The Dragons Backbone

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Wednesday 6th September 2006

Today we visited the Longji rice terraces, also called the Dragon Backbone Terraces. The journey on a very mini minibus took around 4 hours. The worst toilet observation happened at the toilet stop on the way. Luckily I’d (Sam) limited my liquid intake and didn’t really need to go, but was going to go ‘just in case’, however the toilets were in the pig trough, communal, no doors, just line up and squat style, which I had been warned existed but was yet to see. They are angled so that all waste runs away! Suffice to say I didn’t use them.

On a more pleasant note, approach to the terraces and the terraces themselves were as amazing as we’d hoped. We had a guide, which is essential in this part of Longji, the Jingken terraced fields in Dazhai. The guide was of Yao origin and a characteristic of this group is for the women to have extraordinarily long hair which they wear knotted on the top of their heads. Her name was Pantefar and she along with her ultra strong calf muscles, walked us around the various levels that the fields occupy. All in all you get to a height of around 800m and there are rice terraces as far as the eye can see.

Small hamlets were dotted amongst the rice fields and the views were amazing. The colours of the fields were still a brilliant green as its late summer, but within a few weeks they will turn golden. At the end of our walk, Pantefar did the sales pitch come guilt trip on us and we came away with buying a change purse from her. Apparently they’re made locally. Some of the embroideries that they do are gorgeous but we have so much stuff to carry as it is.

It was an interesting day, seeing how a farming system that is 600 years old is still functional today. Of course they now, as well as rice yields, have small scale tourism to support the communities.

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