Photography Archives - Pierre Trowbridge

Anping Park- Finding Solitude in the Busy City

September 4, 2015 by Pierre 9 Comments

One of the first things you notice about China is the noise. To say they use the horns on their vehicles liberally would be a gross understatement of the truth. I had only been here long enough to get to my apartment from the airport, unpack a little, and have a much needed nap before I set out in search of food at about 8 in the evening. Within a hundred meters or so of the school campus that I now call home I found myself standing on the corner of a busy intersection. The amount of activity and the accompanying noise gave me pause: what the hell have I gotten myself into now. Well, it’s a country of 1.3 billion people and Anhai Town is on the edge of a major city. What did you expect, dumb ass? Fair enough.

If you want to see what that intersection looks like in the daytime watch the video below. I think it’s worth the 2 minutes it takes to watch it. It gets real interesting around the 50 second mark.

I quickly discovered as I cruised around town on my bike -yes, I ride in the traffic in the video. I am really rather good at it- that there are any number of green spaces and parks scattered throughout the city. It is in these that one can get away from the hustle and bustle of the streets and find some tranquility.

The longest stone bridge of its kind in China.

Easily the nicest of the parks that I have discovered so far is the park in Anping. This park is on a large parcel of land in the throat of Shijing River and is a great place to retreat from the busy streets and relax. There are many places to sit back and read, enjoy some time with your family, or go fishing if that’s your fancy. Anping Park is most noted for its stone bridge, the longest of its kind in China. The bridge is the center point of the park and spans the large body of water formed by the widened river.

Not surprisingly, the park is very popular with the local folk so it can be busy in places but you will find that that is mostly near the entrance to the park, so the deeper into the park you go the more solitude you can find. As you wander the park it is easy to find families enjoying an outing and fisherman with their hooks out, and even the odd fellow with a cast net trying to pull in a few fish.

For my taste, easily the best time to visit the park is early in the morning. There are a lot less people and most of those that are there are fishing, so the park possesses a nice easy going, mellow feeling.The morning that I was there to take some photos, the park had a dreamlike quality as it rose from beneath the heavy overnight rains that had laden it and peered out at me through the last veils of a light morning mist. I hope the pictures help you to experience some of what I felt that day.

Until next time.

Sunday Morning at Jinjiang’s Old Market

August 26, 2015 by Pierre 10 Comments

There are times when I am visiting a new city that I like to pick a direction and wander off into the unknown with no plan and see what I can see. What I do during such times is watch the people around me and look for places where large groups have gathered or large numbers seem to be heading in the same direction. A few years ago in Hong Kong this practice led me to a Kung Fu master performing acts of strength and dare devilry such as lying on a bed of nails, and bending a piece of ¼ inch rebar by pushing against one end of it…with his throat! In Mokpo, Korea it led me to the beautiful display that is their annual Water Festival. Just this past Sunday morning at about 6 a.m., following a steady stream of pedestrians and vehicular traffic led me right to Jinjiang’s Old Market. It was quite a spectacle.

The busy street was teeming with people travelling by every means imaginable.

It started off simply enough with a few stalls lining one side of the street with a construction site on the other before leading upon a busy street, teeming with people travelling by every means imaginable, and vendors, whose families have probably been coming to these same spots for generations, calling out to the masses, trying to make their day’s pay. From there it was a rather breathtaking, and somewhat street crossing and then past another group of vendors calling to customers from both sides of the laneway selling all manner of fruit and vegetable, rice and grain.

Then things got interesting.

Once I reached the end of the alleyway, the market opened up into a wide square and erupted into a frenzy of blaring horns, people yelling, cutting, and chopping. At this, the focal point of the market, the energy was palpable. The air was so thick with it that it felt as though a match could ignite it. For a moment I just stood there and took it all in. Then I moved into it, became a part of it, adding my own essence to the union of souls.

Everywhere you looked there was people preparing meet, fish, or fowl for sale and consumption.

Everywhere one looked there was some manner of beast, fish, or fowl being hewn into edible portions. There seemed to be always something underfoot, be it a child, a dog, tubs full of the morning’s catch from the fishmonger, or the legless man lying on the asphalt in the middle of the busiest intersection of the market holding out a cup for alms while people and vehicles zipped past, showing him no sign of recognition. It should be noted that this kind of scene is not something unique to China. In fact, I have seen some version of this drama played out in nearly every large city that I have visited in Asia, whether it be Seoul, Bangkok, or Saigon.

After have a look around the inner market I headed back to the outer market to buy some fruit. With the help of my Mandarin Chinese phrasebook and a good many hand gestures, smiles, and laughs, I negotiated my first purchase in Chinese. I figured I was probably getting shafted a little on the peaches that I bought but I didn’t care too much. I was delighted later when my Chinese co-worker told me that I had in fact gotten a good price. All the better.

This gentleman gave me a good deal on peaches plus he let me have his photo.

I made a couple of other purchases – one of apples and the other of watermelon, each again a good price – and headed back to my abode. I was excited to try out this fresh local produce. I wasn’t disappointed. I plan to make Sunday morning trips to market a regular part of my routine here in Jinjiang.

There is no better place to put your finger on the pulse of a place than its public markets.

2014: A VeloTramp Year in Review

January 4, 2015 by Pierre 3 Comments

I feel like I have been 47 years old for more than a year already but that number has been reached just today. It was at least October of 2013, since I first started referring to my upcoming January 2014 birthday as my 47th. I was months into the year still asking myself how old I was, my first instinct always being to say “47”. I don’t know why but it seems I was in a hurry to get to number 47. I hope it was for a good reason. As the old saw goes, time will tell. But I choose to see it as a good omen. Regardless of what the outcome may be, I have great anticipation for 2015. And I see reasons to be positive about the year that is to come as it’s dawn breaks upon us.

Like you, my year has had its ups and downs. Some of the downs have been unique and challenging. Some of the ups rank among the biggest ups of my life. It would be easy to dwell on the negatives. Many of us do. We concern ourselves so much with the things that haven’t gone according to plan. We focus so much on the grey that we often forget to look at the brighter side of things. We forget, to our detriment, those people and things in our lives that bring light, and we forget the courage and the strength that we used to get back up when we were down. Those are good things, too. Like so many people, I’ve often been guilty of this type of attitude, but I am changing that. So, in a year with it’s fair share of tumult, I am going to focus on some things from the past year that hold meaning for me, events that contribute to my hopefulness for 2015.

It was a pretty vanilla start to the year. We had Blackout Newfoundland, lots of snow, and temperatures and wind as cold and as biting as those thrown out by Satan’s wings at the heart of the Inferno. I had my 47th, I mean 46th, birthday dinner at Donovan’s Irving, because it was the only place in town that had electricity and was serving cooked food. Eventually, the hellish cold of winter passed and what passes for spring in Newfoundland arrived. It was then that I bought my new bike. I have had a long love affair with cycling. There have been times where I have gone without cycling for extended periods but the past 5 years or so I have been very dedicated to it and plan to keep that going as long as I am able to.

Spring came and went and then June-tober arrived. I managed a few good rides on my bike but the first truly great ride would come in July. July was one of the best months of weather I can recall in all the years I have lived in Newfoundland. So I packed up my car full of bike and camping gear and headed to the west coast. I parked my car with new friends Gus and Beryl Adams in Deer Lake and headed off to L’Anse-aux-Meadows. It was an incredible ride. It was about midday on day 3 that I had a moment of cycling bliss that will stay with me forever. I found myself riding in what I can only refer to as “The Zone.” It was a period of over an hour where I rode effortlessly regardless of terrain. Up, down, it didn’t matter. I was riding in top gear the whole time, speed increasing as I climbed grades rather than decreasing. Legs turning and churning, putting kilometer after kilometer behind me, and the tension and effort changed only the slightest. An incredible experience that only served to confirm my belief that I was born to ride a bike. The rest of the journey was filled with joyous moments and before I knew it I was at my destination. 5 days of riding to cover 460 kilometers. Not bad. And it was all trouble free, right until the moment of my triumphal arrival at the shores of the sea at L’Anse-aux-Meadows when I promptly tipped to the side and I, bike and all, fell over. Smooth move Ex-Lax. Regardless, it was at this point, lying on the road bleeding from scrapes incurred in the inglorious topple that the seeds for The VeloTramp Project were germinated.

L'Anse-aux-Meadows, NL — L’Anse-aux-Meadows, NL

With my appetite for adventure temporarily sated I set my eyes upon another prize: a new camera. I had been wanting to change cameras for a while. I had become aware of the newer compact systems cameras now available on the marketplace. These cameras do not have mirrors and thus they are much smaller and lighter than the dSLR that I had been using. I remember the overcast September day well. I marched (more like skulked) into Henry’s and confidently (timidly) placed all of my old Nikon gear on the counter to see what I could get in trade. I was more than pleasantly surprised. To make a long story short,I got much more for my gear than I ever dreamed and at the end of our transaction I found myself holding on tightly to a brand new Fuji X-E2 camera. I had tried some others before the Fuji but when I placed my hands on that Fuji? Man! Those other cameras were immediately forgotten. You can read more here if you are interested. After trading for the new camera all that remained was to take it for a good test run. A large part of the reason I desired this compact and lightweight yet powerful camera was to carry it with me on bike rides. Well then, what better place to take it than beautiful Cape Breton Island. And holy wow folks. If there is any place more beautiful than Cape Breton Island in autumn, especially the Cabot Trail and Cape Breton Highlands National Park, I have yet to see it.

So, in a moment of temporary madness I started a Gofundme account with the intention of raising money to pay for a cycling trip to Cape Breton and the VeloTramp was born. I have to admit that I was going through a very weird time in my life when I started it, but if I had been of a more sound mind, I probably wouldn’t have done it. So maybe it was a more sound mind that started it than I thought at the time. I dunno. Anyway, I started the campaign, got some contributors (thank you all), bought a plane ticket with some air miles and headed off mad as a hatter to Cape Breton.

It was everything I could have dreamed of in a bike trip. It was challenging, rewarding, and incredibly beautiful. The trip has been well documented with both writing and photos and you can go to pierretrowbridge.com if you want to see and read more about it (You should. There’s some good stuff there). And while the land itself was incredible, it was no match for the wonderful people I met along the way. Particularly my friends the MacDougall’s in Sydney. I could write a book about Keith, Janice, and Lyndon, the family of my great friend, Sandy Currie, whom I met while teaching English in Korea, and never scratch the surface of how wonderful and amazing these people are. The same goes for their many friends and family that I had the great privilege of meeting during my time there. It is you, my friends, who were the greatest reward of the trip.

So that’s a brief look back at my 2014. 2015 is now well under way and birthday number 47, the one that I seemed to be in a big hurry to get to, is on the horizon. As I said at the outset, I am entering this new year with a great deal of anticipation. I have already begun preparing for a new VeloTramp journey that I hope will take place by April. I’m not sure where that trip will be yet, but I will be sure to let you all know when I do, and maybe a few of you will join me at pierretrowbridge.com and follow along and enjoy the stories and pictures that go along with the ride.

Have a great 2015 everybody. Ride on.

Cape Breton Photo Gallery

November 3, 2014 by Pierre 7 Comments