1. Departure

May 12, 2:28 pm, almost all my Reuters Beijing colleagues saw the office TV sets shaking. Those TV sets had often shown the news but it was the first time they themselves had been the news. Within a few seconds, we realized it was an earthquake. An 8.0 magnitude earthquake had hit Sichuan province. Sichuan! My home. About ten minutes later, I was driving my car to Beijing airport. At that moment, I did not even know that there was a place on this earth called Wenchuan. Where was I going? What time could I leave? Fortunately, I was the first Reuters journalist to arrive at the airport and unfortunately I was the last to leave as I chose to fly to Chengdu and its airport was closed. I had almost no idea how serious the situation there was but wisely as it turned out took two instant DC/AC power inverters which meant I could work normally in the firs few days when the whole area was completely out of power.

2. In the field

On afternoon of May 13, after 6 hours of driving from Chongqing, the first earthquake-hit area I reached was Hanwang Town of Mianzhu. I was one of the first to arrive there. It later transpired that because the epicenter had been Wenchuan everyone assumed it would be worst hit when in fact towns in the surrounding area suffered more disastrously. It was like the end of the world with gloomy skies and soft drizzle. Terrified survivors told me Hanwang Dongqi Middle school had been horribly damaged so I headed there. It was unnaturally silent, the bodies of at least 20 students covered with plastic bags lay in a row on the ground. A mother gently removed the coverings trying to find her own child. Policemen surrounded the scene and I dared not approach but with a long lens I could see rain and tears merged on her face. Sometime later a couple found the body of their child and were just overcome with grief.  I shot a single frame and went and hugged them but then an aftershock struck which made the damaged buildings ‘peng peng’, like the King of Terrors clamouring against which humans were just so small and weak. The rain became heavier, the mourning became louder and the sky became darker. There was a choking smell of death. I could not believe that just that morning I had been in Beijing, a city with a population of 15 million.

3. Beichuan

On May 15 I set off for Beichuan, utilising all available modes of transportation - jeeps, cars and my own legs. I arrived 5 hours later as a mass military rescue team also reached the spot. It was a valley of death. A  landslide had almost buried the whole of the old district while the new part was just rubble with fires flickering here and there. Once in a while there would be a shout ”someone here” as a survivor was located beneath the debris. At one collapsed kindergarten, I saw dozens of cute little faces almost untouched except for the dried blood rimming their eyes and mouths while the rest of their bodies were stuck beneath heavy rocks and concrete. The tears in my eyes made it almost impossible to shoot pictures and I had constantly to remind myself that I needed to show this tragedy to the world in a way that was not too general but not too brutal. What a painful feeling, I saw everything I could not let my camera see as I walked and walked among the bodies of victims looking for pictures… I saw a butterfly fluttering between pretty shoes on the feet of a young girl which stuck from the rubble. As I pressed the shutter I mourned for this young soul and moved away to leave her be.  The next day, I saw a mother searching in the rubble for her daughter; she sobbed as she told me she had forced her 4-year-old daughter to go to school that day although she said she felt unwell. She kept saying, “I killed my own daugher”, and begged me not to shoot pictures of her…

4. Death is right at your back

With the death toll in Beichuan soaring, I felt obliged to continue my reporting there in case quake lakes burst or epidemics started. On May 17 for the first time in my life I felt the approach of death as I and 10,000 people ran for our lives. Around 2:55pm, a helicopter, hovering overhead reported that a nearby dam was about to burst and all military and rescue teams were ordered to retreat. All of a sudden everyone was running for their lives in complete terror - including me.

The day before I had imparted the details of my savings and investments to my editor in Beijing - just in case. In the circumstances I hadn’t wanted to worry my parents and which of us doesn’t want our parents to think we can take care of ourselves? But after hundreds of aftershocks, cracking dams, continuous landslides, with the threat of plague and a possible nuclear leak, I had felt it was maybe time to  hedge my bets a bit.

The stampede started downtown and ended on top of a nearby mountain 3 kilometers away. After running madly for 5-minutes, I realised what I was doing and turned back to record the scene with my cameras and called it in to the Reuters Beijing office. 

5. Back to Beijing

In 12 days I lost 5kg in weight and brought back sadness and nightmares to Beijing.

On May 24, as I boarded the flight back to Beijing from Chengdu, I met a senior photographer from a competiting agency, who said, “your pictures are very nice”. In Beijing we almost never talked and it was the first time that he had praised me face to face. While it is good to get compliments deep inside I still feel sad. I am Chinese born in Sichuan; after spending days in the ruins, keeping a lid on my emotions, shooting pictures, describing the scenes for my text colleagues in Beijing, helping to rescue survivors and fleeing for my own life, my sense of identity, my feelings and my reactions are complicated…

One thing I do know is that we are lucky - because we are still alive.

The first chapter coverage of this story is gone, things need to move on and I will try my best to play my part in it all.

The 133rd running of the Preakness Stakes horse race was held in Baltimore this past weekend. It is one of the most prestigious events in the American horse racing calendar, the second race in the annual three race series beginning with the Kentucky Derby and ending with the Belmont Stakes in New York. Once again the Reuters pictures team (Jim Young, Molly Riley, Jonathan Ernst, Tim Shaffer and I ), were armed with spools of electrical wire, switches and cases of extra cameras and lenses as we arrived from Washington 10 hours ahead of the 6pm race to set up our ‘remotes’.

Remote cameras are triggered either by a cable or wireless transmitter, allowing a photographer to shoot multiple angles of an important moment like the finish of a horse race. They can provide an usually high or low angle to vary the type of pictures we like to provide to our clients.  On news assignments remotes can also yield an alternative angle from a tight position or one that does not allow a camera to be hand held. The only limit to shooting remotes is the photographer’s imagination!!

With a cut-off time of 10am before the first race of the day, we set up five remote cameras under the inside rail of the track, and another on an observation post beyond the finish line with a high angle general view of the end of the race. Putting in place the gear - five EOS-1D Mark II cameras, an assortment of lenses from 16mm to 200mm, and their little mounting plates was a breeze, about 5 minutes in total, compared to the next step - getting them all to work!

Over the next hour, there ensued an awkward dance which involved laying our two-wire electrical cable in the mud alongside the inside rail of the track, clipping each remote camera’s slave cables into that string, and connecting a foot-switch that would fire all the cameras at the same time. All easier said than done when up to a dozen other photographers are doing exactly the same thing at the same time. Sports Illustrated alone laid out 12 cameras for the finish line picture.

The next most crucial step, involves “Dark Arts”, invoking the sort of magic that only boy wizard Harry Potter knows and attempting to appease the Gods of Technology and Good Fortune as, with all of your fingers crossed, you switch on the cameras to complete the electrical circuit and pray that none of them start firing indescriminantly at 8 frames per second, a sure sign that at least one of the connectors is set to the wrong electrical polarity.

Alas, in the distance we heard one of our cameras start firing off dozens of frames. We disconnected it from the string, reveresed the connector only to find that another of camera had started blazing away. There really is no science to setting up a string of random, separately functioning electrical devices like digital cameras, and with a lot of trial and error, we finally got all the cameras to behave themselves.

The fifth remote, high on an observation tower, was too far from the string of wired remotes so we utilized a set of Pocket Wizard wireless triggers which use a specific radio frequency determined by the user. That allows several photographers to fire just their own cameras, independent of other frequencies. The transmitter, a small box the size of a pack of cigarettes with an antenna atop, can be triggered with a button or placed into the hotshoe of a handheld camera and will fire whenever you press your handheld cameras’ shutter, like I did in this race.

In the eight hours and 11 races before the Preakness Stakes is run, we cover all the cameras with plastic bags and elastic bands to protect them from the water truck which comes by at the end of each race, spraying a ton of water on the track to keep it moist. Without the bags that water would destroy thousands of dollars worth of camera gear. We also do a test run, firing all the cameras during one of the early races, take the memory cards out and take a look the images on a computer screen then, based on the results, go back to each camera and fine-tune each camera’s focus, the exposure (with a 1/2000th sec shutter speed to freeze the motion of the horses), and adjust the composition if needed. Of course, whether the winning horse finishes up against the rail or 30 feet outside of the rail is beyond our control so we hedge our bets and assume the favorite, Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown will not only win, but do so along the rail.

In the end it was a successful day for the Reuters team. The pictures were fine and newsworthy; Big Brown did win the Preakness Stakes, not alongside the rail but not too far out, and Big Brown and his jockey Kent Desormeaux  go to the Belmont Stakes with high expectations of winning all three races, the elusive Triple Crown.

Before Big Brown had made his way to the winners circle, I had pulled the memory cards out of all the remotes and was feeding the key finish line sequences (only about 5-10 images per camera) into our other “remote” setup, the Reuters Paneikon editing software which allows a Reuters editor anywhere in the world to remotely edit pictures almost in real time. Canadian Chief Photograph Peter Jones, sitting at his desk in Toronto, took in our images within seconds of the race finishing and had all the important remote pictures on the wire and onto the front pages of Yahoo news and MSNBC.com within minutes. The front of the New York Times Sunday Sports section used our picture of Jockey Kent Desormeaux looking back at the other horses across the finish line, a key and telling image that told the story of how far ahead he beat the field, made with our third remote camera about 100 feet past the finish line.

Thinking about how many aspects can determine the success or failure of remotes, based on previous experience and other photographers’ anecdotes, here is a random list of things that can go wrong. Looking through it, I marvel at how high our success rate with remotes has been…

Any ONE of these things can ruin hours of set up time. The more cameras you add into the mix, the more chances that any of the following will happen:

* The water truck drowning the cameras and/or short-circuiting our wired connectors.
* Ditto rain, destroying thousands of dollars worth of equipment.
* An errant camera firing indiscriminantly and without warning, setting off all the other cameras in your chain.
* Getting the right exposure until the sun goes behind a big cloud = everything underexposed.
* At the criticial moment forgetting to step on the footswitch, or stepping on it too early and then every camera’s memory buffer fills up and temporarily stops shooting at the exact moment you need them all to be shooting.
* Another photographer moving your camera because it’s in the way of his own.
* Another photographer thinking that your precisely-setup camera is his own, deciding that all your settings are wrong, and changing them.
* Camera batteries dying halfway through the race.

* The winning horse finishes about 50 feet outside of the rail and becomes a small dot on all your remote cameras.
* Pre-focusing in the wrong place. Out of focus = unusable.
* Lens flare from the sun screwing with your exposure.
* Someone accidently cuts your trigger cable with a shovel as they ”helpfully” try to bury them out of the way in the mud.
* Forgetting to turn the cameras on after eight hours of waiting, or forgetting to put memory cards in the cameras, or not formatting (erasing) the card so that the card is already full from all the test pictures and therefore has no room for the “money shots”.
* Another photographer using your wireless transmitter frequency and filling your cameras cards with images of nothing but test frames before the race starts.
* Police calling in over the radio for extra donuts in the infield and using radio frequencies that interfere with your signal getting to your camera and firing it.
* Batteries on the transmitter dying before the race
* Someone stepping on your footswitch and filling all the cards on all your remotes with images of nothing before the race starts.

I could go on and on but you get the picture. Fortunately the Gods were smiling on us…
 

The images of the earthquake relief effort in China have been horrifying and deeply moving and remind me what has always been so compelling about my job - the ease and speed with which still pictures can impart so much readily understood information to so many people.   

And what brilliant pictures they are.

Day 8 - After travelling 4 days from Lhasa Airport, and spending 4 days at 5200 metres, we are all feeling the effects of altitude but mostly suffering from frustration at the lack of information about the Olympic torch. Mark Chisolm, Reuters Cameraman and Producer, Nick Mulvenney, Reuters Correspondent and myself travelled from Beijing on April 25 to Tibet to cover the Olympic torch’s ascent of Mount Everest.       We are currently at a make-shift press centre located near Everest Base Camp. Facilities consist of an extremely good media centre, with amazingly fast internet, a press conference room, that doesn’t provide the media with any information (but I will get onto that later), small basic cabins that offer fairly comfortable beds but are just plain freezing, a dining room with excellent food, and last but certainly not least, the toilet block. Oh wow!! I cannot even begin the try and find the words… so I will leave it at that.

Mountainmen Chisholm, Gray and Mulvenney.

The altitude is a major factor in everything we do. It affects each person differently. Some have a very low percentage of oxygen in their bloodstream, some have a very high heart-rate, some get high blood pressure, many get severe headaches, others stomach problems. But all get breathless after walking just 20 metres and all are very tired. But the effects of altitude are not consistent, and even somebody who has travelled frequently to and from high altitude react differently each time. So the fact that the three of us have managed to feel ok after our schedule of travelling from Beijing, situated at a height of just 50 metres above sea level, to Everest Base Camp at a height of 5200 metres in just 4 days, does make us feel like we have achieved something, even before we have produced any stories. But this is not to say we are in the clear. Acute altitude sickness can hit anytime, even once you are back at normal levels, so we are extremely wary of this achievement.

The days consist of walking around the 500 metre cordon we seem to have been restricted to. Chinese Border Police keep a watch on our moves from several vantage points along the road and surrounding hills. I like to watch the changing weather patterns on the peak of Everest, but you cannot keep photographing it every hour - the weather might change but its shape doesn’t.

The nights are the toughest. The three of us share a small hut made of what looks like recycled paper shavings. Temperatures drop to around minus five degrees, down to maybe minus 15 with the wind factor, and the paper walls are just not thick enough to keep this cold out. But while I am freezing in my bed, all I can think about is how the teams on Everest must be feeling, camped on what some have called a ‘death zone’.

But the biggest frustration is the lack of information regarding the Olympic torch’s whereabouts. The most basic questions like ‘where is it now’ and even ‘how many people are in the team taking it to the top’ are simply not being answered. The real shame is that all the good work that has been done regarding media facilities, especially the mobile phone coverage and internet, is being undermined by the lack of information.

The lack of information combined with the rigours of the altitude, freezing temperatures, absence of washing facilities and the lack of a confirmed depature date means that frustrations are high.. almost as high as the summit of Everest itself.
     
     

For sub-editors on Reuters Singapore Picture Desk, one of this year’s performance targets is a “shooting assignment”. They have to select and plan a valid photographic assignment and then shoot pictures for the wire. The exercise is intended to give them practical insight into the working lives of busy photographers in the field and the decisions and operational challenges they face on a daily basis. 

Shahida Patail is one such sub-editor.

Up until now my picture taking had been limited to holiday snaps and friends’ weddings but the thought of shooting a picture for the Reuters wire was certainly appealing.

In my eagerness I decided to go to Arab Street and on a working day to boot. There was no concrete idea in my head, but I kept thinking of the colourful shop houses and the much-photographed Sultan Mosque and felt confident that I’d be able to find a subject. Luckily, before leaving the office, my boss Pedja Kujundzic suggested a possible angle - old buildings contrasted with new buildings.

Off I went only to find all my enthusiasm melted in the searing heat as I realized I had no idea what to shoot. I ended up taking random images. I couldn’t seem to find the right angle to deliver the shots I had in mind. The shop houses suddenly seemed more dirty than colourful, and every building seemed to be blocked by those blasted trees and lampposts.

And every time I tried to take a photo with people in it, they would quickly turn or walk away. My hopes were raised when I saw one foreign worker sitting in a corner of an old shop house, tiffin carrier in hand as he prepared to eat his lunch. I was already fantasizing  about the wonderful portrait picture it would make, when he saw me and got up rather menacingly. Panicked, I abruptly turned my camera away and pretended to be shooting an adjacent building. When I felt brave enough to look back in his direction again, he was gone.

Memo to self:  

-Plan the assignment properly. Have some idea of what you are looking for - unless you wanna walk around for hours in the heat uselessly lugging heavy equipment!

-Bring a trolley back or backpack - the weight of the equipment is an issue particularly if you are not used to it. 

-Go do the assignment on an off day, not a working day. You need plenty of time and patience to wait for that picture to come, and it’s best to do it while the mind is still fresh.

After my rather unproductive maiden shoot, I was ready for another go. This time, I was better prepared. I picked a day that I wasn’t working, I dressed comfortably, I brought along a lightweight backpack.

Earlier, I had discussed possible ideas with Editor in Charge David Loh, who brought to my attention the railway track running through the Portsdown area. He told me of families living in the nearby HDB estate who had made the area near the track their private little “gardens”, growing food and plants. So my theme for the day would be the railway and its little communities.

My first stop was the railway station in Tanjong Pagar. This is the starting point for trains leaving Singapore. I arrived before 8am, and started taking shots of passengers buying tickets and waiting for the train. When the first train finally pulled into the station at about 8.30am, I followed the hordes of people onto the platform - five minutes later I had been unceremoniously ushered back into the waiting hall by a fierce-looking train conductor. “No photography on the platform,” he said in a booming voice that made nearby heads turn in my direction. At that moment I wished that the 20D (plus grip) was a lot less conspicuous.

So I turned my attention to the station building. It’s a nice building, built in 1932 in a distinctly European style. After taking a few shots there, I took a taxi to Portsdown.

Armed with a street directory, I thought I could easily find the track that runs through the area. I was wrong. The taxi made a few wrong turns, and finally I decided to explore on foot. Kind Mr Taxi Driver agreed to wait for me as I trekked across a field towards the railway track partially hidden by long grass. Yes, there were old HDB buildings across the track, but there was no one and certainly no “gardens”. The whole area was quite desolate. Plus all sorts of insects were having a go at me, so I ran back to the taxi. Luckily, Mr Taxi Driver told me the track ran through the nearby Jalan Hang Jebat, so we went there. This time, access to the track wasn’t hampered by overgrown vegetation or bloodthirsty insects, but there was no sight of the train. After taking a few shots, I slowly walked back to the waiting taxi. I was about 50 metres away from the track when I heard the chugging of the train. I turned and ran back - too late. The train was too fast for me, and by the time I raised my camera the train was gone. Determined to catch the train, I went to Bukit Timah, where there was a small station. I waited for a long time for the train to appear, and finally gave up.

So my rail theme wasn’t working out. I then remembered David mentioning that the high-rise buildings in Telok Blangah offered spectacular views of the port. I tried my luck, but the tiny corridors gave a very restricted view.

Desperate now, I thought hard and decided that Mount Faber would have good views of the port. So I headed there, and realised the hill had decent views of the city and residential skyline. I took some shots, and on my way back took some photos of the cable cars travelling to and from the hill.

It was evening when I got back to our office at Science Park Drive, but the day had been fruitful - 2 pictures were moved to the wire, and 5 others to the RPA archive.

 Memo to self - 2:

- When faced with challenges, improvise! I should have bought a train ticket and hopped onto the train; it would have offered plenty of shots and the conductor would have no reason to chase me away. And I should have knocked on doors at that Telok Blangah flat…

- If there’s time, recce the place you’re intending to shoot. Things change and people move, so a little bit of research beforehand doesn’t hurt.

- Enough trains!

It was third time lucky and thing really started to come together at the day-care centre for elderly folks. It was cramped and messy, and it was a challenge for me to find a suitable place to position myself and take decent shots. But the patients at the centre were all lovely and smiley and really made my shoot worthwhile.

This is my favourite shot - a therapist massaging a patient. When I saw the clean background behind the therapist, I knew immediately I could compose something worthwhile here. What was a bonus for me was that the patient’s face was quite expressive, but I did not notice this when I first took the shot ‘cos it was dark. And of course the camera LCD screen is small. When I opened the picture in Photoshop back in the office, I was pleased with the result. 

I was extremely nervous when taking these shots of the patients undergoing pet therapy. The dogs that were brought in were MASSIVE, and they were barking a lot. Of course they’re harmless but I’ve never been surrounded by so many big dogs in my life. Every time I crouched down to take a picture, I was afraid of accidentally stepping on a dog’s tail, because the space was so tight.

Japan’s sleepy town of Iga offered an opportunity for me to write my first story for the news wire. Iga is known to many Japanese as one of the traditional home towns of the ninja. I was looking forward to seeing tens of thousands ninja clad enthusiasts, the ninja themed-train and a house with secret escape passages - the home of a real ninja.

The hardest part was knowing where to start - that and deciding on what the story’s ’selling point’ would be in text terms rather than pictures. Would I be able to persuade people to give me both tantelising ninja tidbits and interesting quotes?

I first interviewed the self-proclaimed grandson of a real ninja who told me that his grandfather was always out on the lookout for ways to further his skills had even mastered the art of hypnotism. A museum curator  that the web of myth and mystery surrounding the world of the ninja fired people’s imaginations and for this reason the ninja lives on.

These were details that could only be related in words rather than pictures.

Shooting and writing have many things in common. Whether writer or photographer, one must think, “what would keep the viewer’s attention for at least one more second?” “Is it this angle? Should I crop the picture like this?” or, “which quote is more interesting? What headline is catchier?”

Needless to say both disciplines call for ethics and accuracy.

But shooting requires instantaneous reactions and concentration - the time it takes to make or break a picture. We can’t ask the subject to smile again, and goals and penalties on the soccer field cannot be replayed in real life. Writers can draft, rewrite and call sources back to check details again but they also need to have an overall view of an issue, information from all sides and different perspectives to balance their offerings, which is often something photographers cannot provide.

So, which is more difficult?

May I haven’t fully experienced the obstacles and challenges which face one of our text writers, but for me every photographic assignment is a battle because there are no real answers. There is no handbook for creativity.

We photographers need eyes in the back of our heads and although we may generate most of it ourselves we work under enormous pressure to distill the essence of the story and capture it in a moment.

The casual observer could be forgiven for wondering whatever happened to the Italian election. For a country which prides itself on the “colourful” antics of its political class, this year the vote was devoid of spectacle and celebration, which photographers prey upon. Silvio Berlusconi won the prime minister’s post after Walter Veltroni conceded defeat in a deadpan speech in Rome, and the best Silvio could do was telephone a few TV stations to say he was “moved”. I pleaded with our staff photographers to provide reaction pictures from party supporters either on the winning or losing side, but it was the equivalent of an emotional dustbowl in the streets of Rome. The only things missing were tumbleweeds blowing through the streets like in a Spaghetti Western. I’ve seen countless election campaigns in my career but this goes into the books as the dullest one… As a colleague noted, due to the stagnant economy this was probably a good election to lose, which may explain the lack of fanfare. 

 
On the plus side, freelance photographers will be happy at the result. Whether or not one supports him, one thing is as sure as the sun rises — Silvio Berlusconi sells photos. Freelancers tell me that their incomes go up significantly during a Berlusconi term, now his third, because he creates news. The grey outgoing prime minister, Romano Prodi, failed to generate the same amount of editorial interest as his predecessor. Now, although the Italian economy may be in the doldrums, at least some of my colleagues can benefit.

     Well……..I don’t believe it!!! It’s happened. If you’ve read my last blog, ‘The Road West of Kangding’ you know that I called that particular road ‘the worst road in the world’. Well….guess what….there is much worse.

     Travelling with Chris Buckley, Reuters Beijing-base correspondent, we flew to Chengdu in Sichuan Province in China’s south-west to try and get into areas where we had heard that violent demonstrations regarding Tibet had occurred. The reports stated that buildings had been damaged, thousands of riot police and soliders had been deployed, hundreds of local Tibetans had been arrested and Buddhist temples were surrounded. So with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao telling the world that such troubles were over less than a week after these reports, and there were no independent witnesses to verify this, we wanted to find out.

     We decided to travel on a local bus north-east from Chengdu to the city of Mianyang, from where we would decide what to do next. Looking back, we should have realised that the number of police roadblocks we saw, just going that far, was an indication of what we would encounter over the next few days.

     We found a local driver, and after staying just a few hours at a hotel (in case the local police became aware of our presence), we headed north. The roads out of town were wonderful. Slowly winding their way through the valley floors and then up into the mountains.

      We needed to speak to some local farmers and chose to stop for the night at a small rural township known as Baima, located around 250 kilometres north of Mianyang. Life was continuing pretty much normally for these lovely, very hospitable people. They showed us proudly around their homes, and told us we were expected for dinner at 7pm. I very quickly got our driver to take me 30 kilometres down the road to get a CDMA signal to file some pictures to the Singapore desk, but thankfully managed to make it back on time.

     The array of local dishes was spectacular. But it did come at a cost - the cost of consuming of 3 cups of local wine in less than one minute, and the singing of a song that both Chris and I knew after we were honoured with a local Tibetan welcoming song. The only song we both really knew was the Australian national anthem, (just a note, Chris has spent 10 years in China and sadly, I had to help him a little, tut tut Chris) but hopefully no recordings were made and that rendition will never be heard again.

     The next morning we got up, and it had been snowing. Around one foot of pristine, white snow blanketed the trees. Beautiful perhaps, buy not a good start when you have to travel on mountain roads that day. We had gone barely five kilometre when we had to get out and remove rocks from our path. The steep banks above the road could barely hold together at the best of times, and with the slowly melting snow adding weight to the soil, this was not exactly safe. The further we went, the more the road seemed to take on a menacing look, with places that just 24 hours earlier had seemed quite safe, now looking like they would give way and result in us tumbling into the valley some 400 metres below. But again, in hindsight, this was nothing.

     To get where we needed to go, we had to start going up into the mountains. And with a foot of snow in the valleys, what could we expect up there. Well, our questions were soon answered - two foot of snow and lots and lots of ice. Our inexperienced driver had to go back and get chains after we started sliding backwards - not enjoyable when u look over the edge of the road which now had a drop of some 600 metres.

      Slowly but surely we continued, through a harsh but extremely beautiful landscape of snow-covered trees and mountains. The treacherous conditions had taken their toll on numerous cars and buses, their engines and I suspect their brakes overheating, and a truck which had fallen on it’s side and lost it’s load over the edge (see picture).

    After 5 tedious hours, we had made it to the next town.

    We met up with our new driver, a man who proved himself irreplaceable time and time again, and started heading further north into Gansu Province. And this is where my new ‘world’s worst road’ (I will call it the WWR from now on for comparisons)  comes into the story. In order for us to get through the countless police and military roadblocks, we would have to travel on back-roads. This provided us with views of the most amazing rural landscapes, but these views came at a cost - our heads, our kidneys, the muscles in our arms and legs from holding on so tightly, but most of all, our sanity. The pot-holes this time were triple the size and a much much more often than the previous WWR. The police presence was at least ten times that of the previous WWR, meaning our ‘ducking down’ skills had to be repeated more and more often the further we got into the troubled areas. But to top it all off, the whole experience lasted four times longer than the previous WWR trip. Total time in the car was nearly 36 hours, and when your driver snores for 4 of those hours barely 3 feet from your head, its not very enjoyable.

       Eventually, after much agonising and wondering if we would ever get to where we needed to be, we made it to the township of Zhuoni. Here we managed to talk to monks in a temple and I managed to take a few frames without disrupting their prayer session. The feeling was tense, as the military had only in the last day stopped surrounding the temple grounds. We hurridly left after we suspected that we were being watched, and made it into the car. I quickly sent 6 pictures so that in the event that we were caught, we would have something to show for our efforts.

      We drove further on down the road, and the roadblocks became more and more numerous. I counted at least 20, and on six occasions, the police stopped the car and asked the driver to step out. At one, a riot policeman even tapped on the window and put his face to the glass to see in. All Chris and I could do was lie down on the back seat and wait. As I said earlier, our driver proved to be amazing.

       We managed to go further into the troubled spots and I managed to photograph a burned-down school, riot police and soldiers on township streets, and another Buddhist monastery located near the township of Xiahe, where the most violent protests had occurred just a week earlier. We even very quickly stopped at a very small Tibetan village where the whole trip for me became worthwhile. Chris finally managed to find a villager that spoke Chinese, everyone spoke Tibetan, and after a few broad questions about the riots in Lhasa and surrounding areas and what he thought about them, Chris asked him what he thought of the Dalai Lama. This ordinary, hard-working farmer who toiled in the fields 12 hours-a-day, every day, said ‘The Dalai Lama is like a member of the family that can’t come home’.

        So our trip down my new WWR was finally completed, after we went through yet another 5 or 6 roadblocks of course,  we checked into our hotel in Lanzhou and I laid out flat for what seemed like the first time in ages.

        Hopefully, this dusty, pot-hold riddled ‘track’ in south-western China will be the final winner of my little WWR award otherwise I will have to broaden the parameters a little to perhaps the ‘Worst Road in the Universe’…….?? To do that, I would definitely have to check with Douglas Adams first I think………

                                                                  
       PICTURE CAPTIONS:

 Pic1 -An elderly Tibetan woman dressed in traditional Qiang minority dress sits in her home in Baima Township

 Pic2 -  The township of Baima in the early morning after snowfall

 Pic3 - A truck that lost it’s load on the treacherous icy road over the mountains

 Pic4 - Farming land near the Tibetan village on the outskirts of the township of Hezuo

 Pic5 - A young boy sits in a cart in a Tibetan village on the outskirts of the township of Hezuo

 Pic6 - Standing with friendly Monks in the Deer Long Temple on the outskirts of the township of Xiahe
        
  

I’d like to add my own congratulations to the plaudits being lauded on Adrees Latif who has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. It is one hell of a picture.

The following images are unlikely prize-winners but serve to demonstrate the delight with which news of his win has been received by his Reuters colleagues. In the first Paul Barker, Editor Asia News Pictures and Asia Chief Photographer Russell Boyce toast his image;

while in the second the editorial team from text, TV, graphics and pictures at Reuters Asia HQ in Singapore drink his health as Adrees himself listens-in via the telephone on the desk to the right of the frame, from his assignment in Nepal.  

I bet he’s pleased now that he diversified beyond basketball and maybe at long last my spell-checker will stop trying to correct his name to ‘Address’.

http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2008/04/pulitzer.html

Reuters Bangkok senior photographer Adrees Latif tells how he took the pictures which won him a Pulitzer Prize. The pictures were taken in Myanmar during the protests in September last year and include the photo of Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai being shot.

“Tipped off by protests against soaring fuel prices, I landed in Yangon on 23 September, 2007, with some old clothes, a Canon 5D camera, two fixed lenses and a laptop.

For the next four days, I went to Shwedagon Pagoda, two-three kilometres from the centre of town and waited for the monks who had been gathering there daily at noon.

Since I was at the same pagoda every day, dozens of people, including monks, asked me who I was and what I was doing. As the ruling military regime is notoriously secretive, my replies were guarded.

Barefoot in maroon robes, and ringed by civilians, the monks chanted and prayed before starting their two-kilometre march to the Sule Pagoda in downtown Yangon. Each day their numbers grew, from hundreds to thousands.

By 27 September, the city had become packed with troops. Soldiers and government agents stood at street corners.

Finding the Shwedagon Pagoda sealed off, I went to the middle of town to find groups of young people taunting soldiers at Sule.

Within minutes, the crowd swelled from hundreds to a few thousand. The soldiers threw barbed wire coils across the roads.

Knowing that hundreds of people were gunned down in similar circumstances in a 1988 uprising, I climbed an old crosswalk directly overhead, to get to one of the few spots offering a clear view.

Below me, protesters were singing and waving flags; to the side, young men were thrusting their pelvises at the soldiers.

At about 1.30pm local time, two dark green, open-top army trucks approached, followed by dozens more packed with riot police. They were hit by a barrage of water bottles, fruit and abuse from the crowd.

I had already locked on my 135mm lens and set my camera shutter speed to 1000, aperture to F/7.1 and ISO at 800. With the camera on manual, I wanted to stop any movement while offering as much depth-of-field as possible.

Two minutes later, the shooting started. My eye caught a person flying backwards through the air. Instinctively, I started photographing, capturing four frames of the man on his back.

The entry point of the bullet is clear in the first frame, with a soldier in flip flops standing over the man and pointing a rifle. In the second frame, the man is reaching over to try and film.

More shots rang out. I flinched before getting off two more frames - one of the man pointing the camera at the soldier, and one of his face contorted in pain.

Beyond him, the crowd scattered before the advancing soldier. The whole incident, which went on to reverberate around the world, was over in two seconds.

I kept low on the bridge, capturing some more images from among a crowd taking cover. However, with soldiers firing shots and smoke grenades below, I had to get off the bridge.

With adrenaline pumping through my body, I put my camera in my bag and followed the protests for another hour and a half. Feeling the demonstration had lost its strength, I made my way back to my hotel via backstreets and along a railway line.

My initial caption read: “An injured man tries to photograph after police and military officials fired upon and then charged a crowd of thousands protesting in Yangon’s city center September 27, 2007.” Initially, I thought he was merely trampled. I had no idea he was dead.

Two of the frames showed the man’s face. A few hours later his colleagues in Japan had identified him as Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai.

The images dominated front pages across the U.S. and the world. Mourners at Nagai’s funeral in Japan clutched the picture, which played a role in the public outrage that prompted Tokyo to scale back aid to the ruling military junta.”