Longji Rice Terraces

Took a spectacular trip up to the Longji Rice Terraces yesterday, probably the most amazing day of our trip.  It was about a 2 hour drive from Guilin and we had to make a couple of stops due to Andrew being car sick.  These terraces were not very well known until about 12 years ago when some European photographers discovered it.  The road up to the one side of the terraces is only 3 years old. The driver dropped us off on one side and we hiked to the other side where we had lunch and then did another short hike before the driver picked us up.

All the terraces are like one giant slow waterfall.  The mountain spring water is diverted to the different paddies, and the water from one paddy flows into another and so on.  The rice is kept in standing water until 1 week before you harvest it, and then they let it dry out.  The people of the villages harvest all the rice themselves with no migrant help.  They pick the rice by hand but use a machine to remove the husks of rice. The rice is stored in the husk until they are ready to use it, then they send it to a place that separates the rice from the husk. All the rice is stored in the attics of the buildings with ventilate to keep it dry.  The rice is only used to feed the locals and the tourists.  Each clump of rice grass makes about one small bowl of rice.  

It is cooler here, so they only have one harvest per year, whereas other places will have two harvests per year. They will grow other crops on the terraces from time to time to give the soil time to recover.  Tourism has suddenly become a big business here, so there is a lot of development going on to accommodate more visitors. 

The drive back was also an adventure.  It was a winding road back out of the mountains with no extra lanes for slow trucks, so there was this constant game of trying to pass the slow trucks.  We saw one car stuck in the "ditch" and another car upside down, probably due to someone's poor passing skills/timing.  Andrew did much better on the drive down, probably benefitted from a belly full of Longji rice.