A most exciting and dangerous Adventure (Patreon)
Published:
2017-06-22 04:07:02
Imported:
2023-11
Content
I have a minute to sit down and write this to you all, my patreons. The last few days have been very taxing on our journey. Lovely scenery and local people, but serious issues with police, PLA, Swat and evil uncles! Our whole Inner Mongolia experience has been marred by constant harassment. I won't go into detail, but there was someone who we originally contacted to ask about interesting things to see and do around the region who turned out to be an awful ultra nationalist and actively tried to sabotage our filming. He called ahead to report us to local authorities, called ahead to the tribes he recommended we visit we to actively try and poison their ears telling them that we were coming to shoot a documentary to make fun of their culture and make them look bad. This resulted in a swat team raiding our hotel rooms at night, holding us there for an hour and a half searching through all of our belongings, footage, passports, licenses etc, calling in a special detective and party head to question us further. Finding nothing wrong they finally bid us goodnight, the following day after convincing the tribesmen that we were genuinely there to film their interesting culture since we want to show the diversity and awesomeness of Chinese culture and hospitality, things were on the go! halfway through filming the military showed up and harassed us for a further few hours, making us empty our car and bags, scrutinising our drivers licenses, bike registrations, visas, footage etc, this really spoiled the mood and the shoot, putting everyone (especially the local tribesmen) on edge, we however pushed through and still managed to have an awesome shoot and we know the final outcome will be spectacular (remember when watching the Inner Mongolia segment that in between shooting we were under huge amounts of harassment and scrutiny), after leaving the areas and activities recommended to us by our friendly saboteur, we thought we could rest easy but upon arrival in a small town we shot an entry shot with our drone (totally legal) and as we were busy getting ready to check into our hotel, the military spotted us on the street and immediately demanded our passports, we gladly handed them over and answered their questions, they were super friendly and were just doing their job, they handed back our passports and wished us well, just as they were about to leave, an evil uncle rushed up to them and said in Chinese "These foreigners have a drone and they were flying it here, that is their car and they have cameras too!" Of course this then resulted in more questions and more passport scrutiny etc etc, they eventually told us that we're welcome to fly the drone all we want since we have all the paperwork and bid us farewell and left. I went up to the evil uncle and gave him a really shit stare and asked him nicely what and interesting things there were to do in the town, he looked a bit unnerved since now he knew I understood Chinese and had understood what he'd said to the military officers, and now they had left and we were still there. He sheepishly told us about some local restaurants, I thanked him and off we went.
I can't tell you how frustrating, amazing, awful, lovely, wonderful and disgusting our experiences have been so far, but I can tell you how much I appreciate your patience and your support during this time. Thank you! I can't wait till this is over so that I can catch you up on what's been going on.
Stay Awesome!
- SerpentZA
I can't tell you how frustrating, amazing, awful, lovely, wonderful and disgusting our experiences have been so far, but I can tell you how much I appreciate your patience and your support during this time. Thank you! I can't wait till this is over so that I can catch you up on what's been going on.
Stay Awesome!
- SerpentZA