Yuanyang, Yunnan, China - August 2024
On that August morning, we woke up to a surprise: our 10am flight to Yunnan had been canceled. After a five-minute panic, with the help of the girls at the reception desk and their Chinese apps, we managed to find a solution. And so, with only a few (12) hours delay, we arrived at our destination.
The original plan was to take the only bus of the day from Kunming to go south, but with the impossibility of online booking (with buses, that's how it is in China), we took a driver and, after a 5-hour drive, at 1am, we arrived. We knew that reaching this place would not be easy, but it was a destination that could not be skipped.
Hao Li, our driver, spoke no English, but with the magic of translator technology, we managed to learn a little more about him and his life. This encounter enriched our trip even more.
(He drove us to our room to check that everything was OK and that we were all right).
It was 7.30 a.m. when, still a little worn out from the previous day's adventure, I headed for the terrace of our room, thinking of the images fixed in my mind seen and reviewed while planning our trip. The landscape in front of me is unbelievable: everything is completely covered in fog and low clouds, you can hardly see anything.
But suddenly, from the frothy white of the clouds, we catch a glimpse of that bright green that would accompany us for the next three days.
The rice terraces in Yuanyang County (元阳) are the largest in the world (almost 13,000 hectares), but still, fortunately, little known outside China. They were built by the Hani ethnic group from the Tibetan plateau, who settled in this area and who built these rice fields over the centuries. A population that lives mainly on agriculture, capable of cultivating every single piece of arable land, even those that are not easily accessible.
Each person every day has plenty of activities to do, and not only related to cultivation, but also in the fields of animal husbandry, weaving and construction. These terraces, in fact, are an astonishing man-made construction, gently following the slopes of the mountains. They reach up to 3,000 meters above sea level and exploit this difference in altitude, and thus a fairly significant temperature difference, to produce thousands of kilos of rice each year. They are a rare sight, which changes its appearance depending on the season. In winter, during the irrigation period, they are full of water and, like mirrors, reflect the colors of the sky and mountains.
They reach an altitude of up to 3,000 meters and take advantage of this difference in altitude, and thus a fairly significant temperature difference, to produce thousands of kilos of rice each year. They are a rare sight, which changes its appearance depending on the season. In winter, during the irrigation period, they are full of water and, like mirrors, reflect the colors of the sky and mountains. Many photographers often set up their tripods before the sun rises and stand by to take pictures that remain imprinted in the eyes of the beholder. We, on the other hand, admired them at the end of the western summer, when they are painted a bright green and yellow, almost ready for harvest. A completely different spectacle from the winter spectacle but one that gives, in any case, a lot of emotion.
Our days in this county were spent walking together with the ladies carrying traditional straw baskets on their shoulders, up and down the rice fields and the paved roads connecting the various villages, always with those endless green terraces as a backdrop. With various invincible techniques, we also managed to catch the various local buses, i.e. minivans whizzing from one side to the other, for only a few yuan, also having as traveling companions two very friendly free chickens singing along to local music from the radio. Days that will remain etched in our minds.
That's how we would like to remember our days in Yuanyang: as vivid as the wrinkled, somewhat toothless smile of a lady, who walked keeping watch over a fully cultivated terrace, and her joy-filled gaze exuding a contagious serenity.
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