| Kevin Gilbert was in a hurry.
"I'm heading out for a six-week assignment," the globetrotting photographer
said to me over the phone about a year ago. So we made it a fast conversation.
I got the information I needed for the story I was working on, and then,
because I knew he'd once photographed there, I asked, "So where are you
off to? Going back to Borneo?"
"Oh, no," he said. "That's
one place I'm never going back to."
I thought, well, that's a story
I want to hear. But time was short, so I just wrote a note for the future
file: "Ask Kevin about Borneo."
And then I thought, I'll bet
a lot of travel, nature, and adventure photographers have places they
never want to revisit. It might be fun to find out what those places are
and why they don't want to go back. I added "Others?" to the note.
The courageous editors of this
magazine okayed the story idea, and so, as the flip side to all those
sweet, glowing, adjective-laden reports on photographers' favorite places,
we offer five tales replete with bats, blood, belligerence, boredom, and
bugs.
We'll start, of course, in
Borneo.
Kevin Gilbert: Drop Zone
Currently a free-lancer and digital photography consultant, Kevin was
for 24 years a photographer for The Washington Times and served five terms
as president of the White House News Photographers' Association. An ongoing
assignment has been to photograph the Eco-Challenge adventure race, billed
as "the world's toughest expedition race." He's covered the challenges
in British Columbia, Australia and New Zealand, among other locales.
In September and October of
2000 Kevin photographed the Eco-Challenge in Borneo. "The Borneo race
covered hundreds of kilometers over water, through leech-infested jungles,
with humidity of about 100 percent all the time," Kevin says. "There were
rainstorms every afternoon, roads that were impassable during the rain
and food that was…"
Mystery food?
"Well, no, they told us what
it was. The problem was where it was. We were staying in this hotel where
the rooms were out on stilts over the South China Sea. Near the kitchen
area they had fish pens down in the water where they'd pull the fish out
to cook for dinner. But after the first day we realized that the toilets
flushed directly into the water, and the area of the sea the stuff was
hitting was about 30 yards from the fish pens. So, of course, no one ate
the fish. And we thought if that was the level of sanitation, we probably
ought to just stick to bottled beer and Pringles; you know, anything that
was sealed up tight and shipped from a first-world country."
Then there was the bat cave.
"One of the challenges for the contestants was climbing through this cave
that was filled with bats. Stuff is falling from the roof of the cave
onto us, and the ground is moving because it's alive with maggots that
live on about a thousand years' worth of bat guano."
The climate made everything
worse. "You're sweating all the time in the heat and humidity; the cameras
are covered with moisture. We were doing a lot of hiking and climbing,
all the time trying to protect ourselves from leeches falling off the
trees. We're wearing long-sleeve shirts, long pants, heavy boots and socks
and still, walking in the jungle you'd look down and see blood oozing
out of your boots because the leeches got in anyway."
Taxi!
Bob Krist: Street Wise
Looking at his pictures of Jamaica, you might wonder why Bob doesn't want
to go back. The island looks great, everyone seems to be pleasant. What's
the problem?
"Well, the problem is that
those pictures were taken under a lot of stress," says Bob, who is one
of the world's leading travel photographers with countless articles and
photographs and several books to his credit, including Spirit of Place:
The Art of the Traveling Photographer and Secrets of Lighting on Location:
A Photographer's Guide to Professional Lighting Techniques.
"Jamaica is a beautiful country,"
he says, "and a lot of the people working in the tourism business are
highly trained professionals. But out on the streets there's tremendous
harassment of anyone with a camera. Jamaica is one of the few places I've
been in the world where the simple act of walking down the street or through
an open market--not even taking a picture, just with the camera around
your neck--will not only get you glares and stares, but people will come
up and threaten you. It doesn't matter if you're a tourist or a professional
on assignment--if you've got a camera you're a target."
And almost everyone asks for
money. "I saw a fruit stand and asked the man there if I could take his
picture. I told him I was a professional photographer, on assignment for
a Caribbean travel magazine. He said he wanted $50. We talked, and I eventually
ended up paying him $25. I gave him my card, and when I got home I sent
a dupe slide to him. Then six months later, after the magazine came out,
I got a letter from him. He saw his photo in the magazine, said I ripped
him off and he wanted more money. He said he wanted at least 10 percent
of what I got. I wrote back and told him I got $125 for the photo, and
so by his calculation, he owed me money."
Bob feels that it's a shame
that this beautiful and interesting place has become a location for photographers
to avoid. "I know at least three other travel photographers who do a lot
of work in the Caribbean who will not go back to Jamaica. As for me, there
were enough nasty people there to make it very unpleasant, and if I can
possibly avoid it, I'm not going back."
Jamaica? Say you won't.
Rick Sammon: The Fire This
Time
Their guide in Varanasi, India, said they had to see this particular site,
so Rick and his wife, Susan, followed him down a path along the Ganges
River.
"As we walked it got darker
and darker," Rick says. "Eventually we came around a turn and I saw a
large fire with many people standing around. I realized it was a crematorium.
Varanasi is the holiest city in the Hindu religion, and it's believed
that Hindus who die in Varanasi are guaranteed a spot in heaven. So the
crematoriums are busy with people who come from all over India when they
feel they're close to death."
Rick, a writer, lecturer, and
travel and underwater photographer who is a frequent contributor to this
magazine, admits to being a bit nervous, but he raised his camera and
took one photo, an image in which you can see a body being tossed into
the flames.
"Seconds later we were surrounded
by about a half-dozen very angry people, all yelling at me. Susan said,
'Get me out of here.' I shouted to our guide. He was stubborn and argued
with them. There was lots of shouting and hand-waving, and all the time
the angry people were forming a tighter and tighter circle around us.
"We finally just walked away,
following our guide. He might have given them money or promised them some
on his next visit, I don't know. We just got out of there."
Rick and Susan stayed in a
hotel in Varanasi the next day and then took off for "some of the more
peaceful places in India."
Rick later learned that there
had been a photographer at the same general location a week before. "He
had shot a lot of film," Rick says, "but obviously he was in a less sensitive
place than we were when I took the photo."
Rick had no intention of offending,
and was doing what a travel photographer does--take pictures. If he'd
thought of it, he would have gladly offered to destroy the film.
Rick says, "It's one of those
events that was very scary when it was happening, but now when you look
back on it…it's still very scary."
A walk along the Ganges? Not
in Varanasi, thanks.
Daniel J. Cox: Swamp Thing
In the early '90s Dan was taking photographs for his book, Black Bear,
and during one summer he followed a particular bear off and on for three
or four weeks through the deep swamp of northern Minnesota. "The area
is a Tamarack bog forest," Dan says, "and the bears like to hang out there;
it's a great place for them to cool off."
For people, it's not that great.
"It's all stagnant water, high temperatures, high humidity, and tons of
mosquitoes," Dan says. "I'd follow the bear from early morning to late
evening. Between foraging for blueberries, he'd fall asleep for long periods
of time. So I spent a lot of time sitting around not doing anything other
than sweating and being chewed on by mosquitoes, waiting for the bear
to do something." Dan got a good number of photos of the bear sleeping,
but let's face it, once you've got a few bear-sleeping pictures, that's
about it for that photo opportunity. So you hang around and hope for him
to do something else, like turn over or stretch or maybe decide to get
up and forage.
Dan doesn't categorize the
swamp as a place he'd never visit again, though. He'll go only as far
as saying that this particular location was "one of the more unappealing
places I've had to shoot in."
Hey, big guy--wake up!
Gil Lopez-Espina: One Good
Tern
"About 10 years ago, when I was just starting out photographing wildlife,
another photographer told me that if I wanted to get a really good wildlife
story, I should go to Maine's Petit Manan island and photograph the terns."
Intrigued, Gil did a little research and found out that Petit Manan, some
21/2 miles off the Maine coast, was a national wildlife refuge. As a haven
for migrating waterfowl and shorebirds, the island featured one of the
largest seabird nesting colonies in Maine. Gil spoke with a representative
of the National Park Service and received permission to photograph on
the island.
"I was going to have three
days on Petit Manan," Gil says, "but the Park Service man warned me that
I should be prepared to stay some additional days because the weather
out there is foul; there's usually fog or heavy mist. I figured, no problem,
I'd just take some extra food and supplies. There was no refrigeration
on the island, no running water, so I bought about 20 cans of tuna, lots
of bottled water, and some other stuff and figured, hey, for a few days,
no big deal."
Gil was also told that there
were two people on the island who tagged the birds for research, surveys,
and studies, and that there'd be a little building where he could stay.
"So with my photography gear, my sleeping bag, and my supplies, I got
on the little boat and they took me out there."
Inside the dilapidated building,
Gil found his base of operation: an old bathtub. "I put a piece of wood
on top and my sleeping bag on top of that. I didn't care, I was very enthusiastic
about the whole thing."
The first indication that there
might be a problem came the following morning. "I get up and see this
so-so sunrise, nothing special, but one of the men there said, 'Isn't
that a gorgeous sunrise? It's beautiful!' and I thought, this doesn't
sound right. But I didn't pay much attention. If I had, it might have
occurred to me that the guy hadn't seen too many sunrises lately."
That day the fog rolled in
and pitched camp. Soon Gil realized that not only were sunrises rare
on Petit Manan, so was the sun, period.
"My three days became three
weeks," Gil says. "The boat couldn't come in the fog to get me, and after
a while I felt I'd put in so much time that I didn't want to quit, I had
to make it count for something. Finally I got one day when the sun came
out. Before and after that day--nothing but fog and mist."
His supplies held out, but
as far as amenities, well…"The only water I could use for washing I got
by going to the back of the house and waiting for the humidity and the
mist to build up and roll down the roof into a pail. And even though it
wasn't that cold, I got chilled to the bone at night despite my heavy
sleeping bag, not to mention visiting the outhouse in the middle of the
night." Even photographing in the fog, which Gil tried a few times, was
a problem. "The moisture immediately condensed on the camera and the lens."
And there was one other thing.
Petit Manan is also the site of an automated US Coast Guard light station
with a 123-foot tall granite lighthouse. And a fog horn. "That horn went
off every 15 or 20 seconds, 24 hours a day."
After three weeks he'd had
enough. The island had radio communication with the mainland and Gil requested
that the boat come at the first break in the fog. The tern story never
happened, but Gil went on to build his career and today is an award-winning,
much-published wildlife photographer who also runs his own photography
tour business, Fototreks. But don't worry, if you sign up with him, he
won't be taking you to Petit Manan.
And if you do meet Gil, it's
probably not a good idea to offer him a tuna sandwich.
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