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.