Rice Terraces

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The Yuanyang rice terraces in southern China near the Laos/VietNam border are huge. The stretch for miles and have 350 levels in places that stretch up the mountains from the valley floors. There are an awesome sight.

Four of us, who made the bus trip down from Kunming together, hired a minivan for the day to take us around to the 8 different places. At 4:30 AM, there were clouds, but we could see stars shining. By the 5 departure, the village was completely fogged in. It was really eerie driving through with shadows of people walking along the side of the road, all coming to the village Saturday market.
The fog lifted once we got to the next mountain. But by sunrise, it had come back and there were no terraces to be seen. So I decided to just go walking along a path to at least get some sort of experience here. A dog wandered by, became my best friend for an hour, and led me the to a small village of rice workers. 6 inch frogs jumped around, and the roosters were crowing, but no sightings of massive terraces...just the primeval dinosaur-age feeling walking along paddy barriers and under trees with 2 foot leaves.

It was obvious that we we not going to see anything that morning, so we went back to our village to see Saturday market. There are four minority groups living in the area, all of whom have really colorful native dress. It was the first time I had seen "butt flaps" on costumes: a 2'x2' beaded square for each cheek. Unfortunately, my "butt flap" pictures all are really blurry because I only photoed them while women were walking. Highlights of the market: red and blue bread (the red was especially popular), the Chinglish signs for the stores ("Ordinary People's Market" was pretty good, although my favorite is enclosed), and watching dog being prepared for dinner (a guide told us "Dog makes you stong in the night").

Walking around the village, a lot of the doors have drawings of local gods. The photo here is from Kunming, but the ones in this village look very similar. I asked about them, but no one who spoke English knew much about the beliefs or even the names of the gods.

The afternoon sunset at the terraces was a completely different story. The day cleared and by 5 was sunny and hot. After the complete bust of the morning, we made the driver stop every 4 minutes, just in case the rain decided to arrive. The terraces are so massive, that it really is impossible to photograph them...it's like trying to photo Grand Canyon..you can only get parts of it. Staring at them, you wonder how much work goes into maintaining them, and just how much work it was to actually buld them hundreds of years ago. The cicadas are incredibly noisy. These sound like really loud electric lines buzzing for big fans that are about to break apart. And everywhere is rice. It's hard to imagine there is a rice shortage in the world when you see this huge rice production place.

After two hours of waiting for sunset and hiking around looking for the best views, we all came back happy campers.

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