Haikou, Qionghai, Wanning

July 1, 2021 to July 3, 2021

The Plan was to sneak home, do my thing with the TV station, and show up at a 4th of July event at a favorite restaurant and surprise the hell out of a bunch of my friends.

The Plan failed.

Partly because one of my friends had my keys and the subtle sneaky way of getting my keys back in time had failed due to a lack of obvious urgency.

This resulted in my having very little sleep and a bit of a hangover when I showed up for the Thursday rehearsal that was actually a filming.

Scarier going up the mountain in this than going down

I kind of liked the Red Brigade of Women stuff. Particularly after most of a day spent talking to the second generation brigade commander¹ and a woman who I think is the fourth, I'm increasingly certain that the actual role they played was substantially less feminist hoorah than the way the stories gets told², but it wasn't unfun; I was just annoyed that today's rehearsal was a full day of filming cause, if I'd known that, I wouldn't have stayed up so late drinking!

The best part of the episode with the cattle breeding agricultural collective was the part where the people who invited us basically ambushed the film crew with an already typed up letter they had regarding an ongoing dispute with another part of the local government only to have the Chinese on screen talent awkwardly explain that we are here to do a cultural entertainment show and absolutely are not the branch of the media you want to be talking to.

One of the unfortunate side effects of going places with photographers is that sometimes you desperately NEED to take an hour detour past the airport specifically so you can get a shot of a jet coming in for a landing over the expressway

As for the caves, the less said about them, the better. Not to be disrespectful regarding Hainan's glorious revolutionary history but if that area was ever used as a base, they were invisible ninjas. Folklore has power too and the power of belief can easily trump the evidence of our eyes, just ask any Young Earth Creationist about the archeological lack of evidence of Jesus³ as a once living person.

¹ The original Red Brigade of Women were guerrilla fighters during the Chinese Civil War and in the fight against the Japanese

² Or the movie, or the ballet

³ To be fair.....there's limited evidence proving the existence of anyone during the time that he would have been alive.

For a place that theoretically spent 23 years as a guerrilla base, there's an astonishing lack of marks from cooksmoke, cleverly chipped hand or footholds, or graffiti

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