Yunnan Xishuangbanna Day 5 Jing Zhen octagon pavillion

We stopped at Jing Zhen a village with an octagon pavilion. It was built in 1701.

This is the gate leading to the temple.

Here, Simon is pausing on the steps up. Interesting statues along the way.

From the temple we can see over the whole village. It is nice and colorful. The small red flowers in the foreground are wild pointsettas.

This is the gate to the village. There are those peacocks again.

Two days ago parents sent off their little boys to the monastery to become monks. There were seats made of bamboo decorated with flowers that we believe the boys were carried in.

He looks like a new monk. He is shy but a little bit proud of his new clothes.

Yunnan Xishuangbanna Day 5 Hung Hai morning mkt

We are off this morning to a morning market. This village called Mung Hai is populated by the Hani ethnic minority. They, unlike the Dai wish to have sons. They will built a "son" house nearby. The Dai wish for daughters to take care of them in their old age. The Hani's daughters grow up and leave; it is the sons that stay to care for their parents. A Hani is not allowed to marry a Dai. The Dai have all of the best land (on the plain in the valley) and the Hani are mountain people. There have been many fights over the valley land.

The Hani in olden times would kill twins when they were born. They believed one was a ghost. The parents would live outside of the village for a month after the birth. Today they adopt the twins outside of the village.

The people practice animalism. They sacrifice animals at the gate of the village. Men and women have separate bedrooms. There are also two kitchen in the home. The men can boil water in theirs and the women do all of the cooking in theirs.

The Hani practice a "grab" wedding. A man will go to the home of his intended and ask for her hand. The parents say no. This happens three times and then the man will go and "grab" his girlfriend. The villagers all applaud.

Most of the people in China are of the Han descent. They are only allowed one child. The minorities are allowed two children. I believe because they are farmers and need the help. Sometimes a Han will marry a minority in order to have two children. Han people marry at about 17 or 18 years of age. Minority people marry at 13 or 14 yrs.

We stopped at a rubber tree plantation. Rubber trees grow in an altitude between 477 meters and 2000 meters. One rubber tree yields 1 yuan a day. The tapping occurs between 3 and 4 am. Most families keep a small house at the plantation.

One can enjoy breakfast at the market. People shop daily and only purchase food stuffs for two meals.

This is a wine shop. Just siphon out your favorite kind.

All kinds of noodles. Grains are in the background.

Yummy geese ready to cook. There were also ready cooked geese available. Around the corner were geese that were flattened breast side up. This must be easier and quicker to cook on a barbeque.

My favorite basket. It was too big to bring home. This basket hold young chickens. There is a stopper that goes in the top and the vendor just reaches in and takes out a chicken. Easy and portable, how cool.

This is baby ducks. So cute and fuzzy.

A beautiful selection of fresh vegetables. Notice all the bad stuff is picked off and thrown on the ground before it is weighed. Everything is bought by weight.

A late breakfast or early lunch?

My friend remembered sugar cane as a childhood treat. We ran back and she chose a stalk. The woman weighed it with a hand scale. She is shaving the outside. She used the side of the shaver to chop it into 10 inch pieces and we chewed it and sucked the sugar juice out. Yum!

This delightful fellow was just sitting there minding his own business when we wandered by. He enjoyed the pictures that we took and then showed him. He was certain to include his beloved dog in the photos. He is a potter and his son helps him. He asked where we were from and then offered to take us to his warehouse to show us more. We went and it was not very full of pottery. He explained that he had just sold most to those getting ready for the new year. Yes, he is smoking a water pipe. He made it himself.

Yunnan LiJiang Black Dragon Pool Park

This is our third and final day in LiJiang. We have been very fortunate to have missed the snow storms that have hit the south and west of China this winter in our travels. This area looks like spring, it is so beautiful.Here we are at the center of town. This is a big open area. the large rock wall behind the working water wheel tells that story of Pu'er tea among others. It is told in the only surviving pictographic language still in existence. The people are the Naxi and the language is called Dongba.

There is much activity in the square even in the early morning. These are prayers that are hanging on a trellis in the town square. They make a pretty sight. There are people coming and going to the market for their daily food, and men dressed in traditional costume giving rides on the sturdy horses of the area. Before heading to the airport for the next leg of the trip, we are stopping to visit the Black Dragon Pool park. This park once held the villa and family temple of the Mu chieftain. The temple was built in 1601. The lions at the gate are different than the ones at the Forbidden City. There are two sets here. The male lions are on the inside. They stay at home and study. The lions on the outside represent women who do everything on the outside of the house. The male lions have genitals. This is not the case on other lion statues seen in the Forbidden City.

We bought a painting here done in Chinese ink painted with the palm of the hand. It is a landscape but the artist Guan Yao Jiu is really known for his palm paintings of dragons in the clouds. The inscription on the painting is "the mountains in a row but feel peace of mind". Through our friend we learned that he is the creator of this kind of painting. He told us that he will be exhibiting in Beijing and that he will be presenting his 100 dragons painting to Beijing for the Olympics. Sometimes it is a good thing that we don't understand what is being said, because when we do we have to try to sort the fiction from the reality. What a stunning vista. A beautiful pagoda reflected in the lake. The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is in the background. We were happy to be here early in the morning.
The lake in this park is fed by a spring. There is a custom that within the first few days of the lunar new year, the Naxi husband comes to this spring and draws water. He then goes home to cook dinner while his wife reclines and rests. He has done his duty for the year, the other 364 days are hers to manage. There were boys running around filling old peanut oil bottles with water. There was a small boy of maybe 6 walking with his grandmother. He was carrying the water bottle and her big black purse. So charming.
In the heart of the park was the Naxi Dongba Cultural Museum. Here the museum guide is recounting the creation story. "Long ago, having set up the earth and the sky, the nine brothers and the seven sisters of the Naxi people conferred with the wise men and the able men. they decided to build Junashiluo Mountain (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain) which could prop up the sky and guard the earth. Thereafter the Naxi people told the story that human beings and nature are brothers and that the Naxi, Bai, and Tibetian people are originated from one ancestor". If you look to the right of the guides head you can see the two people with the three sons. This is who survived the great flood. Each of the sons are the forefathers of the Naxi, Bai and Tibetian people. The story is written in the Dongba language.

The Naxi totem is a frog. Frogs reproduce easily and cover the earth. Many carvings depict a frog in the center and the 5 elements radiating from it (earth, water, fire, metal, and wood) with the 12 zodiacs surrounding this. Now it is lunch time and most of the people want to try the local delicacies. The guide said that they usually don't serve these. First Tom is holding the deliciously crisp dragonfly in his mouth so carefully.
Now to try the rather squishy bamboo worm. Yummy. Tom preferred the worms. They were warm. After a yummy lunch of vegetables, meat, and local treat, we head back to LiJiang for some shopping and general roaming of the old town. We saw this lovely vista of the Jade Dragon Snow mountain.

We pass by one of the few remaining statues of Mao in China. The creators were meticulous about the sizing. the statue is 7.1 meter (1971 was the founding year of the communist party), the box he is standing on is 5.16 meters (can't remember this significance perhaps May 16), and the total height arrives at 12.26 meters (the birthday of Chairman Mao). I understand that all statues were different from each other but that all are as carefully designed.

We went to one of the many tea houses in LiJiang for a tea ceremony. We all sat around the big table and tasted many different years of Pu'er tea. The longer the tea sits the milder it becomes. There are many factors that determine quality. Tom said that it is just like wine in this regard. The best leaves come from the top of the tree and are the youngest. The best way to ferment the tea is naturally and not in a factory with chemicals. Lastly, is the length of time that the tea is allowed to ferment. It is packed into biscuit shapes about the size of a luncheon plate and maybe an inch thick at the center. It is then wrapped in paper. It was originally packed that way to aid in shipping.

We had a wonderful lady in our group who is very interested in Pu'er tea and she asked intelligent questions and translated the answers to us. Without her help we would have learned a whole lot less or just gotten stories about the teas and her family. With her, this was a valuable learning experience and good tea to boot.

We tasted 5 year old tea as an introduction. It was fine and it gave us a point of comparison. Next we tasted an 8 year old tea that was smooth. The hostess told us that this tea would sell for 800 to 900 yuan in Kunming (probably more in Beijing or Hong Kong). Here in LiJiang at her shop which sells the tea from her 300 year old family business she would sell it for 360 yuan ($50 USD). We figured that a biscuit of tea would last for a year. We compared this tea to another 8 year old that was comprised of younger leaves (400 yuan); a slight improvement in smoothness.

We moved onto a 15 year old tea that was formed into a brick for transportation. We questioned our hostess about this and she said this is common but not as much as the biscuit shape. Some of us liked the smokey taste of this tea, especially those who like smokey tasting scotch ( the caramel color of the tea reminds us of good scotch). Others preferred the 8 year old because it was not smokey and smooth.

Our hostess had teased us from the beginning with a rare tea that she has. It was picked in 1975. It has the highest level of quality (7) and there were only 28 biscuits produced. We asked to taste this along side the better quality 8 year old for a good comparison. Our hostess warned us about this saying this is very unusual and she knew we would prefer the older tea. She was right of course. She had a few 1975 biscuits left in her shop and the remaining 14 are in Hong Kong. The price of this tea was 2800 yuan. We decided that at a us dollar a day it is still way cheaper than starbucks and you can get 15 cups of tea from this amount. A young man who was with us wondered aloud if there was tea from his birth year of 1976. HA! I must say that several biscuits of this old, yummy stuff was hand carried home on the plane by several people (yes, including me).

we wandered around the town. It was a very busy town with everyone enjoying the New Year. There were alot of folks just going about their daily business like this man bringing home vegetables and a live chicken.

Yunnan Xishuangbanna Day 4 elephant valley

It is afternoon. Lunch was wonderful, the local beer good. We are visiting the Wild Elephant Valley to talk a walk and hopefully run into some wild elephants. Here is how it went:

We stood in line for the cable car ride and this was a picture of what we might see. I took a photo just in case.

The cable car ride was 30 minutes of going down into the valley of a rainforest and then up to the top of a mountain. We were way above the tall, tall trees. We looked with our eyes and with the telephoto lens of the camera for elephants. We heard a symphony of peeper frogs along the stream in the valley. No elephants yet....

We came to the top of the mountain and the end of the cable ride. Now we will walk back through the valley on a paved path. We came across many signs similar to this one. We saw many elephant paths and leavings and footprints in the mud..but no elephants yet...

We came to a camping area. One can rent a room in the trees. This area was along the stream and near a muddy area that had lots of elephant tracks. No elephants in yet...

It took us an hour to walk back to the gate of the park. We are nearing the end now..and no Elephants yet. Tom is hoping and hoping.

A group of 3 ahead of us had a small family of elephants walk right across the path in front of them and off through the woods. They had pictures to prove it. We were glad someone saw the elephants.

Yunnan Xishuangbanna Day 4 Man Hai village

It is still morning and we have one more place to stop. This is a village called Man Hai. We hope to visit some local homes here. Our group chose to visit a local rural village over a tourist village. It was well worth it.

This is a typical home. It is built on stilts to keep the wild animals at bay in olden times. Once it hit dusk, everyone would go in and stay in. There were tigers in this area. Newer homes are being built out of concrete.

This man lives in the house. He is making a triangular basket to carry chickens in. He has a few hanging under the rafters with chickens in them. He is 88 years old.

This is his wife. She had a hard time getting up due to knee problems. She was very congenial. She is 90 years old.

These are the couples pigs. They were cute as buttons. The one looking at me is a tad skinny.

We were invited into another home. There was a big fire going outside with a wok on it and something cooking steadily with a lid covering half of the contents. There were animal bones in a pile on the ground. The wok held animal skins. The lid held them under the water.

This is outside of the steps to the doorway. It is level with the floor. It is a coffin ready for use. There is no bottom in it yet. It is nice to be prepared. We didn't see anyone at this house that looked old enough to be thinking about death.

This is the village temple. It is well kept.

This is a picture of a man walking by the temple wall looking into the temple grounds. He has a hoe over his shoulder.

We passed these children on our way into the village. They were laughing and dancing then and here they are really putting a show on for us as we leave. Their mothers were sitting at a table out of doors preparing vegetables.