The Romans, in the height of their glory, have made fish the mistress of all their entertainments; they have had musick to usher in their Sturgeons, Lampreys, and Mullets, which they would purchase at rates rather to be wondered at than believed.
Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler
Whenever I walk by any of the tributaries and branches of the Pearl river, I find anglers. One night as I walked by the East river in Huizhou, a tributary of the Pearl, I realized that angling has changed in the 21st century. The man you see in the photo was fishing with an LED light as lure. No matter how prepared you are, China can catch you by surprise at times. As I walked on I realized that the shore of the river was dotted with anglers at night. This was more traditional. I couldn’t see what fish they caught.
Early winter in Wakayama prefecture is warm. In mid-December leaves were still turning gold and red. So one day after lunch we decided to take a ride on the slow train to the village of Kimiidera, which has a nice temple perched on a hill above the village. It threatened to rain all the time. The morning had been sunny and we’d not picked up umbrellas from the hotel. We were lucky. The threatening skies remained just a threat as long as we were out. But the clouds gave us lovely shots when we were on the mountainside. You see a panorama over Wakanoura bay and the Pacific ocean with those clouds in the featured photo.
As we came down to the entrance of the temple we saw an inviting little cafe. As we sat there and had a coffee and cake, the rain came pelting down. We thanked the hundred armed Kannon of the temple for extending this small mercy to us, but there was more to her blessing outside. As soon as we got out of the cafe an excited lady pointed to a rainbow over the hills. I could see a double rainbow, but persuading my phone to see it was tough.
With the rain the sunset had turned even more technicolor. In our years of living by the sea we’ve noticed this before. The microscopic water droplets suspended in the air just before or after a shower give a special light. If you want to know the technicality, it is called Mie scattering. But you could just enjoy the yellow and purple sunset instead. As we walked back to the railway station we realized that in the right light even a parking lot can look beautiful.
Wakayama peninsula is known for two things in particular. The first is the Kumano Kodo trail, a religious pilgrimage route across the Kii mountain range. This is what most visitors come for, and it is now inscribed into the UNESCO world heritage list. The other is an old and living tradition of fishing all along the coast, with its harbours and villages. In one long day we sampled both. We took a four hours’ trip from Wakayama city to the village of Nachi-katsuura by a fast train, then a bus to the beginning of a pilgrimage route, walked uphill to the Kumano Nachi Taisha and the Nachi waterfall, and then came back. Although the twelve hour day was tiring, in retrospect it is one of the unexpected highlights of our trip.
We got off the bus at the Daimonzaka stop and walked to the beginning of the slope (zaka) that would take us to the big gate (dai mon). We took a shadow selfie at the sign which marks the beginning of the slope. Trying to read the three character sign, I was surprised that the first character is pronounced almost it would be in Chinese, rather than in modern Japanese. The steps wound through a forest. Bears have been a problem this year in Japan; so much so that the kanji of the year was chosen to be 熊 (kuma, meaning bear). I thought there were enough people on the trail to keep them away. I started taking photos along the route, but after climbing about two hundred steps I gave up.
After a little more than an hour’s uninterrupted climb we reached the last steps below the big gate that you see above. This would turn out to be the entrance to the Kumano Nachi Taisha. This houses the kami (the god) of the Nachi mountain. I understand that the worship of the kami of this mountain and two others that lie in this range are the oldest religious beliefs surviving in Japan. I do not know enough about the architecture of these shrines to be able to show you its telling details. Moreover, I was really hungry, and the last eateries were going to close soon, so we hurried through this complex.
According to Kojiki, the creation myth of Japan written in 712 CE, the first emperor, Jimmu-Tenno, landed in this peninsula, and walked to Nara. On the way he discovered Nachi waterfall and its kami. The shrine complex is big. From the top we could look over its rooftops to the beautiful three-story pagoda of the temple of Seiganto-ji and the waterfall. The temple to Kannon (Avalokiteshwara) was founded by a monk who is said to have come from India in the 4th century. The pilgrimage route was initiated by the emperor Uda in 907. It is interesting to follow a route that has been walked for over 1200 years. Bears would certainly have been more common when the route was new, and it might have been quite an act of bravery to make the pilgrimage.
We took a detour for a late lunch, centered on a very filling bowl of udon. After this we were too tired to walk back up to the shrine and get a view of Seiganto-ji with the waterfall at the back. In any case it was late, and neither would be in sunlight. Instead we took the shorter walk to the waterfall. The 133 m drop of the waterfall is truly spectacular. It is Japan’s tallest waterfall with a single drop. Even today one can understand why so many features of the landscape here are said to be embodied into kami.
With the end of our walk we took the bus back to Nachi-katsuura. It would be dark soon, but we had time to walk around the town once. The first discovery was a picturesque house with a very colourful door, two lovely windows, and a bench from which to watch people go by (that’s the featured photo). We walked on to the deserted harbour. It had a beautiful rock formation at its mouth. I’d been hoping to see some birds, but it was too late. Wakayama province is the birthplace of whaling. It started here in the 16th century, but now the coast is known for its tuna. As I stood on the pier and looked for birds, someone came along and offered to guide me through the tuna auction the next morning. It was a natural confusion. This town has an onsen, and many visitors stay overnight.
It was getting near the time of our train back. In that strangely deserted town we’d found only one restaurant open. We walked into Tuna Bowl Muromaru and found that it offered the freshest bluefin tuna sashimi that I’ve ever eaten. Maguro is my favourite, and this cut was marbled with fat, clearly a winter’s catch. A bowl of rice topped by this incredible sashimi and a bowl of miso soup was a nice meal to end the day with. We had time to sip their tea before we headed to the station to catch our train.
When I proposed a trip to the Wakayama peninsula, The Family asked why. There were touristy answers of course, the Kumano Kodo trail with its wonderful sights, the Nachi waterfall, Koyasan. But behind it all was my curiosity about the Japan you see when you move away from the dense cities along the Shinkansen route. How do people live in these smaller places? What is the landscape and how is it shaped by the people in it? Eventually we spent a few days in Wakayama city, and one day we took a four hour train ride to see the Nachi waterfall. The fast train is named Kuroshio, after the warm current in the north Pacific gyre that washes across this part of Japan.
I found my seat and promptly took an hour’s nap. When I’d compensated for my morning’s sleep we were already well in the countryside. I’d imagined something very different from the landscape in Hayao Miyazaki’s films. So I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that there were parts which required only small edits to look like a scene from “My Friend Totoro”. A hundred years has not changed the place significantly. I decided to keep taking photos for the next three hours.
This coast has an abundance of fish and their fry, and fishing here is probably as old an occupation as farming. But it was only 400 years ago that whaling started in Japan, and it started from the coast of the peninsula that we were rounding on this train. I had not realized that we would pass as close to the coast as we did. Most people in the carriage didn’t even look up, but I thought it was beautiful in its own way: the Pacific ocean in front of us, grasses and flowers on the verge of the railway, low wooded mountains in the distance, fields and villages below them. Nothing to see, no grand monuments, no spectacular gorges or heights, just a landscape slowly being tamed by people.
This peninsula figures in the founding stories of Japan. According to the oldest book in Japan, Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 612 CE), the first emperor, Jimmu-Tenno, who was a divine figure born of the goddess of the sun, Amaterasu, first landed in Japan on this coast. The landscape of the interior is sacred, and pilgrims on the Kumano Kodo trail, which we would follow for a few hours on that day, pay homage to the Kii mountain range in the interior. In our age of media immersion, a very useful word is anemoia. This means nostalgia for things you have never experienced. I was headed for spectacular landscapes, but here the simple human scale of the landscape near the shore filled me with anemoia. It was nothing, but it was my kind of nothing.
Bay-backed shrikes (Lanius vittatus) are creatures of scrublands and open edges of forests. For a few years, when most of my birding was in such places, I grew to like these small shrikes in their striking colours: grey head and the “bay” coloured back. Since I’ve seen them in India, my photos show the subspecies L. v. vittatus. Westwards, up to Iran and Turkmenistan, one finds the other subspecies, the migratory L. v. nagianus, with its muted reds.
A good things about shrikes, from the point of human watchers, is that as predators they love to take a perch in the open, from where they survey their territory for prey. Unfortunately, I don’t have photos of them impaling their prey on thorns before eating. Apparently this behaviour is due to their legs not being strong enough to hold prey as they dismember them.
Shrikes radiated away from their parent stock about 79 million years ago, when grasses evolved a new photosynthetic mechanism (C4 photosynthesis) that enabled them to spread rapidly across arid regions of the world. This new niche created other modern predator clades such as harriers and falcons, all adapted to these newly developing open habitats. If you make a trip specially to watch one of these clades, you are bound to net others.
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One of the smallest of Suzhou’s famous gardens is the one called Master of the Nets garden (网师园, Wangshi Yuan). Liu Dun-zhen, in his book on the Classical gardens of Suzhou says that this was originally part of a much larger garden called Yuyin (Fisherman’s Hermitage), and the current garden is the area on which stood what was then called Ten-thousand Volume Hall. The garden was abandoned, recreated and abandoned again. Towards the end of the Qianlong emperor’s reign it was finally built in its current form by Song Zongyuan, a junior minister who chose the current name to reflect one of the earliest names of the garden.
I mentally divided the many halls and corridors into three parts: the central pool and its surroundings (the featured photo is one view of it) and two major courtyards. One has low piles of stones with a parterre which was quite bare when we visited. The other has a rockery called Yungang (Cloudy Heights) where a central anvil shape of a cumulonimbus column rises from other masses in which you can imagine a cloud bank. I’d kept enough time to form a good mental picture of this small garden. It contained all the elements that are used in larger and more visited gardens in the city.
The narrow paths surrounding the moderately sized pool misled the eye into seeing it as a much larger area. There were no lotuses or reeds, so it was possible to see beautiful reflections of the surroundings in its still waters. In fact, this area is beautifully constructed so the taller buildings are offset from the edge of the pool, allowing it to reflect more of the sky. You can see in the featured photo that there are lots of halls around it, but in the photo above you see a much more quiet vista of waters.
I came across this beautifully twisted tree in a courtyard. The twisted and knotted shape does not reveal itself adequately in one photo. You see above two views of the tree (the shadow on the wall may be thought of as a third view). In a way this tree embodies the spirit of these classical gardens, where the same thing can be viewed in different ways, and at different times, and can still always look interesting.
Our hotel in Beijing was in the middle of a hutong. The narrow approach road may have been hard to get through at the wrong time of the day, but since our timings were flexible, we didn’t ever have to try it. But living in a hutong meant that the nearest restaurants were either full of tourists or full of locals. When we have no idea where to eat we follow a simple rule. Walk about till you find a place where locals are going.
As we examined the menu outside one of the restaurants, someone came by and told us “Good home-cooked food.” We watched him go in and decided to follow. He was right. The food was lovely, and the restaurant slowly filled up with families and groups of friends from the neighbourhood. One of the things that amazes me about restaurants in Chine is that people often bring their food and drink into the place. As long as they order food from the restaurant in addition to what they bring it is fine. We watched people around us unpack foil wrapped goodies to add to the table as we ordered our food. Indeed our momentary guide was right: the food was good home-cooked fare. We loved the meats and soups and vegetables. And I got to practice picking up fried peanuts with chopsticks as I drank the beer.
Just inside the Shenwumen, the exit gate from the Forbidden City complex is a line of chairs. Ten years ago I’d posted a photo of the chairs “all full of extremely tired people who have just walked through the imperial acreage on a scorching hot day”. Six weeks ago when I reached that place again, I took a follow up photo. It was a different season, and people were much less tired.
“How can they not feel cold!” The Family exclaimed when she saw the first few women dressed in Qing era finery posing for photos. We had jackets on, and I had a cap. Most men and other women we saw were also dressed warmly. Beijing is not warm late in November, no matter how sunny it looks.
I enjoyed the scenes as they played out: husbands and boyfriends press-ganged into taking photos of women in cosplay (except a solitary couple, both dressed up). I had a whale of a time people watching (the number of instruction from the photographer and photographee to each other) and doing ambush photography (capturing those interactions). “They have normal clothes under those robes,” The Family sighed in relief. Layers was the answer to her question. The other question was answered as we exited the Forbidden City. All these women were returning their rented clothes at a shop.
Another one for Esther: What’s success? The first captain of HMS Bargain was George “Swamp” Dungarees. He got that odd nickname when, as a trainee pilot, he drove HMS Noodles into shallows off the Tiger’s Mouth. If he hadn’t failed up, he would have been an octogenerian now, possibly wasting away in a clinic. Instead he’s slowly turning into a skeleton in the wreck of the Bargain.
Very hot, is how we remember our first visit to the Forbidden City. Cold is how we will remember our follow up. Cold, not only in the temperature, but also in the experience. The first time we had spent the whole day, wandering into nooks and crannies. This time visitors were directed into the walled city through a side entrance, and were channelled quickly through the palace, avoiding many interesting things like the Nine Dragon Screen and the Qianlong Emperor’s quarters. The central three halls were the focus of the current route.
This is impressive enough if you haven’t come here a decade ago, entering through the Meridian gate. You first see a large square through which the Golden Water River flows. It is crossed by several bridges. Pay attention to the carved posts. Each is topped by a representation of clouds, to remind you that this city belonged to a celestial being, the Emperor. You cross this and reach the Gate of Supreme Harmony.
Behind this are the three main palaces. The first is the Hall of Supreme Harmony. The names of the palaces and pavilions have changed many times in the seven century long history of the city. It was built very early in the 15th century CE and served first as Ming palace complex. After many political upheavals and calamities it became the palace of the Qing emperors, until they were deposed and a republican China was created. Structures were built and razed, burnt and their use changed, before they reached the form that they had at the end of the Qing dynasty. This is what we see today.
On our previous visit we tried fruitlessly to insinuate ourselves into a throng jostling at the doors of the Palace of Supreme Harmony to catch a glimpse of the Dragon Throne. In the new dispensation you stay five meters away, but the throng of people is as dense as ever. That shows the fascination that the Dragon Throne still holds for the people of this nation. I managed to get a distant photo of the throne this time around: the calligraphy above it, the screen behind it and the seat itself.
While The Family tried her hand, I backed out of the crowd and busied myself looking at the details of the doors around me. The Forbidden City is reputed to have 9999 rooms. Going by the number of doors each room has, the city should have 99999 doors: enough for days of examination and photography. I found that many of them have patterns carved into the wood, which are then hammered over with thins sheets of metal.
Eventually we passed by the Hall of Central Harmony (see the featured photo) and the final Hall of Preserving Harmony. Our visit seemed to be over too quickly. There would only be the Imperial Garden to visit, and we hadn’t even seen the Nine Dragon Screen! I stopped to take photos of this line of cauldrons before veering off to look for that section. Apparently it is no longer possible to visit that without having pre-booked a separate ticket. So we started to look for things which we had missed previously.
Of these, the most interesting was the Palace of Prolonging Happiness. It burnt down and was rebuilt in 1909 in a western style with a moat around it, and called the Lingzhao Pavilion (Pavilion of Nimble Waters). It was then bombed in 1917 and never reconstructed, so what you see today is the remnant. Surrounded by barracks built in the 1930s, it has a completely different look from the rest of the complex. We spent some time looking at the other palaces in the complex, and then there was just enough time to walk through the garden and leave.
Don't hold your breath 