Huajiao in a Baoji market

Almost three years ago now at the beginning of my stay in China I discovered a weird and wonderful spice that I'd never heard of before. Huajiao, or Sichuan pepper contains hydroxy-alpha-sanshool which leads to a tingly, numbing feeling and, along with the subtle clovey/lemony overtones makes for a rather addictive experience. A mapo dofu (麻婆豆腐) would be nothing without the use of a good handful of huajiao and the expat favourite, gongbao jiding (宫保鸡丁) would lose a vital dimension sichuan pepper-free.

Anyway, I'm writing this to link to this photo, taken in Baoji, Shaanxi province as I went hunting for the solar eclipse last month. I often found that markets were good places in China for getting shots of the street-sellers who were usually very happy to have their photo taken, given a few minutes of small-talk first.

Right now, having arrived back here just a couple of days ago I'm having to stock up on food and having made a batch of humous which should last a good few days I have a chicken soup on the boil now. The local shops give away chicken carcasses for free and the pot is now full to overflowing with six carcasses. The smell is not helping my work!

Photo updates

A few shots from the last couple of weeks. First of all I feel I have to post an eclipse-ish photo. As I said a few posts ago, the sky was pretty cloudy where I was, though clearly as you can see from this photo, it wasn't complete cover everywhere. The photos from totality are rather featureless, but this photo was taken perhaps a minute before the lights went out completely, taken in Pingliang, Gansu province:

Before the eclipse, as I said, I attracted the attention of some local kids, I gave them my camera to play with and they had a blast snapping everything around them. This was one that I took of them, great expressions, great kids:

Back in Baoji, before heading back to Beijing I met up with a guy taking birds to market, chatted with him briefly and asked if I could take his photo. There's a compromise to be made between being overly polite, in which case you are likely to get the least natural photos, and being rude, which will probably give you the most spontaneous images. I tend to err on the side of caution a little too much, perhaps.

Onto Seoul, and just before the fantastic cloud shadows posted yesterday, caused by the layers of haze below the main visible clouds, we had a show of rather fine sun beams over the temple complex:

and finally, yesterday afternoon, this guy was sat perched in a tree. I waited for around half an hour for him to fly off. Eventually he did but I fluffed up the timing and didn't get a decent photo of the ascent, still, he gave me some time before to watch him stalking the fish:

More photos on my Flickr site and all can be found in larger sizes.

Today I've rested up and spent some time relaxing in a local cafe. Lots of things to get on with tomorrow after some productive conversations on Friday evening.

Eclipse hunting

It's a strange kind of trip where you don't know where you're going, but you know when - I mean by this that the destination is a time, and not specifically a place. My destination is some time around 10.30 am on Friday the first of August, at which point a swathe of land from Eastern China through Mongolia and Russia and up into Greenland and Canada will gradually become covered in darkness.

I've never had the chance to see an eclipse, other than through the dense clouds of a Cornwall morning, some time back in 1999, so I thought that I would take the opportunity to go eclipse hunting this time in a somewhat more exotic location. I say I don't know where I'm going because my trip is only half booked. Today at 5 pm I will take a train to Baoji, some 15 hours West, arriving tomorrow morning, at which point I will find an internet cafe, look at the weather forecasts for Friday and plan stage two.

Currently, as I mentioned before, my plan is to head to Pingliang, though the forecast at the moment is not looking great. My second best option may involve heading another 15 hours further North West, which is going to make coming back in time to catch my flight to Korea somewhat tricky, so I have to play this carefully. Unfortunately it's impossible to book train tickets more than five days in advance here, so I haven't even been able to secure a return trip from Baoji. This is rather crucial, as I will only have around 24 hours to play with!

So, that's the essence of my trip. The idea of seeing an eclipse from the top of a legendary mountain in a distant province in central China makes my head spin just thinking about it. I really hope that conditions are good on Friday, but whatever happens, I have an exciting, unknown trip ahead of me for the next few days...wish me luck!