Category Archives: Travel

As per tradition, I’ve compiled a group photograph from a series of hand-held shots taken by the members of the group in turn, in low light and high alcohol conditions. I’m moderately pleased with this year’s which was taken using the Sony RX100.

Sadly, Christine was missing as she wasn’t feeling too well. Otherwise here’s the Light and Land Myanmar 2017 tour group, from left to right: Julia, Andy, Geoffrey, Linda, Annette, Sara, Yours Truly, Neil, Fiona, Beverley and our leaders, Phil Malpas and Clive Minnit.

Please just don’t try and match up the beer bottles or count the legs too closely!

I am slightly disappointed to find that the "floating market" is actually on solid ground, and only "floating" in the same sense as the "floating crap game" in Guys and Dolls. However it’s still a bustling, vibrant place, with lots of both photo and retail opportunities! It’s Saturday, and we’re in a part of the world where many people don’t yet have ready access to refrigeration, so most of the locals buy fresh food every day or two. It’s definitely fresh: some of the fish come wriggling out of buckets, and some of the chickens are plucked squawking from baskets just before becoming quarters…

Another observation is that for anyone used to Chinese food, there’s nothing that unusual. Chillies aside, there’s nothing I wouldn’t eat, provided it was prepared cleanly and cooked well.

Despite expectations to the contrary expressed widely within the group, I manage to find a carved elephant plaque which will go nicely alongside the animal-themed masks from Venice and Bhutan. As they say in Apollo 13, "Failure is not an option" 🙂

Once back at the hotel we say goodbye to the very friendly and helpful staff and start the journey back to Yangon. The initial trip across the lake, lunch, and the climb up to Heho airport are uneventful and much more enjoyable as we arrived in fog and mist, whereas we now have a glorious sunny day and can see much more of what’s going on. The trouble starts when Shine announces an extra stop, to visit a paper manufacturing workshop, and it becomes apparent that our flight is going to be significantly delayed. At 5pm the other flights have all departed and the shops and cafes in the tiny terminal put up their shutters and quit for the night.

I discover there is a hidden step down into the gents. That’s right, I went headlong into a haha at Heho airport. He he.

Well after 6pm we are still waiting for our flight, very much on the "last one out turn the lights off" basis. There’s a loud cheer when the flight finally lands. We get to Yangon a couple of hours behind schedule and we have an early start. Oh well, this trip has been consistent in several ways.

A decent night’s sleep! I am obviously now so knackered that I have just “tuned out” the boats.

After breakfast we go to a different area of the lake, to watch more leg-rowing fishermen but who use a different style of net (and who are quite obviously really trying to catch fish), and then the "island builders". Essentially they harvest "lake weed" (mainly a type of water hyacinth) and place it on the "floating gardens", which are essentially just vast vegetation bundles bound together with bamboo, but on which some of the islanders live.  These are very productive agricultural resources, for growing lots of things but tomatoes do particularly well. After about 10-15 years a particular area is left to disintegrate and return to the lake, and they start on another one.

This visit is followed by one of the more peaceful moments of the whole trip, drifting without engines down a "side street" of one of the villages. Great reflections, and observations of village life. It’s intriguing to see one crew demolishing one of the stilt houses, and another one building a new one. Their boats are all tied up neatly underneath, not unlike a row of white Transit vans at an equivalent site in the UK.

Then it’s a trip to weaving centre, where they create beautiful cloth of cotton, silk and from the lotus plant, which grows on the lake. Photographically it’s a bit of a challenge given the high dynamic range of the lighting, but everyone is very friendly and accommodating, and we make appropriate use of the well-stocked shop.

After lunch and a break, we gather in our longhis for the group photograph. I have also supplemented mine with a rather nice cotton top from the weaving shop, and look every inch the Burmese gent, once I’ve been reminded to remove my Italian mountain shoes and socks!

Another hour on the lake at sunset is pleasant, and Shine has persuaded one of the waitresses from the hotel to model for us. Tomorrow morning we visit the floating market, then start the long journey home.

I really shouldn’t complain. I know the sleep deprivation thing is a bit annoying, but it’s just become a running joke. On the other hand, I am getting the opportunity to see and photograph some rather magnificent sites. Here, and with a rough nod to the title, is what I made of the Bagan plain at sunset.

We’ve been having a debate in the group about how different people see and make images. My temptation, which matches my usual professional role of taking complicated things and trying to put some unifying structure onto them, is to try and somehow capture the essence of a whole scene. Others have a perfectly valid but different approach of working out from details of interest. This is an example of mine.

The "Light and Land Burma Sleep Deprivation Experience" (TM) gains a new twist. While theoretically we have an extra hour and a half in bed, at almost exactly 4.43 am the little boats start powering past the hotel, single-cylinder engines going full chat. I manage to hold on until about 5.30 and then get up. At breakfast I suggest the tour is re-labelled "Burma, on even less sleep than the guys who built the railway". This is acknowledged as humorous and not inaccurate, but not in the best possible taste. Sorry.

However, such complaints seem churlish when the day gets going. The first stop is the local junior school (from kindergarten to about 12). Yet again, as on the Bhutan trip, we are welcomed in to photograph the students and their activities, something which would be almost inconceivable in Britain. We get lots of shots of happy little faces. Every year Phil presents a book of shots from the previous year, and then takes a cover photo of a group of kids with the book on display. Next year’s book should include a couple of my photos, and the cover will include a record of four years of visits.

After that it’s back in the boat again, and to the local village, where our first stop is a workshop run by the Kayan people. These are the group where the women wear brass rings around their neck and legs, which is now a dying tradition but we are lucky enough to meet and photograph a couple of older ladies, and a couple of younger practitioners who are also producing great weavings. The group goes on to photograph some novices at the nearby monastery school, but I prefer to get some exteriors of the village and its canals in wonderful light.

After lunch, we return to the hotel for our afternoon break. This is great in theory but the traffic on the lake is really busy, and we’re bang in the middle of it, so it’s rather like being buzzed by small military helicopters continuously for 2 hours. It’s a blessed relief to get back in the boats for the afternoon shoot.

This is quite magical. Our guide, Shine, has arranged to meet with half a dozen of the famous "leg rower" fishermen. Under his able direction, they perform over an hour of positively balletic moves in front of the setting sun, creating perfect silhouettes and also providing intriguing close-ups. My only slight concern is that we are in danger of creating communities in which modelling talent trumps, for example, the actual ability to catch fish. However for now we are the beneficiaries, and if it keeps at least the basis of the skill alive in a changing world, that’s maybe of some value.

Today we have a welcome opportunity to sleep a bit later. Unfortunately the Pavlovian conditioning has well and truly kicked in and I wake up at 4.43, although I do manage to get back to sleep for a bit longer before the Mandalay traffic makes sleep infeasible.

The first leg of our journey is uneventful, but I do wonder why Mandalay airport has to be over an hour from the city. At least I get a bit more practice trying to shoot motorbikes from the bus, although with limited results.

"Mandalay International Airport" does have the air of a vanity project – no busier than the others, and while there are fully equipped gates for large jets they are completely empty, and the small turboprop planes which comprise the bulk of the traffic have to park way out on the apron, serviced by transfer buses. The other regional airports feel a lot more sensible.

Our flight to the splendidly named Heho Airport in Shan State is delayed a bit, but smooth once it gets under way. The drive down from the airport (which is on a high plateau a few hundred metres above Lake Inle) is quite unlike any scenery we’ve seen so far, and reminiscent of Southern Bhutan.

After an impressively quick lunch stop (my pizza takes less than 10 minutes) we’re off across the lake by yet another form of transport  – essentially a teak gondola with a big single-cylinder outboard engine. Inle lake is a large body of relatively shallow inland water, with a combination of permanent and floating islands, on both of which the locals have established settlements, with full agriculture and so  on.  The crossing of the lake takes about an  hour and is colder and windier than expected, but the hotel location, on stilts in the middle of the lake, is great.

We have a few minutes to check in, and then go off to our first shooting location, a village which is home to a couple of necropolis – an ancient one several centuries old in which the memorials are now crumbling, and a new one in which new buildings are still being created. I favour the latter as an area of great shapes, colours and light, but others focus on the older monuments, and still others on photographing the locals. We all end up paying K500 (about 30p) for the official camera permit, and about K5000 (a bit less than £3) for the unofficial camera permit, purchased from the young lady vendors in the form of a cotton scarf.

I don’t know whether it’s good karma, but in four hotels I have now been in rooms 201, 202, 203 and 204.

Today was not quite as restful as planned, and tummy grumbling slightly – this trip is quite hard work. That said, it’s another excellent day of photography.

After an early start – quel surprise – we go back to the old teak bridge first thing, and photograph locals coming and going, and then fishermen casting their nets. We then shoot (& I film) the farmed ducks being led to the lake for the day. It’s fascinating that a group of  several hundred ducks can be trained to follow a farmer from their pen to the lake, and then back at the end of a day’s "grazing". Phil has the idea of putting my little Sony RX100 in movie mode at ground level in the ducks’ path and it works quite well. When I’ve sorted the video out I’ll post it for review.

On the way back to the hotel, I start thinking about whether one can really plan travel photos or not. Photography textbooks are all full of a concept called "pre-visualisation", the concept of seeing the finished image in your head before pressing the shutter button. Set aside wrangles about semantics and whether "pre" has any role here (surely this is just "visualisation", or "envisioning"?) I suspect that this is a concept with limited value in our modern photographic environment. Firstly with live view and the ability to set picture styles and aspect ratios in camera, you can get close to the expected look of an image, and you probably only need to "visualise" when that’s not possible and you need to plan post processing work. However the main issue is that travel photography is more about "found" images. You may research a bit about your target locations, but the individual images are still tricky to plan.

As an exercise, I have set myself a target of capturing something about Mandalay transport. Shine, who originates from the city, has told us that Mandalayans are born riding motorbikes, and that certainly seems to be the case. I have started collecting images which represent this. I rather like the following one, but what I really want, which I have seen several times and "visualised", is an image of a bike with two attractive women sitting side-saddle on the back! Getting good images from the bus is tricky, but I’m working on it.

After a late breakfast and lazy lunch break we are back on the bus, first to visit where they carve all the alabaster Buddhas and other religious icons. This is done on a massive scale, out of a number of  small workshops but with the total volume being very impressive. After that we visit the banks of the Ayarwaddy (Irawaddy) river, where there are substantial migrant worker villages. Essentially most of the "heavy lifting" of moving goods around in Burma, whether by boat or other methods, is done by these people who move seasonally depending on the state of the rivers. They are very friendly, and we are welcomed into their village to take photos, but like many similar communities sanitation is clearly a bit of a challenge, and coupled with my slightly fragile state I’m happy to bail fairly quickly to the bar of the posh hotel over the road.

There we seem to have crashed the local Valentine’s day event. There’s a definite over-supply of roses, so much so that Phil and Geoffrey (not, as far as we are aware, any sort of an item) get one each, and that simply demands a photo, doesn’t it. I may post said photo, depending on how heavily I’m bribed with beer.

Slightly later start tomorrow, and we move on again to Inle Lake. Fingers crossed.

Lie in.  🙂 Until 5.35. 🙁

After breakfast we go to Bagan airport and got the flight to Mandalay, which took 25 minutes ground to ground, followed by a bus drive of well over an hour through the city to the hotel.

Late morning consists of a trip to the Maha Muni Temple in central Mandalay. This is a splendid golden construction, but I am reminded of Noel Coward’s famous song about Mad Dogs and Englishmen when I nearly burn my feet walking around the outer courtyards. The central area under the pagoda is an open grid of columns and arches, with highly polished tile floors which generate great light and reflections.

The Maha Muni is a busy place, with constant comings and goings by pilgrims, monks, nuns and lots of local visitors as well as tourists. Playing "catch a monk", trying to photograph a monk well-positioned against the background is entertaining and quite challenging. One of the primary activities is for young novice monks and nuns undergoing initiation – most Burmese children spend at least a few weeks in training as a standard part of education. I get a great shot of a tiny princess preparing for her initiation, and a rather fetching smile from a pretty older novice who passes us in her group.

Lunch is pizza in the back of the Mercedes showroom next to the hotel. Unexpected. Delicious.

In the afternoon we head for the U Bein bridge, the longest teak bridge in the world. Unfortunately we hit bad traffic. Mandalay is a busy city of around 1.5M people, most of whom seem to be simultaneously on motorbikes, and the traffic does seem to be subject to random delays, especially around the frequent and poorly managed roadworks. It doesn’t help that the good hotels are near the old Royal palace to the east of the centre, but the airport and most attractions are to the west.

The bridge provides another "good game" (shades of Bruce Forsyth) – attempting to catch a couple of locals, ideally monks, perfectly positioned between the bridge uprights without any other people in shot, while working from a rowing boat at extreme zoom range in the middle of the lake. I prove to be quite good, not sure why.

Fingers crossed for a decent nights sleep tonight.

Sunday. We started the day very early (again!), with a pre-dawn shoot at one of the temples, which ended with watching the balloons take off in the rising sun.

After breakfast we went into Bagan’s main market town (Nyaung U as Bagan city is in the middle of the archaeological zone and very restricted in development) for some market photography and what would be described as "retail therapy" if there was any element of choice or relaxation in it, which there wasn’t. I got a few items with a bit of an elephant theme for fun.

I would describe Nyaung U as “cheerfully manic” – a lot going on, but not as frantic as a larger Asian city like Kathmandu, for example. In sharp contrast to Yangon the main mode of transport seems to be the motorcycle. The number of attractive women riding around without helmets with their waist-length hair almost in the oily bits is quite large, but they seem to be sufficiently practiced to avoid the obvious problems.

It’s not easy to capture "cheerfully manic" in a photo. I’m not sure whether the above does the trick.

After lunch I got another hour in the sun, which was almost but not quite without incident. You would think that the accumulated engineering skill of the human race would allow repeatable design of items such as the sun lounger, but apparently not. The Burmese design looks superficially similar to the western one, so much so that you could be forgiven for assuming that moving the back support beyond its final notch would just lay the bed flat. Unfortunately this is not the case – in the Burmese design this action disconnects the bed from the back "feet", turning the lounger into a see-saw with its centre of gravity (net of an adult human) outside its base. I watched with a combination of amusement and horror as the elderly gentleman beside me attempted said adjustment, and was then gently deposited head-first onto the pool deck. Fortunately no harm was done, but honestly. Gravity 1, human mechanical sympathy 0.

After that we had another hour scheduled for photographing dimly-lit temple interiors, but I declared UDI and went off to photograph the exteriors in late afternoon light. We finished up an another temple where you could get onto the roof to watch the sunset, a bit of a heaving mass of humanity but we got a few decent shots regardless.

We have another early start tomorrow (although not quite as bad as the last couple of days) and fly to Mandalay.

There’s a pattern starting to emerge for this trip: late meals, short sleeps, and then amazing visual experiences which make it all worthwhile. After a somewhat slow dinner last night and a very early alarm this morning I woke with a bit of trepidation, but I shouldn’t have worried. This was going to be a hard day to top.

The reason for this morning’s early start was a balloon flight over Bagan. This is an area of a few tens of square miles with roughly 4,000 ancient temples and pagodas, many of which date back to the 11th Century AD, although some are later. Most are in very good repair, although some have been clumsily restored in recent years, and ironically it was those which were badly damaged in an earthquake last year – the older unrestored ones weathered the ‘quake without problems. The balloon flight drifts gently over the area, allowing you a unique bird’s eye view of the temples and the landscape, juxtaposed with the other balloons in the air at the same time.

This was my fourth balloon flight, and quite possibly the best yet, even given that the last one was a mass ascent at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta in 2012, itself a magical experience for different reasons. Our flight today lasted over an hour, and included both high vantage points, but also drifting over the fields at a height where we could have picked some of the produce. The air was a bit hazy at first, but as the sun came up the contrast improved and I think I have some magical shots.

We had two breakfasts: a glass of champagne at the landing site, then back to the hotel for some more traditional fayre. After that we were out again, to visit one of the temples. I had misunderstood the instructions, and didn’t take my tripod, which was a bit of a challenge given that we were photographing inside by available light… However necessity is the mother of invention and I got some unique shots using the altar and my camera bag as a base, using the camera’s timer to fire the shutter without any shake. I’m very pleased with the results.

After lunch we had a couple of hours to ourselves. I spent mine by the pool, drinking what has to be one of the best pina coladas I have drunk in recent years. In the Caribbean they have taking to making such drinks with a pre-made mix which doesn’t taste of much. In Bagan they had clearly liquidised some real pineapple chunks, and the results where excellent.

4pm rolled through, and we set off to a "mystery event". Our Burmese guide, Shine, had rounded up some local villagers to act as models: "local people doing local things" as Steve Pemberton might describe it. I’m not quite sure the young lad who was playing the novice monk quite understood things, but the old ladies realised quite rapidly that they could earn money just sitting in the sun smoking cheroots, balancing baskets on their heads and so on, as long as they didn’t collapse into hysterics. Shine oversaw the whole thing, directing the action through a megaphone like a budding Steven Spielberg, and a great time was had on both sides.

The penultimate stop was the top of a temple facing into the sunset, and we got some great shots of the local architecture bathed in end of day light. Then it was on to our dinner appointment, which included a cabaret. After the dimly-lit fiasco of "Bhutan Culture Night", I had relatively low expectations, but it was brilliant. The dance moves and costumes were fairly traditional, but the well-lit stage and fairly modern "fusion" music certainly weren’t, and the better for it. I have some great shots and video. The pretty ladies and handsome young men performing traditional routines were fine, but I’m afraid the evening’s prize has to go to the elephant dance, performed by a couple of blokes (probably) in a pantomime elephant costume, to what can best be described as "hip hop". Hilarious, and almost worth the price of the trip on its own.

The only problem with today is that I don’t know how Clive, Phil and Shine can top it…

Just in case there’s any risk of our body clocks getting back in line, we have a 5am start to return to Swedagon Pagoda before sunrise. This is essentially a reverse of last night, with the buildings initially under artificial light and then in the morning "golden hour", but with the significant benefit that it’s very quiet, with only locals and dedicated pilgrims and photographers, until well after 8.

I realise that I’m tending to take a lot of the same shots as last night, and force myself to just sit on some steps with the 100-300mm lens mounted, and train my eyes again to look for details rather than the "big picture". However, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t "see" in the traditional 70-200mm range. I’m happy trying to capture big vistas with wide-angle lenses, up to the short telephoto range, and then looking for details at what most people would regard as extreme telephoto, but I take relatively few shots in the middle. That’s something I need to work on.

After breakfast we have a couple of hours to ourselves, which I spend on sorting out emails and getting the blog running, then we’re off again, on one of the many separate flights which comprise this trip. We stop for lunch at a Chinese restaurant which has an impressive menu but where the waiters’ English skills are less comprehensive. I order a small portion of roast duck, but what turns up appears to be almost a whole bird. Glad I didn’t order the large portion!

The flight up from Yangon to Bagan is uneventful. Despite having much less in the way of paperwork and jet engines, Air KBZ runs promptly to time… We are now staying in a hotel with the wonderful name of the Amazing Bagan Resort!

Another dawn start tomorrow, just in case. This time it’s our balloon trip over the plains of Bagan. More tomorrow. For now, here’s a picture of two nuns meditating – peace be with you!

I’m off on my travels again – another photographic trip with Light and Land, this time to Myanmar (formerly Burma).

Having recently downloaded a copy of Canned Heat’s Greatest Hits I was tempted to call this blog “On the Road Again”, but that’s not correct for this trip. It appears that outside the main centres Myanmar’s roads are pretty non-existent (despite managing to host a very good Top Gear special a few years ago), and most of the medium as well as long-range travel on this trip will be by air, hence the title. However we’ve not got off to the best of starts, and I’m hoping that’s not an omen…

Things start on Tuesday, the day before travel, when I received a flurry of emails late in the morning explaining that my outbound flight to Bangkok is being rescheduled by 3 hours, and as a result I’d be on a rather later connecting flight to Yangon (formerly the Burmese capital of Rangoon). That isn’t too much of a trial, as Frances is able to re-arrange to accommodate the later drop-off, and it means that we avoid rush hour on the M25. As a result we have an easy trip to the airport and arrived in plenty of time. At check-in I meet Julia, who was also on the Bhutan trip, and it is no great hardship having a natter and looking at photos over lunch. Unfortunately when we get to the gate, things started to look a bit more problematic, and it becomes clear that there are going to be further delays. We finally get away about an hour and a quarter later than the rescheduled time.

The flight is smooth and uneventful, apart from sleep being impossible due to the old lady next to me listening to the entertainment that I could hear her film soundtrack from her headphones, with mine on (and I’m quite deaf)!

The process for dealing with a delayed, full A380 at Bangkok airport is a number of Thai Airways employees scattered throughout the terminal, each with routing instructions and meal vouchers for a subset of the passengers. I am beginning to wonder how this can work, when the second person I ask for directions turns out to have my name on her list, and my lunch voucher. Impressive, or just good luck??

The flight to Yangon is rostered onto an airbus A330, capacity over 300, despite the fact that there are only a handful of passengers who only just outnumber the crew. Loading takes about 5 minutes, and is complete a good quarter of an hour before departure time. However that doesn’t stop departure being delayed by a further 25 minutes, for no reason which was ever explained to us. I’ve come to the conclusion that Thai Airways regard the clock as a broad guideline rather than anything more. Oh well, if you can’t face these things with reasonable equanimity you shouldn’t be doing international travel…

Arrival in Myanmar was straightforward, and it was good to meet up with the rest of the group, and particularly Clive Minnit and Phil Malpas, the group leaders. This will be the third of Clive and Phil’s trips I’ve been on, and I have great expectations based on the previous ones. It takes a while to get across Yangon – it’s a busy city of a similar size and population to London, and there’s a fair amount of traffic at rush hour – but it was noticeably different from the mania often portrayed of this part of the world, and which I experienced in reality in Kathmandu. There’s none of the milling bikes, mopeds and overcrowded buses. Yangon seems to be “London busy” rather than “Asian busy”, if that makes sense. It will be interesting to see how Mandalay compares.

We only have about half an hour to unpack the cameras before setting out again, and I’m starting to feel somewhat ragged, but that all evaporates when we got to the Shwedagon Pagoda. This is actually a “pagoda complex” over several acres, where the huge central golden pagoda has been progressively surrounded by hundreds of other pagodas, temples and shrines. We arrive just as the sun was starting to paint these fascinating structures in late afternoon light, and stay until an hour after sunset, by which time everything is artificially lit. The enormous difference from Bhutan is that the Burmese don’t mind you photographing inside the temples, and you’re free to photograph them as well as long as you don’t actually disturb someone’s meditation. Talk about a “target rich environment”!

I’m slightly stunned by the wealth of visual information, and not quite sure where to start, so these two images are just a taster. More tomorrow!