Rice terrace trekking

After the peace and quiet of our first 2 nights in China, we headed for the city for a quick night stop before spending another day on the buses to get to ChengYang and then the LongJi rice terraces. The least said about the city the better ;-) It was hot, we were literally the only westerners wandering the streets and there was meat in almost everything on the breakfast buffet, including the French toast. (The Chinese don’t always understand vegetarianism, if you ask for Vegetarian, they first of all try to give you just a little bit of meat, then eventually understand that you’d prefer none!)

But the villages were a breath of fresh air. We stayed in a succession of traditional guesthouses, all built from wood, with nothing but a wall of tongue & groove between us and the people in the next room… and it wasn’t just the next room you could hear, you could hear a mouse burp in the room beyond that as well. You can only imagine the problems Mike had when trying to stifle those natural bodily noises.

We wandered through the villages, took countless photos of rice drying in the sun and tried to get the ultimate shot of an old Chinese lady for the portrait wall at home. One day was spent walking between villages, about 6 hours in all, up hill, down dale and stopping off at the house of a local minority family for lunch en-route. This pic shows the cooks in action.

After all that fresh air and peace and quiet, as much fun as it was, we were pretty glad to get to the next town, where we had been told the hotels were made from bricks and there was a McDonalds on the corner.