The bumpiest road in the world

Trip Start Aug 12, 2006
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Trip End Sep 11, 2006


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Tuesday, September 5, 2006

We left Chengyang early in a minivan to go to the Longji rice terraces. The road between Sanjiang and Longji was ... the bumpiest road in the world! Apparently the government have been building this road for the past two years, so it's in the middle of being constructed, but the progress is very, very slow. It was tortuous and very dusty; after almost 4 hours of being hauled out of our seats every other minute, we were glad to reach the rice terraces.

We stopped in a small town about an hour from the terraces to drop off our large baggage, and continued with our day packs. We met Farmer Tang, our local guide who was a sweet short man with a cute fragmented accent. He gave us fresh watermelon when we arrived, a refreshing treat after our horrible journey.

The road to the terraces was a mountain edge road, quite windy in places Another view of the terraces
Another view of the terraces
 . The mountains were steeper with dense green forest on the upper slopes. The valley below revealed big boulders and rocks where I imagine a gushing river used to flow, now leaving a trickle of a stream.

We parked the van in the car park and walked about half an hour to the Yao village in the middle of the terraces. The Yao women don't cut their hair after marriage and wear it on top of their heads, they have the longest hair in China. The walk up to the village was uphill much of the way, pretty tough on the legs, chased by the Yao women persistently trying to sell their wares.

The view of the rice fields was pretty, with the step-like nature of the crops creating a pretty green pattern across the mountains. It was damp and misty, but you could see distant higher mountains through the clouds too.

We had an afternoon snack, and then chilled out around our guesthouse. Some of the others went on a mini-trek to one of the viewpoints, with Farmer Tang. I opted to leave it, in order to conserve some energy for tomorrow's trek.

We had a group dinner in the evening which was nice, although there seemed to be an excess of bugs around. They kept landing in the plates and getting stuck on the oil. We made an attempt to save one of the flies, but Angeline ended up pulling the legs off. Not good.

We tried to watch Kangaroo Jack, a movie with Dean Cain in it, but it was pretty poor and the quality wasn't great as it was on VCD. The others seemed to enjoy it and managed to see it all, I left before the end.
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