Shanghai Tan

Following the trip from Sanqingshan, we drove about 70km to Wuyuan and stayed there for 3 days 2 nights. This was my second time to Jiangxi Wuyuan [江西婺源], last year was also during this season of omnipresent yellow rapeseed fields. With the freedom of driving, our aim this time was to visit a much larger area of this beautiful county once praised by a National Geographic journalist as “The most beautiful village of China”!

With the rise of its reputation across China, the many scenic areas within Wuyuan have gotten together to create a multi-sites pass that costs 180 rmb, linking 12 sites in total. If you go to any of these sites, you have to buy the combo ticket, but you can use it for 5 days as many times as you want. To make sure you don’t resell this to another individual during the valid period, they record your fingerprint in the card during first use, and subsequent uses must be authorized by the same fingerprint. Smart, but potentially troublesome, and I suppose this doesn’t come cheap in equipment and maintenance. I just wonder how much more money are the site owners making in using such system… or maybe the money just go to the county touristic department first and they redistributed to the site owners, in which case I doubt they would receive their full entitlement…….

Well, the first 2 days were cloudy, as typical in the Jiangxi and Anhui provinces. The 3rd day was absolutely blue sky and great weather. During this trip I did see much more of Wuyuan, so much that I felt the villages were repetitive and basically indistinguishable in photos. With the convenience of a car, we drove back and forth among the 3 observation decks of the Jiangling [江岭] scenic area 3 times during the morning. We actually stayed one night on top of the mountain, allowing us to be at the observation deck very early the next morning (7am). But then we realized that people were much more crazy then us, they were there way before we woke up! When we got there, people were already filled up the place with tripods and long lens. Once again, the cloud was thick, sky was blue, what a wonderful world I told myself! Seeing a small village on the mountain dipped in the cloud, I couldn’t stop pressing the camera shutter, on and on and on.

Trying to capture different aspect of Wuyuan this time, I was pleasantly surprised by the Yue Liang Wan [月亮湾] scenic area. We were not aware of this place when we drove cross a crowd of more than 50 amateur photographers lining up beside the river. We decided to pull off and joined the crew, spent more than an hour of truely enjoyable shooting time. It was a really nice discover for me. I feel that I did shoot many different views of Wuyuan this time compared to last year, and I felt more comfortable in shooting with the new camera now. I feel that my framing skills have improved during this year too.

Click here to see the whole album.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 12:14 am and is filed under Photo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.