Putuoshan Island
I was going to upload the last entry shortly after I wrote it… but then I discovered I couldn’t load the “post new content” page on my blog, so it looks like I’ll be doing a mass post of all of the stuff I write when I get back to England.
We spent Boxing Day on the bus to Ningbo… a short distance on a map, but a fair few hours to get there when you account for the fact that it requires two buses, a ferry, and about thirty minutes at one of the bus stations to figure out where you are.
Last night we stayed in a fairly nice hotel near the seafront in Ningbo… it was only 266 yuan (18 pounds) for a spacious double room with super-hot shower. A quick trip around the night market before a reasonably early night so we could get up in decent time today. The fast boat to Putuoshan island took 20 minutes and we found another hotel very quickly… there are times when the station touts are fairly handy, and this was one of them.
Putuoshan island is a small, quiet place with three or four major temples. One of the main attractions is the large golden-coloured buddha that sits high on the mountainside with a view over the ocean. With all of the air pollution in China it is practically impossible to distinguish the horizon so it’s easy to believe that you’re way up in the clouds.
Annoyingly I wrote off a whole role of film when I discovered that I had made the rookie error of not properly loading the role of Kodak BW400CN… maybe I can use the fact that I’ve never loaded a role of film into the OM-2 before as my excuse. Fortunately I don’t think there was anything really great on that roll, and some of the better ones I had copies on my Nikon as I grew a little suspicious of the meter after the needle stuck a couple of times.
This hasn’t been my only bad experience with film so far… finding it is a really big problem. Your choices are pretty much: Kodak Gold 200, Kodak Max 400 or Fujifilm Superia 200. It’s a real shame that I couldn’t have got my order for 20 rolls of Tri-X 400 from 7dayshop.com in time!
Xiaoxiao and I are going to sit down and watch a film this evening (as it is only 7PM and we have already eaten) before an early night so we can catch the boat back to Ningbo reasonably early.
As to where we’ll be going tomorrow… I’ve no idea!
Tags: Travel