A few hours outside of Guilin City is a region with mountains, rivers, and terraced rice fields. I thought I had gotten used to terraced fields during my time in Tengchong, but these were something else entirely. I kept being reminded of a caption I saw in a CNN description of the most beautiful places in China: "Here's an idea. Let's make farming even more difficult."
They are called the Longji Rice Terraces, Longji meaning dragon back. Supposedly the terraces look like dragon scales and the mountains form the dragon's spine. The terraces are thought to have been mostly built 650 years ago.
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| Looking down at the valley, including the small village where we stayed. |
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| The view from the hostel. |
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It was extremely foggy for most of the time that we were there,
but when the fog lifted for a few minutes the views were all the more striking. |
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The final ascent to our hostel (second from the right). It was quite a hike, especially with luggage.
(There are local ladies who carry luggage up for visitors, but we carried ours.) |
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This was not peak season for visitors. The peaks are in the fall when the rice turns yellow and early spring when they flood
the terraces but haven't planted. Still, you can get a sense for what the latter might look like here as the rice is still young. |
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| Thick fog...and then... |
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| A little while later. |
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| Wenhuan made a little cairn in the middle of the stream, something he said is done a lot in Tibet. It reminded me of Iceland. |
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| Most things are carried in baskets on people's backs, but there are also a few horses around. |
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| We had a rice dish and a chicken dish both baked in bamboo like this. |
I am awed by the terraces, especially when I think that they were built without mechanical help and probably very little animal power either.
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