[Leica] China Photography

[topher at netvigator.com (Chris)]

Doing my yearly delurking thing;

Tina:
Living in Hong Kong since 1988, i've done a lot of travel in china. I 
haven't been to Suzhou for about 10 years, but when i was there, we had 
a lot of annoyance from the touts. I hope you are in a tourgroup or 
have a guide, hopefully they can protect you a bit. The gardens are 
beautiful but touristy, you might try to visit some of the smaller less 
popular ones, and have a good wide angle handy! They are quite compact 
little places...

My favorite thing nowadays when i go to shanghai and get sick of the 
pollution is to visit some of the canal towns on the yangtze river. 
Really beautiful places. Zhouzhuang is very touristy now; i went to 
Tongli last fall, still quite unspoiled at that time once you get away 
from the main bus area. My next targets are Xitang and Zhujiajiao. I'd 
just hire a taxi from shanghai if you have a guide (have the guide do 
the negotiating for the taxi fare! or you will lose a lot of money). 
I'll try to slap some pics up on the internet for you, see if you like 
that type of place, since they are not on the usual tourist agenda for 
foreigners (but you will see many mainland tourists). Unfortunately i 
took my m6 and it had some problems... wierd light blobs on the pics. I 
thought maybe i'd burned a hole in the shutter, but the local leica 
people said it was the light sealing thingies...hmmmmm. been using my 
other cameras since getting it fixed in june so i'm not sure if it's 
ok.... anyway......

If i can help on any more questions let me know!

christopher