After a sleepless 12 hours aboard the Yangshou - Guangzhou night train, I'm on a ferry heading into Hong Kong and preparing for re-emersion into western society. China (outside the tourist onslaught in Yangshou) was really amazing. Escaping the main tourist arteries and diving into village life is the absolute way to go.
Yesterday we took a five hour bicycling ordeal through the rice paddies and between the picturesque (in the Chinese painting sense) rock mountains near Yangshou. It was an amazing journey, a close-up look at village life and rice farming. The muddy trails took us across raised barriers between rice fields, over 500 year-old walking paths, across ancient stone bridges , and onto floating fishing village docks. And, although Yangshou's tourist epidemic is a relative disgust, life just a bike ride away is standing still. The systematic rice growing process slowly covers the land recycling twice yearly. Except for the occasional "rich farmer" with a mud hopping tractor, traditional water buffalo pulled plows are the norm. Rice planting generally follows the procedure of planting dense rows of seedlings then replanting in six inch patterns across mud based, water filled field sections. Some more skillful farmers plant the seedlings by tossing them like darts into the soft mud in perfect arrays. The continuously recycled fields resemble ancestral quilts with green patches of rice, striped patches of seedlings, dotted freshly planted patches, and gray freshly plowed patches. It's difficult to describe and even more difficult to capture in a photo.
As the Chinese wet season commences, mud accumulates on the roads and between the paddies. What once was an imperfection in a dirt trail turns into an impassable mud crater. The red dirt and water mix to the consistency of thick slippery paint. As our dodgy bikes struggle along the theoretical trail the mud accumulates around brakes, fenders, and derailers in incapacitating slippery globs. The mud is so bad at times wheels stop moving and force us to stop and remove it with sticks or by bathing the bikes in ever present irrigation canals. Many locals stop to help after laughing at the crazy westerners covered in mud. The sites, sounds, and silences of China were presented to us in a slightly mud enhanced fashion. The trail was difficult and my muscles are sore, but the accumulated experience was well worth the laundry expense.
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