I'm livin' on Chinese rocks

N 23-something, E 102-something - 20 November 2008 - Yuanyang

Well, an abbreviated post, I'm in an Internet cafe in Yuanyang (no internet at the hotel or room) and don't have my diary and notes with me. We just stuffed ourselves with our last Chinese dinner and have an early morning tomorrow, catching a 7 am bus to Hekou to make sure we are out of China by tomorrow when our visas expire. It will be sad leaving, especially the food. Up to now, Mongolia had been my favorite place we had been but China has been just really amazing, great food everywhere, cool things to see, really nice people, and a rather challenging but compelling language.

Yeah, maybe I'll write up our bird trip eventually as well as the rest of the month in China that I haven't written about yet. There is so much yet to write about. But then, Sid already wrote about some of our bird trip and Tibetan adventures here, and there are lots of good pictures there and all that, so I can let that stand for a bit.

Today we spent the day in the back of a small motorbike taxi going around seeing rice terraces. Ok, it is better than it sounds, except for the motorbike taxi. A lot of the way was on really bumpy roads and it took a few hours to go there and back and we were here for one day when the fog decided to roll in and cover the whole region. BaDa was clear and was really amazing, DuoYiShu was completely covered in fog and we couldn't see a thing. In MengPing, we had barely stopped before hawkers were shoving stuff into our faces (and into the vehicle), look postcards, needlepoint stuff, blah blah. My only regret there is that I didn't take a picture of them, it was just so funny, about six of them all yelling at us, pushing their stuff at us.

Well, I'm sure there will be more in Vietnam to take pictures of. This has been the first place in a while with really aggressive hawkers (actually just that one stop today) everywhere else in Yunnan has been pretty mellow. We are a little more off the tourist route now and it isn't really high season now. Not like being on the Great Wall and being followed for miles by persistant hawkers, "waterbeercoke" while pushing t-shirts and postcards in your face. After Beijing and Pingyao, it was mostly just the scrum at train stations and bus stations and if you happened to go down a especially touristly street, followed by lots of "hello, look here" and the standard followup question, "where are you from", I guess to engage you in a conversation before the sales pitch.

But rice terraces, they really are pretty amazing, entire hillsides, looking like an OS map, contour lines and shining rice paddies with different colors of water, from black to tan to silver. Even the fog was nice, when it wasn't too much to obscure everything. It added a nice atmosphere and highlight. We might have flumoxed the driver a bit, a little distracted sometimes from the terraces by something flying overhead. Sorry Sid, I'm not sure we learned our lessons very well, we can't identify them immediately like you. Some sort of buzzards, maybe, or there was that one with the distincive wing shape, curved like a bow, which I can't remember now of what it is distinctive. Or the one with the clearly spread fingers on the wingtips. The shame. But they looked cool circling over the terraces and were nice to watch with binoculars as we tried to ignore the hawkers pushing stuff in front of us.

Anyways, as I always seem to say, more later. Too much stuff to see, too much already seen and not enough time to write.