I got back from the Vietnam-China border in Guangxi Province a little over a week ago. I handed my nine rolls from the over to Sdodo at his laneway lab back as soon as I got back Shanghai. I was happy to get the scans back within three days.

Vanessa, my fiancee, and I had set aside five days to travel from the Detian Waterfalls right on the border and then work our way east all the way to the end of the border where a river delta meets the South China Sea. However, the ongoing coronavirus outbreak threw a spanner in the works. All tourist sites were shut down and many towns with border crossings were closed off from outsiders. In the end, we made the journey in three days.

The first image in the gallery below is of the Chongzuo Leaning Pagoda, a tower built on an island on the Zuojiang River during the Ming Dynasty in 1621 AD. The tower leans around 1 metre from its base. We had no idea it was there. I just turned off a provincial road after seeing a stone aqueduct, which from a distance, I thought was an old bridge. That’s the kind of thing I really love about these kinds of trips. You can plan and research, but almost everything that happens out there is improvised and unexpected.

Still, I know that the most important borders are all the eight remaining ones. I had a feeling that I’d shot enough in three productive days and thought it was better to save my film for a big trip out west in the summer.

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