Yunnan XiShuangbanna Day 6

We had the morning free and some suggested we visit their exquisite botanical garden. Well that garden was too far away to visit before catching our plane home. This garden was wonderful.

Here is the opening sign. I neglected along the way to say that temperatures here in Xishuangbanna were in the mid 70's. The azaleas were in full bloom. I also must say that we were told that 80% of all plants in China and 60% of all animals originated from Yunnan province.

Tom noticed this beautiful plant with variegated leaves and azalea like blossoms.

Look at the tree at the end of this lane. There is a palm tree right? You are partly correct, there is a palm tree but a banyan tree is growing around it. Eventually the banyan tree will kill the palm tree and there will be a hole in the center of the banyan tree.

This is a close up of the trunk of the tree with the palm tree peeking through.

This awesome tree is about three feet across on the one side and skinny as heck when viewed sideways like this. How cool is that?

Concrete lily pads across the water. See Tom on the far shore?

I am enjoying a wonderful ride over the lake. Actually I got to ride the other way too!

A beautiful archway of flowers.

I miss not seeing the lotus in Beijing. Here they are.

It is time to go home and there is my basket ready to get on the plane. I tied a smaller basket to the top with strong, sturdy sock yarn. That knitting habit comes in handy sometimes. Speaking of knitting yarn. I lost a button right in the middle of my shirt one morning as soon as we took off in the bus. I had nothing with me but my yarn needle and sock yarn. I sewed three places along the front of my shirt to make it look decent. Thanks Mom for teaching me all the tricks.

Two-Year Anniversary

Valentine's Day commemorates the two-year anniversary for me and my colleagues in Beijing working with our partner on a credit card business. It all began at a dinner the night we first landed in Beijing. We went to a restaurant called A Fun Ti. We celebrated last year our first anniversary. We won't be celebrating the second anniversary as the Chinese New Year is getting in the way.

Yunnan Xishuangbanna Day 5 Bulang Village

The last event of the day was to visit a tea plantation. Bulang Village is at the top of a mountain and many of the people there "own" the land and grow tea. I neglected to mention how fickle tea is to grow. Conditions including altitude must be right.

To reach the village we took tractors. These were amazing machines. I wish I had the vocabulary to describe how ancient the mechanisms were. I can tell you that the engine was a crank start. The ride was 30 minutes.

We passed fields. I love this bamboo fence and notice the plastic covering the soil in the background. Perhaps it is weed control. There is lovely terracing in the background.

The village must be doing well. They are building a better road than the dirt one we used. This is the rock foundation.

We have arrived. I got to ride in the front. Even though I saw how the tractor operated, I still can barely describe it. The shifter was a side ways H and I had to watch my feet. There was a rubber flap where my feet would go. The shifting thing-a-ma-bobby moved around quite a bit on the bumpy road. Maybe the rubber flap is to keep out the splashing in the rainy season. This is a typical bamboo house. Many are being replaced by concrete homes.

At the front of the village is the monastery. We also were greeted by two young girls who were chewing the stuff to turn their teeth purple to attract men. To each his own.

We visited a local home. It was upstairs ( just as the houses were in LiJiang). The sides were vertical planks of wood. In the center of the room was a fire and a hole in the roof above. This woman is visiting her neighbor. She is 77 and her husband is 63. She talked about how they take turns working in the tea field and in the home. The woman who lived in the house had lost her husband. There was a young man holding her baby and her older son.

This woman was smoking a pipe. She was sitting close to the fire and relighting her pipe with a frayed piece of bamboo. She was very animated and told us she was rich as she showed off her silver earrings with red yarn through the bottom for emphasis.

This is the primary school. Way down at the end of the gutter in front of the school you can see a black spot.

This is the black spot. I love the pigs.

This is a picture of one lane in the village. On our walk through and really around the streets of the village we encountered several people taking showers on their "decks". One of our group asked if we should walk down another lane to leave these bathers their privacy. Our guide said they are used to this in the village, there is no need.

Look closely and you can see the water flowing down the middle of the lane. I loved the pigs. There is a "real" runt in this family. He was so cute.

A beautiful picture of a new monk.

Another newbie.


We all visited the 5 star (not!) potty in the woods and then walked a ways to meet our ride back to the bus......the tractors.

Tea plantation

A woman carrying something in her two! baskets. These people are such hard working folks.

We are in our tractors now and headed down. The two giant "trees" in the middle of the picture are actually bamboo. I had been trying to figure out how to take a good picture that shows how tall and sweepy this plant is. I was really trying to take a picture of the two water buffaloes along the side of the road on the right. The tractor driver was honking and they scampered up the road toward us and off to the left of this picture.

Yunnan Xishuangbanna Day 5 Man Zhao papermaking

This is the other cool part about Man Zhao. They also make paper. Almost every household makes paper. This picture however, is not of paper making but a cool shot caught by our wonderful photographer Simon. That looks like a new robe and a new bike!

Paper is drying in the sun.

We visited the first house and the man here was taking the paper off the drying screen.

He took us in and showed us the bark piled up in his home. The bark is cooked with ash for 1 day and then sits in a rinse for a day. It is dried and pounded into a powder. The mechanism he was using to pound the bark was very similar to the one used to leash the cows in the field. There was a main support pole and a bamboo pole across the top. One end was weighted and the other was attached to a hammer. The hammer sat in mid air over a large slice of log. Cool huh, Em?

After the powder is produced, it is mixed with water and made into a sludge. The sludge is scooped out of a bucket and put into this large concrete vat. The screen is passed into the water in the vat and a thin film of paper is caught on the screen. In olden days the screen was made of thread. Today it is plastic or nylon.

The paper on the screen is dried in the sun for 1 hour and then peeled off. This man makes three thicknesses of paper.

The mans family is helping to tie up the paper that we were buying. Word spread fast that there were tourists buying paper in the village and three women came out to sell their paper. One of them was admonishing our guide for not coming further into the village. I bought paper (of course) from the man and the three women. Now I have a cool large basket and a huge roll of paper to carry onto the plane. Since each is hand made and each mixes their own pulp, each was different. I bought an especially long thick piece of paper suitable for a book cover. When I got home I opened it up and there was a thin spot that the woman had taped a small patch of thinner paper on.

The paper from this village is sold to an umbrella company. They can paint it with special stuff to make it waterproof. The paper is pretty sturdy. It is also sold to wrap ... you guessed it! Pu'er tea.

There are many activities that keep these villagers busy and the nice thing is the variety.

Yunnan Xishuangbanna Day 5 Man Zhao roof tiles

The village of Man Zhao has alot going for it. They have excellent clay to make roof tiles. Here you are looking at the kiln. It is dug into the hill (perhaps man made) and the top is made of bamboo. There is a hill of special dirt at the forefront of the picture. The man is loading wood into the kiln. Off to the right is the road that leads to the village proper.

Here is a close up of the entrance to the kiln.

The clay is moulded into a long brick the size of the board in the picture. It is sliced off with an instrument that looks like a cheese slicer. The slice is laid on the board and the metal and wood "cookie cutter" shapes the tile. There is a little flap that is bent up on the end. This is hooked onto the cross lathe of the roof. Starting at the bottom of the roof the tiles are hooked on to the cross lathes of the roof and the weight of the tiles holds them in place.

The winter time is ideal for making tiles because it is dry and sunny. The tiles are laid in the sun and then stacked before firing.

The men share lunch. There is a table behind where women are eating. When we asked about this the men said it was just the way they sat down today to eat.

This may be difficult to see but it is a cow leash. There is a pole to the left of center with a long bamboo pole across the top. One end has a bucket filled with something to weight it down on and the other end of the pole that is way up in the air has a rope attached to it with the cow on the end. The cow is the dark animal looking spot on the right in the center. This was an ingenious way to keep them tethered and still give them lots of room to wander. The long bamboo is flexible enough to keep the rope from tangling.

This is a pump that brings water to the clay making, tile making operation. It was a pretty smooth running, practical method.

Yunnan Xishuangbanna Day 5 countryside and lunch

We drove past fields laid out so orderly. It was pretty. Do you see the tea trees (bushes) on the hill in the distance?

The soil here is red and clay like or just plain red clay.

The actual buildings and a closer look at plots planted with crops.

We ate lunch in this airy room. I would have been just as nice in the rainy season.

This fish was delicious. It was served splayed open. The head is to the right of center.

Yunnan Xishuangbanna Day 5 Mung Zhe and temple

We stopped at Mung Zhe village to see the temple.

This is it. Under the awnings are paintings on the walls.

This young monk was whittling a little piece of bamboo in the shade of the roof.

There was this big statue in the backyard. That is me in the blue.

Tom is standing by some of the wall paintings. It told a long and complicated story.

This is the street outside of the temple.

As we were leaving there were many trucks carrying sugar cane to the factory in the village.