regarding comments

Of course, it is possible for me access www.blogger.com to compose and upload postings to this blog, but I cannot view my blog through normal channels. China blocks the url that blogger blogs use, blogspot.com

Interestingly enough, they don't block yahoo blogs, msn blogs and many others. It seems that people who use blogger.com are of a different breed (but we knew that, right?).

Being moderatly web savy (barely), I found out I can access my site and many others (all others, in fact) by using a proxy server.

One can go to www.livreproxy.com or www.anonymouse.org, key in any website address, and surf anonymously through a server in the states. Amazing!

To get to the point, though these are nice services, they have one problem. For some reason, I can view my comments but not post any. Go figure.

I'm sorry that your comments are unanswered. It's not because I don't like you. Actually, I quite like you.

Thanks.

it's like this.

Just ONE more picture of tea, ok? DaDuGuan grows a lot of tea... this view well made up for rough day of climbing.

This storm had us spend about half an hour under a nervous woman's shop awning. She didn't know what to make of us. After the third cookie purchase though, the ice was broken. Score one more for successful cultural exchanges!

Pictures... pictures of people taking pictures... are the most wonderful pictures in the world.

Definitive proof that I am in China. This is DongMen (the eastern gate) in JianShui. Even the locals are impressed. The apprentice of the designer of this gate is said to have designed and built TainAnMen in BeiJing 20 years after DongMen was built. As not to surpass this teacher, TianAnMen is one floor shorter. Take that BeiJing!

Looking down from the gate. Local folks relaxing over the sweet sounds of the ErHu.

Backroads in ShiPing. All of these southern cities still have raucous old districts full of markets and mayhem.

Local cruisers. Cushy. No wonder the old men aren't jealous of our rides.

Pu'er Pilgrimage

With directions from a tea store owner in MengHai, we headed into the hills to find the old tea fields. The directions were sketchy not only because they involved unmarked mountian roads that began 20 km out of town, but also because they were described in Chinese sometime past midnight over our fifth pot of pu'er.

We did not set off early the next morning. Those lacking experience be warned: a pu'er hangover can be tough to deal with. It's is best cured with a lot of water and another strong cup of tea.

After climbing to an elevation of around 1700 meters on a rough road, getting lost in an old village, avoiding a local guide, and finally getting more much needed directions, we finally got onto some nice dirt tracks that lead into the fields. That's a stunted tea tree on the left side of the road.

A look back at the hills and some smaller tea trees on the left.

This is one of the oldest tea farmers in the area. Note the look of concentration as he busily tends to his trees.

This tree is said to be 700 or 800 years old.

As I understand it, tea actually originated in this area. Probably not in this field or anything, but this county has apparently been producing tea for thousands of years.

Old trees = big tea leaves.

We bought some "big tree tea" in town that we occasionaly mix in with the morning pot of Pu'er.

Tea in the initial stages of fermentation.

That's about all I've got concerning tea.

Now we are in JianShui, a city with a great old section of town. Tonight we are heading to a local tea house we scoped out last night for some song and dance, and probably some gong fu, all of course over tea.

I like tea.

MaMa knows best

We find ourselves in JingHong again after a three day excursion in search of fine Puer tea and the ancient tea trees in the mountains west of here. More about that soon.

It's rice planting season, and everyone is out in the fields working hard. These plots contain rice seedlings which will soon be harvested and transfered into the rice paddies by hand. The color might not look real, but it was late in the day and the fields looked stunning.

Riding through the country side we've passed through some amazing Dai villages. The beauty of riding is that you can just stop to take a break or a walk anytime. The Dai share there roots with the people of Thailand and Laos. The arcitecture is similiar to some of the traditional houses in northern Thailand, though they use a lot more brick here. As you can see, it's still quite tropical down here.

This is impressive (though maybe only to me and Tom). With a gravel pit above, this hand built system graded and temporarly stored gravel to load into trucks. This is the kind of technology that I'm sure Canada hasn't seen since the old coal mines in the early 1900's. Spectactular.

What a beauty! This is a simple truck that all the farmers use around here.

For risk of giving you all a distorted picture of what southern China looks like, here's a picture of an urban area encroaching on the country side. It's ugly, but the trash you see at the bottom of this picture is actually sorted for recycling. See the group of kids heading to school on the path between the rice paddies?

And finally, here is a picture of me doing the tourist pose with reclining Buddah.

We stayed in a kind of homestay/boarding house (lushe) in MengHai, and the owner's mothering instincts soon dominated our relationship with her. Our first mainland MaMa was very concerned about our apparent lack of concern for our own safety. It was soon decided that she would take us to a local temple to be blessed and given talismans - blessed objects that confer safety on the wearer. After a walk across town we came to this temple, but unfortunatly the guy wasn't around. MaMa implored us to wait around until the afternoon for our blessing, but we decided that we needed to head out of town and look for those tea trees.

I crashed my bike four hours later on a mountain road. I guess MaMa knows best.