Category Archives: industry

Best. Factory tour. Ever.

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Sorry! Long post ahead. Day Two of my adventure in China’s Sichuan province started with checking out of my Chengdu hotel and finding my bus assignment for the core of the 2015 Sichuan International Cultural Tourism Festival. Bus 23 would be my home for the next few days.

Literally hundreds of tour operators and travel journalists had been invited to the festival and would all descend on the city of Yibin to learn what the region has to offer to travelers. The scope of the event became apparent as my bus joined a motorcade of buses that never stopped as they made their way toward Yibin. (I eventually saw vehicles numbered as high as 99 but I’m guessing that the total number of vehicles in our motorcade was well over 100 at times. In some places, people were lining the streets to watch it roll by.) Whenever we went through a town, every intersection was controlled by traffic control police so that we could make our way unimpeded. It was surreal to see the manpower that had been brought out and to see the efficiency of the workforce. Quite amazing.

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So these first two shots were literally taken through the bus window as we hurtled through the countryside. The landscape was amazing and I saw many areas that I would have loved to have lingered but we were obviously on our way somewhere, and the schedule was out of my hands. The itinerary had been changing frequently and every morning we were verbally given the most recent updates. Today, apparently, we would be stopping for lunch at a distillery.

You’d think I’d have learned by now, but — when in China — always expect something bigger than you would first imagine. Though I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes yet, this is the distillery that we would be visiting: the Wuliangye alcoholic beverage company.

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The complex is enormous and — yes — one of the buildings is shaped like a large bottle of alcohol. My head was swimming a bit but I believe I recall them saying that there were over 65,000 employees.

My first sight of the “campus” was actually in what I would assume is the visitor center area as well as the corporate offices. Our parade of buses rolled to a stop and we got out here:

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I love the architecture.

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The buildings, the landscaping, the sculptures…

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I’ve been to a lot of distilleries in my life (don’t judge) but I honestly wasn’t prepared for anything like this. I loved the grandeur and the spectacle of the place.

We had a quick buffet lunch and were then given a tour of several galleries showcasing the products and accomplishments of Wuliangye. There was a “3D” film in an IMAX-style theater that assaulted you with flyovers of the Chinese countryside. There was a presentation on the history of Wuliangye, how it was developed and how it became the incredibly popular and successful product that it is today.

That’s right. A history presentation. Anywhere else in the world, this probably would have been done via a quirky, stiff industrial video. But not here. Not in China. We experienced a live-action history presentation in a giant, domed structure with a cast of colorfully costumed performers.

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I’m tempted to stop here and let you all catch your breath. Maybe save the rest for a “part 2” post but, no, I’ll just keep going so that you can enjoy the full ride just like I did. Enjoy the show:

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After the show, we boarded our buses again, but we weren’t finished at Wuliangye. We made two or three more stops — one with a marching band at a pagoda, one with the big overlook of the entire factory complex I showed before, one with a showroom of many specialty bottles of Wuliangye sporting price tags that were difficult to comprehend.

Back on bus #23, we were told our next stop would be at a historical village. It was clear that we would be continuing our tour of the incredible land of contrasts that is China. More on that, next time…

Hunger Games, Spanish style

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Continuing on with documenting my recent trip to the Extramadura region of Spain, day two began with a trip to Jaraiz de la Vera to learn about smoked paprika. We heard about the cultivation and smoking of the peppers at the Paprika Museum, then visited this production facility to see how the dried peppers were milled and packaged. The row of milling machines above looked almost cathedral-like to me, which seems appropriate given how revered paprika is in these parts.

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The aroma in the plant was amazing. I wish I had a way to share that with you. Sometimes when an appetizing smell is in a really high concentration like this, it becomes unpleasant, but I found no such problem here. I left feeling really hungry — which was good because our next stop was Hervas for a lunch of venison with double deserts: chestnut pie and… something chocolatey:

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More on the town of Hervas in the next post…

 

Wind power, part 2

A couple weeks ago, I was out in western Kansas shooting wind farms for a State project promoting economic development and employment opportunities in rural areas. I got my start shooting out in this part of the world. Throughout high school and college I had jobs that had me prowling the backroads of this under-appreciated state and I came to know it in detail. I’ve roamed all 105 counties and it’s a rare dirt road that I haven’t been down at least once.

Over the past few years, my attention has largely been elsewhere. My photography began to take me farther afield and international travel has been a bigger priority. I never stopped shooting around my home state, but it has taken a bit of a back seat for a while. This year I decided to refocus on Kansas a bit and to freshen up those stock files. That decision led partly to my taking this ongoing assignment of documenting rural areas for the State. It has several aspects, but the common element is that it’s getting me back into the countryside and I’m having a blast rediscovering this place that I’ve known so well, but — in some ways — has changed so much over the past few years.

It was appropriate that this first segment would focus on wind farms, as they may represent the biggest visual change to the Kansas landscape in decades. Even crossing the state on I-70, you can’t help but be awed by a large and growing group of these behemoths in the Smoky Hills near Ellsworth. I shot one of the state’s first wind farms near Montezuma for Kansas! magazine years ago and in the time since, they’ve been sprouting up everywhere. On that first shoot, I only visited a finished wind farm but on this assignment, I would also visit factories, assembly areas and holding yards where the giant components are stored until needed.

What I saw on this assignment is that wind power is changing the Kansas landscape in more ways that you see by driving down the interstate. This is a new, booming industry. It’s not uncommon now to see turbine blades being shipped by rail or passing you on a flatbed trailer as you drive down the highway. In a lot of ways, Kansas hasn’t changed much since I was exploring it 10 and 20 years ago but it has not been standing still. Every time an assignment takes me out into the field, I’m discovering something new about this place.

And I couldn’t resist a quick self portrait while shooting from atop the crane that’s used to load components on rail cars — complete with all my required safety gear: