Portrait of an LBX

In contrast to the women, we have yet to see the men in Yunnan wearing traditional or colorful outfits. Perhaps that's only for the tourist zones.

Two Miao (苗族) women walk through the Ameng Wednesday market. Check out those leg wrappings!

Watermelon farmers on the eastern coast of Hainan load their harvest onto a truck to be shipped to markets in the mainland. The family's fields are comprised of 40 mu (畝, 6.6 acres). They were planted with seedless watermelon back in October, which the family is now selling at 1.6 yuan per half kilogram (斤), a decent price, we were told.

We caught a glimpse of this beach at Dahua Corner (大花角) from on top of a hill on our ride and had to check it out and have a swim. It ended up being the perfect camping spot, too. Thanks to the Gorillapod for making shots of all three of us possible!

A man works in the fields outside of Zhongteng Village (钟腾村) in Fujian. Zhongteng has three tulou (土楼) -- large, castle-like, earthen structures housing dozens of families around an inner courtyard. The one on the left is called Facing the Sun Building (朝阳楼) and the one on the right Horizontal Building (水平楼). A third, not pictured, sits further to the right. Generally, only the poorest residents of a village live in the tulou as everyone moves out as soon as their children off working in China's cities send home enough money for them to build "Western" houses (read: cement and brick boxes).

I'm not vigilant enough to be able to tell if this teen is Kazakh or Kyrgyz -- both seem to be prominent in the Lake Karakul region of Xinjiang in China's far northwest on the road to Pakistan. Regardless of their ethnic makeup, the locals at Lake Karakul are all extremely aggressive in trying to get money out of tourists, demanding money to look at the lake, camp in the area, stay in a yurt, and pretty much anything else you could possibly do. This particular young man was about to try to push a camel ride on us. The vibrant blue of Lake Karakul is in the background.

Yangshuo, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region

I took this picture in Henan, a generally bare and dusty place that is one of China's poorer provinces. What is immediately surprising about this family is that it has three children, despite China's One Child Policy. In rural areas, I believe the policy permits you to have a second child if the first is a girl, but it looks like all three of these little hedgehogs are boys. It's possible they are from different families. What is not surprising is that they are being cared for by an older woman. The garden in my own apartment complex in Beijing is filled with little babies running around with crotchless pants, each with a middle-aged "ayi," or auntie, taking care of him or her. Here most of the ayis are hired and paid for their work. In the countryside, they are just an older member of the extended family who can care for the children while the parents labor away in the parched fields of Henan.