Travel Book Review ~ Snake Fang Salad - Culinary Travails in China by Greg Elms

Snake Fang Salad - Culinary Travails In China by Greg Elms. First published 2007 by Black Light Publications, Australia. ISBN 0646475800. Click here to see if we currently have a copy in stock.

This book is right up my alley: I'm mad about Chinese food; I'm an obsessed food blogger; an amateur photographer; and a complete travel nerd. In Snake Fang Salad, professional photographer Greg Elms travels six weeks through China photographing food for Lonely Planet. This is something I would do for free (we'll do it in 2011 hopefully). When we travel we go nuts photographing food for our blog. To have Lonely Planet pay me to do it sounds like nirvana.

Then I read Snake Fang Salad and decided I'll leave the paid gigs to the pros. Sure Greg Elms gets paid to travel but there's deadlines; a long list of specific shots he has to get; a tight travel schedule; 200 rolls of film to be paranoid about; paranoid Chinese officials to be paranoid about; and twenty kilograms of expensive photographic equipment to cart around (and not get stolen).  Sounds like hard work to me. 

Snake Fang Salad is a great read if you are into food, photography and China.  Both Alison and I loved this book. We both found it a bit frustrating reading passages where he is visiting tourist attractions when he could be wandering around the streets looking for weird and wonderful food. Except the Terracotta warriors, that sounds mind blowing. 

As with all my reviews, I could blab on endlessly about the how good the book is, and you would have no reason to believe me because I would really like to sell a copy to you; so I select a favourite passage or two from the book and leave it up to you.

Landing in Shangri-la...

I pictured myself swooping over snow-capped peaks in a Russian rust-bucket to a scene straight from James Hilton's Lost Horizon. A heroic adventurer, Pd descend upon a little-known mountain-shrouded hamlet, and possibly dodge a yak or two on the tiny airstrip as we landed. Me and half a million other tourists! In a gleaming 737 jet, we touched down on Lijiang airport's broad tarmac and taxied past a lineup of similar-sized people movers. Alas, not a yak in sight. Still, I remained in denial. Climbing aboard a luxury air-conditioned coach (always a bad omen in a remote region), I rode into town. My fantasy materialised in the blinding clarity of noon sunlight. Sure enough, the antiquated roofline of Lijiang's Old Town was before me, but directly across the road was 'New Town', a sprawling modern metropolis of crude high-rise offices servicing a million inhabitants. My jaw dropped for all the wrong reasons. Fed by a sparkling stream, a refurbished waterwheel splashed gaily in the sunlight, beckoning me into Old Town's network of cobbled pathways. On the brink of my destination I still wanted to believe the romantic vision, though it was somewhat undermined by the cityscape looming behind me. As I walked beyond Old Town's entrance the dream disintegrated altogether, amid strings of plastic bunting that flapped in the breeze, hordes of souvenirs that spilled from spruced-up ancient shop fronts and throngs of guided tourists in matching baseball caps. Clearly, the Lost Horizon was a little further afield. (In fact, government officials have changed the name of a nearby town, Zhongdian, to Shangri-la. Naturally I was too wily to be fooled by such blatant tourism propaganda.) I trudged along a rough-hewn flagstone path through Old Town's maze of alleys, trying not to add injury to insult by coming a cropper on the uneven pavement with my heavy pack. An aged wooden-fronted house brimmed with ethnic babyware. One of many, they formed a cordon of luminous primary colours dancing in the sunlight along the street. This place was beginning to feel like an ethnic theme park! Shangri-la meets Disneyland.

A wonderful paragraph summing up the joys of getting lost overseas (we love walking around foreign cities without a map or a clue)...

For me, one of the great joys of travel is being three-quarters lost in a strange country, inducing a heightened sense of wonderment; feeling myself slightly overwhelmed, the lifeline to a known world momentarily severed. At such times, only the present matters. Past worries and future threats dissolve. There is only here and now. It's an immersion in chaos to achieve its opposite - the serenity of forgetting my home mortgage.

A piece about photography, capturing what you see...

The sky was dusk mauve by the time we returned to our hotel on Shamian Dao. Jacqui decided not to join us for dinner; Aurora fatigue, I suspected. Before heading off again, I wanted to capture a twilight shot of the city, and found the energy to walk to the nearby People's Bridge over the Pearl River where I had a clear view upriver to a thicket of city towers. The light was waning, colouring the distant tangle of glass and concrete facades a uniform smoky blue. Along the riverbank a string of streetlights blinked on, and a small passenger ferry carried commuters back and forth across the river. It wasn't a stunning vista, but worth a shot. With camera atop tripod, I snapped off eleven frames as the light faded - shot numbers thirteen through twenty-three on my 196th roll of film.  I wanted the shots to be more than mere documents of office towers at dusk. But that was all they were, and not particularly inspiring office towers at that. I willed the images to take on a gravitas beyond perfunctory reality, though in my haggard state I had no idea how to produce it. I could have embellished the shots with a coloured filter but considered it inappropriate - actually, I couldn't be bothered rummaging through my camera bag. And I was seeking more than technique alone could produce. I wanted the photographs to reflect how I felt at that moment: the debilitation of a fourteen-hour day grind for six weeks in a foreign country; the elation at having all but completed the assignment; and the secret longing that it would never end. At the verv least I wanted to imbue the images - and every image on this assignment - with the adrenaline rush of travel and its nerve-jangling onslaught; to show the strangeness of the world and invoke wonder. Countless times I've wished my pictures could communicate such feelings as I pressed the shutter button. Sometimes they do, and all the effort is worthwhile.

Snake Fang Salad Culinary Travails In China by Greg Elms. First published 2007 by Black Light Publications, Australia. ISBN 0646475800. Click here to see if we currently have a copy in stock