Pixiq

After almost a month shooting two books in cities (mainly Shanghai and Beijing), I decided I’d done my duty and deserved a trip somewhere else before heading back to London on Sunday. I flew down to Guilin, in southern China, a few days ago. This is China’s most famous beauty spot (the Song Dynasty poet Wang Zheng Gong wrote, ‘Guilin mountains and water, first under the sky’, so it’s official)

It’s famous for a landscape of steep limestone hills — karst limestone, like Vietnam’s Halong Bay on dry land with a river running through them. The scenery around the small town of Yangshuo, south of the city of Guilin, is fantastic — range after range of sugarloaf mountains receding into the distance. The tourist exploitation, on the other hand is mind-numbing. Hundreds of boats, cafes, restaurants, all concentrated in a tiny area. The good thing about this is that a mile or two away, like on the hilltop where I’m staying, all this is happily remote. The bad thing (well, there are several bad things, but the one that bothers my photography) is that every obviously photogenic location is overwhelmed.  The day before yesterday I drove down from Guilin city, and then up to the village of Xingping on a bend of the Li River. This is the most famous spot of all, and my concern before I arrived was the usual one of not wanting to copy the obvious.

Well, I needn’t have worried on that score. In just a short stretch, dozens of craft of all sizes, from passenger boats to small powered rafts, were churning up the river, while the banks were full of tour groups and wedding photographers...

There’s even a landing spot all neatly laid out for what’s known as the “20 RMB shot”. This is where the the picture was taken that graces the 20 RMB banknote, and it’s very popular with tour groups. This is it, on a note I just fished out of my pocket...

A rather grubby note, but you get the idea. At least it shows I’m not getting into the banknote reproduction business. The actual view these days is nowhere near as tranquil. And this isn’t even the peak tourist season. Now, to give you an idea of what everyone thinks it looks like, here’s the cover of a book by my old friend Steve Viidler, one of the world’s top travel stock photographers...

Trouble is, he shot this a number of years ago, and nothing stands still in China. (Actually, Steve has had a unique and very successful career in photography, and I interviewed him a while ago on my teaching website for the UK’s Open College of the Arts — see www.thefreemanview.com, then under Featured Photographer). So, while I no longer had to worry about plagiarism, because that and similar shots just aren’t there in their pristine form any more, I did have to think about what I was going to do. Placid water works very well with this kind of landscape, but where? I spent time with a map, and quizzed the owners of the small hotel and a driver. They suggested a tributary river, too shallow for motorboats, where I could hire a boatman with a bamboo raft that had to be poled along. Sounded better. The next thing was to go at daybreak — most people don’t like getting up very early on holiday, so that usually improves things.

The new location wasn’t bad at all, and the boatman took me up and down for three hours. By the end, I’d found a particularly lovely stretch of water, not crowded even by mid-morning. And better still, an hour upstream we’d stopped at the old Yulong Bridge so that my boatman could pay his ‘fee’ to the local government (that’s another story; the boatmen are not at all happy that they are forced to pay about a third of what they earn, for no obvious benefit). As he moored the raft, I found myself next to a slimmer bamboo raft with four cormorants. Turned out that one or two men still fish the traditional way, though by this time in the morning they’d finished. This sparked an interest, as I’ve shot a story on cormorant fishing in Japan, and again on Erhai, the lake in Yunnan. In Gifu, Japan, it’s all for tourism, but in Yunnan and here, it’s to make a living from catching fish.

So, I arranged to come back the next day — this morning — very early, at sunrise. No tourists at all, and the sun just appearing through the haze as we followed the fisherman slowly downstream...

And...

Now, you might complain that I’m favouring one reality over another here, and that instead of the picturesque I should have shown the reality of mad tourism. I think I’ll leave that to someone else. Personally, I just had the most idyllic morning.