wild china04

To create the series Wild China

we embarked on 57 filming trips to almost every part of China,

employed 20 cameramen and shot around 500 hours of tape.

Our filming crews were given access to China's most stunning landscapes,

met many fascinating people

and enjoyed some truly memorable wildlife encounters.

To capture all this in high definition images

took perseverance, skill and ingenuity.

In a vast country like China,

getting into remote areas can be quite a challenge

and some modes of transport were more unorthodox than others.

This is an account of our filming journey.

Producer Gavin Maxwell takes up the tale in Tibet.

We wanted to film Mount Kailash.

It's one of the most sacred sites in the world

and every year around June, there's the Saga Dawa Festival

when thousands of pilgrims try and make the journey there.

We decided it would be an interesting story to film

but it's no mean feat trying to get there.

Now, from Lhasa the roads are paved,

but quite soon after that, within half a day,

the roads run out and you then remain on dirt tracks

which get progressively more and more hairy.

As we were driving down a mountain pass,

one of our drivers lost control of his vehicle

and rolled it with six people on board.

So any trip in Tibet is not to be taken lightly.

Working in the desert's always difficult because the sand

causes unique problems in terms of getting around.

But when normal vehicles won't do in the desert

you have to resort to specialist vehicles.

At times we were using quad bikes to get up sand dunes

to get into the filming locations which were going to work best for us.

Even then, sometimes quad bikes wouldn't do the trick

and then you had to resort to the ultimate

in desert transport, which is camels.

The problem with working with camels is that they are pretty grumpy animals

and weren't always happy about being loaded up with a lot of equipment.

We tended to travel light,

just tripod and just a camera and cameraman and director.

The next location had equally difficult terrain.

But Tibet's Wild Yak Valley offered the added danger

of wild bears to contend with.

So the idea was to try

and get as close to a Tibetan brown bear as we could.

It was a pretty hard thing to do.

These animals are terrified of people. They are hunted

out in China and they have very little contact with people.

And so it was a case of staying downwind

and using all the topography to get as close as we could.

And there is no vegetation up there. They live on pika,

a sort of relative of a rabbit, and that's all they feed on.

The idea was to try and get footage of them hunting pika by digging them out.

So it was just a case of driving as far as we could,

putting the camera on the back and walking

and when you've got 30 kilos on your back

and you're trekking for eight hours a day,

it was really hard work.

We had a spotter on top of a hill and we spotted the bear.

Every time we were moving,

it would get that little bit further away

and this went on for two or three hours

and eventually we were close enough to film, maybe 80 yards away.

The bear was digging for these pika. It was incredible.

He somehow sensed we were there, but bears have poor eyesight

and so he stood up on his hind legs

and we ducked down but he couldn't smell us.

The only way they can really know what you are is by smell.

So he then started to circle us, but we were on top of a hill

and he disappeared below the horizon, and suddenly, about 30 seconds later,

he popped his head up and he was only 30 metres away from us.

Absolutely terrifying, and you saw his nostrils

flare like this, and before we knew it, bang, he was gone.

20 seconds later he was a mile up the hill

and at that altitude we had no hope of following him.

It was a fantastic experience

and probably about the remotest place in China that you could get to.

Or so we thought,

until Gavin Maxwell decided to film the world's deepest gorge.

So the Yarlung gorge is the deepest gorge in the world

so we thought we'll have to go and film that.

The site we wanted to reach is called the Big Bend

where the Yarlung River finally turns and cuts through the Himalayas.

So that's where we needed to get to.

When I spoke to Richard Fisher,

the man credited with discovering the gorge,

I said, "What's it like? " And he said,

This place is like low intensity warfare.

Because of the topography at the end of the Himalayas,

there are earthquakes and land slips and mud slides.

It's always very wet because the monsoon is able to rush

through this break in the mountains, very slippery.

There are rope bridges,

which are in a fairly poor state of repair over the gorge.

You look down and you just see and hear this mountain of water.

We had a team of about 30 porters to carry our camera equipment,

our specialist lenses and, of course, all our food.

So we set off on our 25 miles two-day journey.

And when we finally arrived there, we quickly got out the camera

only to discover that the camera had been broken,

probably during the journey.

So there we were in the deepest gorge in the world,

two days' walk from anywhere with a broken camera.

Fortunately, we had a digital stills camera with us

so we were able to construct some time lapses

so at least we didn't go home empty-handed.

Nearly 2, 000 kilometres to the east,

Kathryn Jeffs faced the challenge

of filming another wild river gorge in the mountains of Yunnan Province.

We came here because it's an absolutely spectacular canyon,

one of the Three Gorges Canyons

that runs down all the way through Yunnan,

and what's very interesting is how people have to live here.

They're living on these incredibly steep slopes

and there's practically no way of getting across this river.

There's like raging gorges

and it would be impossible to get boats across on many of the areas.

So you have very isolated communities.

And so the people around here have a fantastic way of getting about

and getting across the river.

They use these brilliant cables, theyjust zip across.

It's a fantastic way of getting to work.

Bye-bye.

It's really fantastic to try and film it as well.

So we' re trying to g et some really dramatic shots today

by actually getting the camera out across the gorge.

And to do that we have to use this cable

and we have to swing the camera out over the gorge

and that's quite hairy, quite tricky. So we've got a great team here

to try to get it out over there and fingers crossed it goes really well.

So what Tim and Gavin have been doing

is very, very carefully uncoiling the cable and laying it out

into this big figure of eight,

which will then enable them to draw it out

smoothly and carefully without it getting tangled.

That's the idea anyway.

How are you feeling, Gavin?

Great. Best bit of the day.

Unfortunately, this is very steep, he's going to go very fast

and I've got to feed the line out of this bag.

We've got to get the line across

so we can start pulling things backwards and forwards.

Yeah.

All right.

The worse thing that can happen is it'll come out in a bunch,

which could get out of my hand, then I'll have to drop it,

in which case you'll have to come back and we'll have to re-sort.

That could be the worst thing. So...

So as slow as you can. I don't know whether you can use your feet as well.

I don't know what you can do. You'll wreck your boots...

- I'll wreck me boots. -Yeah.

Oh, Tim!

I'm fine. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine.

#NAME?

He's all right. He's landed, has he? Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah.

So what just happened there? We're not sure...

There was a bit of a bundle of rope and it just caught my little finger.

I couldn't let go 'cause it had looped around my finger.

So I somersaulted.

Ouch!

#NAME?

That was pretty impressive.

So once we'd got the small line across,

we now had to get the big cable across and it was quite scary really because

it's going to take quite a weight with the camera and the dolly.

And this is very expensive equipment

so we really need to make sure it's not going to go in the drink.

So we had to make sure it was at the right tension

so that when all that weight goes on the cable,

it's not going to sag

and all of a sudden just touch that water

and get whipped away.

Once we had got the cable all set up, it was the moment to put the camera on.

It was an interesting moment because if something had gone wrong

then the camera would go in the water and that's the shoot down.

And just that moment when we let it go

and sent it out over the waters was fairly interesting

because this was the test of all the work we had been doing.

It was months of planning with Gavin and Tim, the experts,

and it was a pretty risky shot to attempt

and yet when the camera came back from over the river

and we saw the shots, it was all worth it.

It paid off and it was fantastic.

It's not an easy place to work

and the first problem I think we all faced

was that nobody or hardly anybody speaks English.

Wherever you travel you're totally dependent on a translator

and that puts a certain barrier between you and the people you meet,

which is obviously a disadvantage and also very disappointing.

Just ask him how long has he been feeding this big dragon?

-25 years. -25 years.

Being able to speak Mandarin in China can get you quite a long way

but the customs of working in China make it very difficult.

You have to work with a Chinese team, there's no other way.

And on the last camel, the last guy.

#NAME?

Even with a translator, organising a shoot wasn't always easy.

Get these guys. Hey! Hey!

Those two there.

Those two guys there. We want them out.

#NAME?

We want to shoot empty desert, but there's loads of people.

Most of the people we met were incredibly hospitable,

incredibly warm, incredibly friendly.

I was expecting perhaps quite a lot of hassle from people

but there was none whatsoever.

And I always felt safe in China.

Again, my expectation was,

Oh, look out! Watch your pocket, watch your money belt, just be careful.

But never once did I feel threatened by other people in China.

Many of the people who live in the north of China are nomadic

and that presents unique challenges

but also it involves working with very unique and amazing people.

The nomadic people are very friendly but they live in their own way.

They have their own daily routines and patterns.

And sometimes we'd be filming with the family

and then they would just disappear.

They'd go off to another valley

and we would have to try to track them down the next day

to see if we could carry on filming with them.

They are both in contact with the modern life in China

and yet they still live this lifestyle

that is relatively unchanged for thousands of years.

This mixture of modern and ancient cultures

was reflected across the whole of China.

A highlight for me was visiting a school in south China

housed inside a huge cavern.

Filming in more challenging caves proved to be technically demanding.

Caves are inherently dangerous, difficult places to work in.

They're also pitch black.

So you can't film unless you light them, and that created obvious problems

in terms of having to take a lot of lights with us,

find ways of powering the lights in remote areas in difficult terrain.

Getting generators and lights into caves,

trying to light what we were filming

so that it didn't look too obviously lit

because you need to give the illusion that you're still in a dark place.

Although you have to light it in order to see anything there

and that was a real problem.

On top of that, obviously,

the difficulties of working in difficult, dangerous terrain,

having to manage that risk

for the crew and everyone else involved in filming.

One of the more technical shoots that I organised for programme 6

was on Shedao Island, which is in the Northern Bohai Gulf.

And this island has been cut off from the mainland during the Ice Age

and it left behind some Pallas' Pit Vipers.

Vipers are highly venomous

which made this shoot particularly difficult

and potentially dangerous.

Charlotte's aim was to film the snakes

ambushing birds that pass through on their annual migration.

We knew that the birds visiting the island

would only be there for three weeks in total.

We had a two-week shoot

and out of that one week was ruined due to wind and rain.

So we ended up with one week to capture this shot of a strike.

A snake strike lasts a fraction of a second

so to reveal what happens, the action was slowed down

using an ultra high-speed camera called a Photron

able to shoot over a thousand frames per second.

The difficulty was that we had to choose

one branch with a snake on it that was waiting for a bird to ambush.

And the birds could land anywhere on the island.

And so it was a really high-risk strategy

to get that one shot.

So thi s i s the Photron camera.

It's got a long lens on it, a viewfinder to look through

and then attached to it is a long cable that runs all the way to...

the main electronics, the processing box,

which is where all the information gets stored and processed.

And then from there we run a cable through to a computer,

which is where we set all the parameters and control the camera from.

And here we can set things like the number of frames we want to run at,

the resolution and other information that we need and we can view things.

And we can also set what's very important, is the trigger,

and this allows us to start recording

and lay down the information at any point.

So if we push this button,

we could then record the next couple of seconds,

or we could record the previous few seconds,

and that's very useful to be able to do

when you're filming things that are difficult to predict.

So once the shot was set up,

we had to play this really patient waiting game,

but then finally, after several failed attempts,

we got the shot and the strike.

But even then the snake missed the bird

so we didn't quite get what we were aiming for.

While technology can solve many filming challenges,

sometimes all that's needed is good old-fashioned skill.

This is when we went to Hainan to film some tube divers.

These are local divers who go fishing

for crayfish and sea cucumbers and other crustaceans.

What they do is they breathe air pumped by a diesel engine

down a tube or a hose pipe.

This kind of tube diving is very dangerous for the fishermen

because they're breathing air pumped from the surface pressure

down to the bottom of the sea where the pressure is increased.

And also the air is often mixed with diesel fumes and carbon monoxide,

so it can be a lethal combination.

This is so dangerous that our crew couldn't consider using the same method.

So a very experienced underwater cameraman

with the ability to free-dive

held his breath to capture these images in shallow water.

And we didn't have all the difficulties of having

scuba diving equipment and big housings for cameras, etc.

So we managed to use low technology to get the shots.

The divers here are... I think they're incredibly brave

because they use relatively primitive equipment

to do some fairly extreme dives.

And it's not the sort of equipment that we would use in the West at all.

We would consider it dangerous. We don't really have the option to bring

our full diving equipment with us to Hainan

so I've been filming the divers here

just by snorkelling, which makes it for me very easy

because I don't have to have much equipment.

But these people make do with what they have

and they do a very good job with it.

Another kind of skill was needed when filming wild monkeys

in an area which is popular with tourists.

Most of them come to see the mountain scenery

but a few of them like to go and see the monkeys.

And they live in very steep sided valleys in dense forest.

I mean, they weigh as much as a rottweiler

and they're quite aggressive. They have powerful jaws and teeth

and they can do a human being an awful lot of damage.

So they're really quite dangerous creatures

and the guides have come up with this idea that

because the monkeys potentially, potentially are dangerous,

the best way to control them is to throw rocks at them.

So, of course, it works. They get to know the guides

and they have this respect and fear for the guides.

But they associate all humans with aggressive behaviour.

The problem that I faced

in trying to get some nice sound of these monkeys

was that there were two places where we could see them

and they were both places where the tour guides feed them

in order to provide a spectacle for the tourists.

One of those places was right next to a waterfall

and that was the best place to film.

So you couldn't get any sound there,

everything was drowned out by the sound of the waterfall.

So I had to leave the safe viewing platform

and follow the macaques up valley when they started moving away

back into the forest.

And that made me very vulnerable but it turned out

that there was a completely other side to the macaques we hadn't realised.

And we discovered that if you just stayed very, very calm,

never looked them in the eye,

and just sat there very quietly, got on with filming them,

they became very, very relaxed around us.

And even to the point where they were coming up

and sitting right next to the cameraman

and leaning forward and looking into the lens

and were behaving in a remarkably nice way

and this amazed all the Chinese that we were working with.

They thought we had some sort of special Dr Dolittle gift!

Whereas, in fact, all we were doing

was responding to the macaques in an appropriate way.

In western China,

Giles Badger got even closer with some cute panda cubs.

Filming panda cubs at the Wolong Nature Reserve

was quite an unusual shoot for us.

We' re very used to filming animals in the wild at long distances,

so 80, 100 metres. But the difference with this shoot

was that we could get right up close and personal

with these pandas, which was fantastic.

This is nuts.

And they really are the ultimate teddy bears.

So we were very lucky enough to be able to go into a location,

into a sort of enclosure if you like, where twice a day these baby pandas

were let out to play and be fed and to be exercised.

My job was to get the sound, and the closer you can get, the better.

But I think I got just that little bit too close

because suddenly one of these pandas grabbed hold of the fluffy microphone

and, I don't know, maybe he thought it was another panda, but...

It's times like that when you realise it's absolutely fantastic.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I'll never forget it.

It was just a bit hairy when he started to kind of fall off,

so it was time to back off and leave the pandas to do their stuff.

The holy grail of wildlife filmmakers in China

has to be wild panda behaviour.

This was Gavin Maxwell's quest.

We wanted to film pandas mating,

which had never really been achieved before.

This was actually our fourth attempt.

Now, pandas live in very thick bamboo forest

so the problem was trying to get close to the pandas,

which are naturally quite nervous.

But the bamboo is so thick that if you move through it,

it starts to make a terrible noise.

So you have to pick your way through the bamboo,

so that you can get close to the pandas.

It's a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

It's the most frustrating thing.

And you hear these fantastic sort of barkings and shouts and growls.

It sounds like nothing on earth.

It sounds like Chewbacca having a brawl or something.

But at least we knew we were very close.

Occasionally, you might find a female up a tree

trying to get away from the males.

But, of course, as soon as she comes down again,

she's vanished and you can't see a thing.

During the mating season the pandas become quite aggressive.

We had one incident where a panda came up very close to us

and one of our guides really wasn't quite sure

what was going to happen next.

Luckily the panda had other things on its mind.

But there was one final panda surprise in store.

Having spent so many days scratching around in the bamboo

trying to make progress, this was the most exciting thing.

Finally finding a good vantage point where we could see two wild pandas.

We weren't quite sure what was going to happen.

We knew what we hoped might happen

but we didn't dare speak or move or do anything.

We just sat there and hoped and hoped

and finally we were able to film the two pandas mating.

This scene was a culmination of many years' work

in order to tell the whole story of panda courtship and mating in the wild.

It had never been filmed in its entirety before.

So at this moment I was probably the most relieved man in China.

Another hard won success

and the most ambitious wildlife series ever made on China

was finally in the bag.>