Victorian, and might even be contemporary with the terrace. However, a blocked door and lancet in the south chancel wall give us a probable original date of about 1200, and a rood loft stair buttress also tells us of this former, Catholic liturgical age. A very good modern extension leads off from the north doorway.
If you had come here 150 years ago, You would have found a tall, ruined 15th century tower, like the one at Corton, 20 miles to the north. The church was painted in 1842, and you can see the tower in the third small photograph at the top of this page. But that is all gone now, for St Andrew was consolidated and completely refurbished inside and out in the mid 19th century. I think the Victorians made a pretty good job of it. The chancel priest door is blocked, and beside it on a buttress is the parish WWII memorial.
The south porch leads down into the body of the nave, and you step down into a church which is full of colour.From a historical point of view the most important survival is probably the 15th century font. This is one of the typically East Anglian fonts, of which about 160 survive in Suffolk, showing angels and evangelistic symbols on the bowl, and lions on the stem. Of all of them, this is one of the best. The seating is banked at the west end, and above it is one of two excellent, large 19th century windows. For such a small church to have two such large windows is rather unusual. This one is by Alexander Gibbs, and shows the disabled man being lowered by his friends through the roof to Christ. The inscription reads This window was placed here in grateful memory of Letitia Caroline Susannah Cannon who died November 8th 1896 aged 81 years, helpless from paralysis during 11 1/2 years. She abounded in most generous gifts to the poor, the church, the churchyard and the endowment. At the other end of the church the window depicts the feeding of the five thousand. These two unusual subjects suggest a particularly evangelical hue to the 19th century congregation here, and create a church like no other in the area. There is a fine, more modern window of St Andrew in a lancet in the south side, which the 19th century restorers here would no doubt have considered idolatrous..
There is an outstanding Art Nouveau memorial in the north-west corner of the churchyard to Letitia Cannon and her husband. I assume that the elaborate ironwork decorative fencing came from the foundry at nearby Leiston. But probably the most memorable thing about this churchyard is the collection of Ogilvie memorials on the southern side of the churchyard. A narrow avenue of box hedging led from the south porch. When I came this way in 2000, this was punctuated by scatterings of parasol mushrooms, which made a very pleasant meal later that night. Today, in the heat of summer, I had been warned to watch out for snakes in the churchyard - adders are common on this wooded heathland. I continued towards what looked like the village war memorial. Indeed, it is used as the village war memorial, but that is not all it is. It is a memorial to one of the Ogilivies, killed late on in the first war; but, as it is so much grander than the simple, pretty one set in the rood stair buttress of the church, it was here in that November that I had found the wreaths of plastic poppies were leaning. The inscription mentions Alexander Walter Ogilvie, who died on October 30th 1918, by name, but also makes reference to Lasting Remembrance of the Great Host of Heroes who made the Supreme Sacrifice 1914-1918. The names of the Aldringham dead are hidden away behind it, as if an afterthought. As I reached it, I was staggered by the massed ranks of large tomb chests on either side of it; Ogilvies to the left of me, Ogilvies to the right. It is the grandest collection of 20th century family tombs in all Suffolk, not excluding the Quilters at Bawdsey. The Ogilvies were fabulously well-to-do, and their name is all over this part of Suffolk, including those almshouses towards Leiston.
The Ogilvies lived at Sizewell Hall, and quite literally shaped the map of Suffolk; theirs was the responsibility for building Thorpeness, the jolly holiday resort on the coast a mile to the east of here, and for the land on which the Sizewell nuclear reactor was built, also a mile away. But best of all, they are thanked every wet Saturday by the divorced and separated fathers of Ipswich, who can let their temporary charges loose in the Ogilvie Room at Ipswich Museum, the biggest public collection of Victorian stuffed birds in the Kingdom. There are simply thousands of the things, including a mighty representation of Bass Rock, and all manner of exotic creatures who met their maker during a flight over the Ogilvies' substantial domain. On more than one display case it says this is the only example of this bird ever collected in Suffolk, and so we may assume that Lord Ogilvie killed an awful lot of birds to make sure that he got these few, a thought which has struck me repeatedly on my many visits to the museum. Ironically, the RSPB's huge Minsmere bird reserve now stretches north of the Ogilvies' former property.
I wandered around the Ogilvies for a while, and then headed back into the church. It was only now that I noticed a simple brass memorial on the south wall of the chancel. It remembers forty-four year old Benjamin Croft, whose name also appears on the World War I roll opposite. What makes him significant (he isn't an Ogilvie, after all) is that he was killed on 10th November 1918, the last full day of the Great War. What an awful piece of luck for him and his family. In 2000, the memorial had combined with the weather outside to infuse me with a mood of gloom, and I remembered still my feeling of sadness. But in 2010 I stepped out into the sunshine, and got chatting to people having a picnic outside the south porch. They were parishioners taking a break from the late spring tidy-up of the graveyard, and they very hospitably asked me to sit down and join them in a glass of wine. It turned out that the Rector, who I had met in the church, had told them who I was, and it was good to meet some followers of the site. They seemd a very jolly, friendly lot, and I decided that Aldringham church must be a fine place to be a member of the congregation.
In 2010, it was the height of the day. I saddled up my bike and set off in the blistering heat towards Knodishall. Back in 2000, the day was ending. I had hoped to head on to find the site of the lost church at Thorpe, and survey the outside, at least, of the 1930s church of St Mary at Thorpeness. But it was not to be, and these would have to wait for another day. The rain was falling steadily, all over Suffolk. I hauled my muddy bike up the muddy path to the almshouses, and set off across the heath, the darkness closing in. On across Coldfair Green, dissolving into the landscape, following Sizewell's mighty pylons to Saxmundham station, and then home.
Simon Knott, July 2010
Tôi, ngày đầu tiên khi cầm chiếc máy ảnh với những cảm giác thật lạ kỳ. Bao nhiêu thứ tươi đẹp được tôi ghi lại....Rồi năm tháng tôi chụp ảnh với những cung bậc khác nhau, đời sống, phong cảnh, con người tôi điều trãi nghiệm qua.
Tôi cảm thấy hạnh phúc khi được cầm chiếc máy ảnh trên tay, niềm vui được cùng bạn bè loanh quanh mọi nơi. Đến một ngày tôi cảm thấy con đường nhiếp ảnh của mình nó không tiến triển hơn nữa, tôi đến với nó bằng niềm vui và sự nghiệp của tôi không thể dồn hết cho nó...Nó có thể phá hủy cuộc đời tôi, nội tâm bị dày xé dữ dội, tôi rất muốn là một nhà nhiếp ảnh chuyên nghiệp nhưng tôi không biết tôi có khả năng đấy không?. Tôi cứ quanh quẩn những suy tư phiền muộn quá nhiều vì nó, tôi mệt mỏi, tôi không còn biết mình là ai và mình cần phải làm gì...cuộc sống tôi đang đi vào nơi tối tăm mà không thể nào quay lại được.....
Tôi, một hạt cát sa mạc....
Model: Leo Nguyen
Photo: Tran Phong
Lighting: Yanming
Assistant: Phương Ruồi
Art idea: Poposon
bapstudio.net
Photographs seem to tell stories. Of course that doesn't make sense. Photographs can't tell stories. I gaze at photographs that hang on my wall, each photograph has a wealth of detail, it would take thousands of words just to describe the detail in one of these photographs, but I never need to do this, each photograph speaks for itself. I took some photographs this week and was hoping to be able to speak or tell a story about our theme. But I've become stuck for words. I look at one of my photographs, it's a bridge across the railway lines at West Hampstead Station. In a way this bridge is the story, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. I photographed the bridge with narrative in mind.
Intersecting Realities: Visions of Immigrant Narratives - "The Unveiling of Dream Mural" - 06.18.11 - UCLA Labor Center
Shot out to the artists:
-Pocho-One - (http://www.pocho1.com/)
-Julio Salgado
- imarte.org/ - Carol Belisa (Mocabel), Leticia Hernandez, Laura Flores, Raymundo Hernandes Aryer, Omar Ramirez, Victor Zuniga
"Each and every one of you has inspired me to get back in the art scene and start taking on some projects that have been developing in my mind for years now. Thank you." -Iván Ceja
Photo Credit: Ivan Ceja
At the end of time, billions of people were seated on a great plain before God's throne. Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly, not cringing with cringing shame - but with belligerence.
"Can God judge us? How can He know about suffering?" snapped a pert young brunette. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp. "We endured terror... beatings... torture... death!"
In another group a Negro boy lowered his collar. "What about this?" he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. "Lynched, for no crime but being black!"
In another crowd there was a pregnant schoolgirl with sullen eyes: "Why should I suffer?" she murmured. "It wasn't my fault." Far out across the plain were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering He had permitted in His world.
How lucky God was to live in Heaven, where all was sweetness and light. Where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred. What did God know of all that man had been forced to endure in this world? For God leads a pretty sheltered life, they said.
So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he had suffered the most. A Jew, a negro, a person from Hiroshima, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the centre of the vast plain, they consulted with each other. At last they were ready to present their case. It was rather clever.
Before God could be qualified to be their judge, He must endure what they had endured. Their decision was that God should be sentenced to live on earth as a man.
Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Give him a work so difficult that even his family will think him out of his mind.
Let him be betrayed by his closest friends. Let him face false charges, be tried by a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let him be tortured.
At the last, let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Then let him die so there can be no doubt he died. Let there be a great host of witnesses to verify it.
As each leader announced his portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of approval went up from the throng of people assembled. When the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No one uttered a word. No one moved.
For suddenly, all knew that God had already served His sentence.
Anon (written before Summer 1982)
This site isn’t so much for travel narrative as it is for looking at pictures, so I’ll cut out a full day’s narrative, save for this:
Thursday was close to an eleven hour day of travel to get from Yangshuo to Detian. I spent less than 90 minutes shooting at the falls. From Detian (western part of the province on the Vietnamese border), I had to make my way to Beihai (southern, coastal city on the Gulf of Tonkin). It was, in distance, much shorter than Yangshuo-Detian. However, it turned into a reasonably miserable travel day and took about twelve hours (with about five of those hours spent in a bus station waiting room in Nanning). I got to my hotel in Beihai around 9:30 p.m. on Friday night. (I would stay in the same hotel Sunday night as well.)
The only positive to come from Friday’s travel was on the bus from Detian to Daxin (and on to Nanning). There was a very nice girl traveling with her parents who wanted to practice her English who happened to have visited Beihai. I think she said she was from Guangdong, too. Anyway, what I wanted to do most in Beihai was go to Weizhou Island (Weizhou Dao). She suggested (almost implied it was required) that I needed to book tickets on the ferry to Weizhou Dao in advance, so she helped me and called someone she knew in Beihai to reserve a ticket for me at 8:30 on Saturday morning.
I really didn’t know too much about Weizhou Dao, except that it was listed in Lonely Planet as a place to go. I did try to research it online, too, but couldn’t find too many pictures of the island. I found a few, though, and it was enough to convince me that it was worth going. Besides, Beihai honestly didn’t have too many places I was interested in seeing for two days.
So, I decided before the trip that I would come out and spend the night here on Weizhou Island. That turned out to be about the best decision I made for this trip, as it was much better than I was expecting from the lack of information I could find about the place.
I fell in love with this island. The ride across the Gulf of Tonkin takes a little over an hour on a high-speed boat. The cost is 150 RMB, which also includes admission to the island. The island is the remnants of a volcano, I believe, and is a reasonably circular island with a total area of 25-30 square kilometers. So…it’s small.
The port at Weizhou Dao is on the northwest corner of the island. The main city (that is to say the one place where there’s a main street running along the water for about 1 km) is called Nanwan (South Bay). To get around the island, you can either walk, rent a bike, or take a san lun che (tuk tuk). San lun che is the easiest. Depending on where you want to go on the island, it costs between 20 and 40 RMB to go from place to place. There are cars on the island, and people (though not many) do live here year-round, but for public transportation, those are your options, and they’re more than enough.
I think I paid 30 RMB to a guy to get me down to Nanwan. I hadn’t booked anything in advance (though I tried), so went to the first place that Lonely Planet mentioned: Piggybar. This was a very cheap place and as close to a dive as any place I’ve stayed in China.
This was the tropics in June, so the weather was sweltering. It turns out that I wouldn’t be alone in my room. I stopped counting how many cockroaches I killed somewhere after five or so. Big-sized suckers, too. But, that would be later in the day. At night, the electricity constantly cut out. This was only a slight annoyance because it would turn the air conditioner off. Sleeping wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. I also stopped counting how many times the power would go off. (It was never for more than 5 minutes, though.) I certainly don’t fault the Piggybar for this. The power apparently just goes out around Nanwan like that.
I did enjoy the main drag in Nanwan. There are a lot of neat little bars and restaurants (and what seemed like a much nicer hotel about midway along the road). I don’t remember the name of the place, but if I make it back there, I’d definitely stay at that place instead.
After I checked into my room in the morning, I took stock of things, thought the view in the south bay was pretty nice, and headed out for a walk towards the rest of the main drag. As this is an island, almost all restaurants have fresh seafood (which, for anyone who knows me, isn’t appealing…but seafood lovers would be in heaven here). I stopped at a restaurant and grabbed an early lunch of generic non-seafood Chinese food. It was so generic that it was forgettable. Maybe it was huntun, which is like a small dumpling soup. I really don’t remember.
While sitting there in the open-air shade enjoying the view of the sea, three college girls came along on bikes they rented and joined me. They, too, were from Guangdong if I remember correctly. I was beginning to think everyone was from Guangdong, but I know better than that. At any rate, they were friendly and we were talking about what to do around the island.
For me, the most interesting place to photograph was going to be the Catholic church. There are two churches on the island – one Catholic (founded by the French), one protestant (founded by Germans, I believe), both around 100 years old, if not a little older. Of the two, the Catholic church is the much more photogenic of the two, so that was what I was most looking forward to shooting, and that was the first place I was going to head via san lun che. It cost 40 RMB to get there. The girls had bikes, so I told them to try to get there – it was on the opposite side of the island…somewhere in the northeast part, but not on the water. They didn’t quite make it, but no worries. I saw them later, and they told me they did eventually get to it.
I wandered around the church and church grounds, and also the streets in front of it for an hour or so in the early afternoon. The church itself was quiet and peaceful and the street in front of it was lively with lots of vendors.
Besides the church, there are a lot of places with natural beauty on this island. As it’s created from a volcano, there are a lot of fascinating rock formations, but those tend to shoot best in lower light closer to sunrise or sunset. There’s even another small island nearby that you can apparently get boat rides to. While near the church, I was enjoying a map of the island with its scenic spots and their flowery names. I decided to go to one that they called Drippy Red Screen. (After all, who doesn’t want to see a screen that drips like blood?)
Really, it’s called that because it’s a dark-colored rock that, close to sunset, apparently turns a vibrant red. I figured, if this is a good place to see a sunset over the sea, I’m there. I left the church around 3:00, and paid a guy another 40 RMB to wheel me back across to the southwest corner of the island.
Though it was far from sunset, I was all too happy to go rent an umbrella and wooden beach chair for 30 RMB with a “front row view” of the sunset. This was vacation, after all, and what better way to spend it than relaxing next to a beach, people watching. At first, there weren’t too many people around. Just a few groups of entrepreneurs like these who took a little area of the beach and rented the umbrellas/chairs. There were also people who you could pay to take you around on jet skis and things like that. Other than that, just sit back, enjoy a drink, and watch boats drift by in seemingly slow motion. This was a good afternoon.
After a few hours, as it got closer to sunset, the tide started to roll out, though, and my front row view began to take more and more of a back seat. Not to umbrellas, but just to people crowding the view. During the 4 or so hours that I was at the beach here, I did manage to take a walk down the way to the Drippy (Not So) Red Screen closer to sunset to see that it wasn’t quite what they hyped it up to be. (That’s a shock…) I didn’t wander more because, as a lone traveler, I was worried they might sell my spot to someone else, even though I said I’d be back. They didn’t, though, and I returned to my umbrella for a few minutes more. There came a tipping point, though – before sunset – when I made the decision that the sunset wasn’t shaping up to be so spectacular that it would warrant being in this crowded an area, so I eventually abandoned hopes of getting jaw-dropping sunset pictures and made my way back to Nanwan before the rest of the crowd did the same. At least this san lun che would only cost 20 RMB, since Nanwan was barely a 10-15 minute ride away.
Back on Nanwan’s main drag, I had the driver drop me in front of the hotel, but I wasn’t ready to go in. I just wanted to walk along the main road there, and eventually discovered all of these unique indoor-outdoor bars. I stopped and had dinner (fried rice, if I remember) and a mango smoothie that was so good that I had a second one in this neat little restaurant where tourists write their memories on the walls.
After that, I continued down the road – all this as the sunset was turning the sky to a deep blue (and I was, after all, quite pleased with what I was able to see here) – and stopped at another bar for a drink. I had a mojito that was honestly forgettable. It tasted more like carbonated soda water than anything. Not seeing much to do besides drink myself into oblivion (which I don’t care to do), I went back out and enjoyed the last of the day’s light before walking back towards the Piggybar. On the way back, I bumped into my college friends from earlier, who told me they’d enjoyed the island, and they did get to the church after all. On the way back is when the first of the power “flickers” happened with electricity dropping on the island.
Without much to do in my hotel room, I tried to stay as comfortable as possible with the air conditioning that continued to go off. It wasn’t as hard to fall asleep as I imagined, and I fell asleep early, which also gave me an early start the next morning for sunrise over the bay.
After checking out of the hotel, still very early (around 8:00), I set off with my backpack and bag and started the walk uphill. My only goal for Sunday morning on the island was to go to the protestant church and photograph there before heading to the dock and making my way back to Beihai.
It was a nice little walk as the road away from Nanwan does a zigzag straight uphill to give a nice view of the town and bay. Also, like western Guangxi, Weizhou Dao’s “countryside” is nothing but banana farms, which was quite nice to see. I shot there a little bit and, when I tired of walking after an hour or so, flagged down a san lun che and paid 30 RMB for him to take me to the protestant church, then to the dock.
The protestant church, unlike the Catholic one, had a 10 RMB admission, and wasn’t nearly as interesting (for me, at least) as the more famous Catholic church. It was nice, however, and I was glad to see it as my “farewell” to the island. From there, I went to the dock and got a ticket for the first available boat back to Beihai.
I really enjoyed my day and night here on Weizhou Dao and was looking forward to one last, relaxing evening in Beihai before getting back to the daily tedium of Chengdu. But first, one more night to go…
This site isn’t so much for travel narrative as it is for looking at pictures, so I’ll cut out a full day’s narrative, save for this:
Thursday was close to an eleven hour day of travel to get from Yangshuo to Detian. I spent less than 90 minutes shooting at the falls. From Detian (western part of the province on the Vietnamese border), I had to make my way to Beihai (southern, coastal city on the Gulf of Tonkin). It was, in distance, much shorter than Yangshuo-Detian. However, it turned into a reasonably miserable travel day and took about twelve hours (with about five of those hours spent in a bus station waiting room in Nanning). I got to my hotel in Beihai around 9:30 p.m. on Friday night. (I would stay in the same hotel Sunday night as well.)
The only positive to come from Friday’s travel was on the bus from Detian to Daxin (and on to Nanning). There was a very nice girl traveling with her parents who wanted to practice her English who happened to have visited Beihai. I think she said she was from Guangdong, too. Anyway, what I wanted to do most in Beihai was go to Weizhou Island (Weizhou Dao). She suggested (almost implied it was required) that I needed to book tickets on the ferry to Weizhou Dao in advance, so she helped me and called someone she knew in Beihai to reserve a ticket for me at 8:30 on Saturday morning.
I really didn’t know too much about Weizhou Dao, except that it was listed in Lonely Planet as a place to go. I did try to research it online, too, but couldn’t find too many pictures of the island. I found a few, though, and it was enough to convince me that it was worth going. Besides, Beihai honestly didn’t have too many places I was interested in seeing for two days.
So, I decided before the trip that I would come out and spend the night here on Weizhou Island. That turned out to be about the best decision I made for this trip, as it was much better than I was expecting from the lack of information I could find about the place.
I fell in love with this island. The ride across the Gulf of Tonkin takes a little over an hour on a high-speed boat. The cost is 150 RMB, which also includes admission to the island. The island is the remnants of a volcano, I believe, and is a reasonably circular island with a total area of 25-30 square kilometers. So…it’s small.
The port at Weizhou Dao is on the northwest corner of the island. The main city (that is to say the one place where there’s a main street running along the water for about 1 km) is called Nanwan (South Bay). To get around the island, you can either walk, rent a bike, or take a san lun che (tuk tuk). San lun che is the easiest. Depending on where you want to go on the island, it costs between 20 and 40 RMB to go from place to place. There are cars on the island, and people (though not many) do live here year-round, but for public transportation, those are your options, and they’re more than enough.
I think I paid 30 RMB to a guy to get me down to Nanwan. I hadn’t booked anything in advance (though I tried), so went to the first place that Lonely Planet mentioned: Piggybar. This was a very cheap place and as close to a dive as any place I’ve stayed in China.
This was the tropics in June, so the weather was sweltering. It turns out that I wouldn’t be alone in my room. I stopped counting how many cockroaches I killed somewhere after five or so. Big-sized suckers, too. But, that would be later in the day. At night, the electricity constantly cut out. This was only a slight annoyance because it would turn the air conditioner off. Sleeping wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. I also stopped counting how many times the power would go off. (It was never for more than 5 minutes, though.) I certainly don’t fault the Piggybar for this. The power apparently just goes out around Nanwan like that.
I did enjoy the main drag in Nanwan. There are a lot of neat little bars and restaurants (and what seemed like a much nicer hotel about midway along the road). I don’t remember the name of the place, but if I make it back there, I’d definitely stay at that place instead.
After I checked into my room in the morning, I took stock of things, thought the view in the south bay was pretty nice, and headed out for a walk towards the rest of the main drag. As this is an island, almost all restaurants have fresh seafood (which, for anyone who knows me, isn’t appealing…but seafood lovers would be in heaven here). I stopped at a restaurant and grabbed an early lunch of generic non-seafood Chinese food. It was so generic that it was forgettable. Maybe it was huntun, which is like a small dumpling soup. I really don’t remember.
While sitting there in the open-air shade enjoying the view of the sea, three college girls came along on bikes they rented and joined me. They, too, were from Guangdong if I remember correctly. I was beginning to think everyone was from Guangdong, but I know better than that. At any rate, they were friendly and we were talking about what to do around the island.
For me, the most interesting place to photograph was going to be the Catholic church. There are two churches on the island – one Catholic (founded by the French), one protestant (founded by Germans, I believe), both around 100 years old, if not a little older. Of the two, the Catholic church is the much more photogenic of the two, so that was what I was most looking forward to shooting, and that was the first place I was going to head via san lun che. It cost 40 RMB to get there. The girls had bikes, so I told them to try to get there – it was on the opposite side of the island…somewhere in the northeast part, but not on the water. They didn’t quite make it, but no worries. I saw them later, and they told me they did eventually get to it.
I wandered around the church and church grounds, and also the streets in front of it for an hour or so in the early afternoon. The church itself was quiet and peaceful and the street in front of it was lively with lots of vendors.
Besides the church, there are a lot of places with natural beauty on this island. As it’s created from a volcano, there are a lot of fascinating rock formations, but those tend to shoot best in lower light closer to sunrise or sunset. There’s even another small island nearby that you can apparently get boat rides to. While near the church, I was enjoying a map of the island with its scenic spots and their flowery names. I decided to go to one that they called Drippy Red Screen. (After all, who doesn’t want to see a screen that drips like blood?)
Really, it’s called that because it’s a dark-colored rock that, close to sunset, apparently turns a vibrant red. I figured, if this is a good place to see a sunset over the sea, I’m there. I left the church around 3:00, and paid a guy another 40 RMB to wheel me back across to the southwest corner of the island.
Though it was far from sunset, I was all too happy to go rent an umbrella and wooden beach chair for 30 RMB with a “front row view” of the sunset. This was vacation, after all, and what better way to spend it than relaxing next to a beach, people watching. At first, there weren’t too many people around. Just a few groups of entrepreneurs like these who took a little area of the beach and rented the umbrellas/chairs. There were also people who you could pay to take you around on jet skis and things like that. Other than that, just sit back, enjoy a drink, and watch boats drift by in seemingly slow motion. This was a good afternoon.
After a few hours, as it got closer to sunset, the tide started to roll out, though, and my front row view began to take more and more of a back seat. Not to umbrellas, but just to people crowding the view. During the 4 or so hours that I was at the beach here, I did manage to take a walk down the way to the Drippy (Not So) Red Screen closer to sunset to see that it wasn’t quite what they hyped it up to be. (That’s a shock…) I didn’t wander more because, as a lone traveler, I was worried they might sell my spot to someone else, even though I said I’d be back. They didn’t, though, and I returned to my umbrella for a few minutes more. There came a tipping point, though – before sunset – when I made the decision that the sunset wasn’t shaping up to be so spectacular that it would warrant being in this crowded an area, so I eventually abandoned hopes of getting jaw-dropping sunset pictures and made my way back to Nanwan before the rest of the crowd did the same. At least this san lun che would only cost 20 RMB, since Nanwan was barely a 10-15 minute ride away.
Back on Nanwan’s main drag, I had the driver drop me in front of the hotel, but I wasn’t ready to go in. I just wanted to walk along the main road there, and eventually discovered all of these unique indoor-outdoor bars. I stopped and had dinner (fried rice, if I remember) and a mango smoothie that was so good that I had a second one in this neat little restaurant where tourists write their memories on the walls.
After that, I continued down the road – all this as the sunset was turning the sky to a deep blue (and I was, after all, quite pleased with what I was able to see here) – and stopped at another bar for a drink. I had a mojito that was honestly forgettable. It tasted more like carbonated soda water than anything. Not seeing much to do besides drink myself into oblivion (which I don’t care to do), I went back out and enjoyed the last of the day’s light before walking back towards the Piggybar. On the way back, I bumped into my college friends from earlier, who told me they’d enjoyed the island, and they did get to the church after all. On the way back is when the first of the power “flickers” happened with electricity dropping on the island.
Without much to do in my hotel room, I tried to stay as comfortable as possible with the air conditioning that continued to go off. It wasn’t as hard to fall asleep as I imagined, and I fell asleep early, which also gave me an early start the next morning for sunrise over the bay.
After checking out of the hotel, still very early (around 8:00), I set off with my backpack and bag and started the walk uphill. My only goal for Sunday morning on the island was to go to the protestant church and photograph there before heading to the dock and making my way back to Beihai.
It was a nice little walk as the road away from Nanwan does a zigzag straight uphill to give a nice view of the town and bay. Also, like western Guangxi, Weizhou Dao’s “countryside” is nothing but banana farms, which was quite nice to see. I shot there a little bit and, when I tired of walking after an hour or so, flagged down a san lun che and paid 30 RMB for him to take me to the protestant church, then to the dock.
The protestant church, unlike the Catholic one, had a 10 RMB admission, and wasn’t nearly as interesting (for me, at least) as the more famous Catholic church. It was nice, however, and I was glad to see it as my “farewell” to the island. From there, I went to the dock and got a ticket for the first available boat back to Beihai.
I really enjoyed my day and night here on Weizhou Dao and was looking forward to one last, relaxing evening in Beihai before getting back to the daily tedium of Chengdu. But first, one more night to go…
سایه ها زیر درختان در غروب سبز می گریند
شاخه ها چشم انتظار سرگذشت ابر
و آسمان چون من غبار آلود دلگیری
باد بوی خاک باران خورده را می آرد
سبزه ها در رهگذر شب پریشانند
آه کنون بر کدامین دشت می بارد
باغ حسرتناک بارانی ست
چون دل من در هوای گریه سیری
سايه
Hidden Narratives, an exhibition at Bullseye Glass Resource Center Bay Area. Work by Stacy Lynn Smith. Photo by Mary Kay Nitchie.
Objective Non Narrative Issue #8.
No longer on hiatus!
5.25 x 7.875 in
Edition of 100
24 pages black and white
photo curtesy of silvanie