Workers, who earn wages of 50 yuan ($7.32) per day, carry metal cages down an under-construction highway outside of Changning (昌寧縣城), Yunnan. The cages will be filled with rocks and placed along the side of the river below to keep the bank from eroding. In this part of the country, where there is so little industry (thankfully for us), these men are happy to have any work at all. For comparison, we met a peasant family taking a cartload of cabbages to market who expected to gross 60 yuan ($8.79) for the load, and they don't sell a cartload of cabbages five days a week.

A snoozy street in the Fengqing old town, by Andy

By Andy

2010/05/29 – 78 km

We start the morning with a search through town for the post office so we can send the tea we bought the previous day to a friend in Shanghai. During our search, we find that Fengqing actually has an old section of town. By old, I mean it looks Communist-era, with most things appearing to be built in the 1950s when the real Communists were around. With the exception of a few white tile buildings (why they built everything to look like a bathroom in the ‘90s is beyond me), everything is built in blocky, imposing, Soviet style).

What’s striking though is how alive the area seems compared to the new section of town where we stayed the night before. The streets are narrow, a single lane in each direction, and everyone is out and about. Street vendors peddle snacks, goldfish, bamboo brooms and anything else someone might be interested in purchasing on the cheap.

There’s even a big mosque, at which we take a quick peak on our way back to the main road. It is one of the unfortunate, white-tile monstrosities of the 90s, complete with cheap, blue, reflective glass windows. Unfortunately, there’s no one around from whom to learn any of the history, so we head back out to the main road and begin climbing.

The road, paved and in good condition once we get out of town, takes us straight up the mountain to the northwest. Below and to our right is the still under-construction highway that will soon make our road obsolete. On it, the occasional car or motorbike climbs over the piles of dirt that have been set up to keep vehicles off, a fairly ubiquitous but ineffective way of closing off roads in this country. Above, our road’s numerous switchbacks snake up the mountain, and the bridges and overpasses for the new highway, held up by tall, concrete columns, cling to the mountain face.

It’s nearly noon by the time we’re crawling up those switchbacks, and just as I’m considering a break to munch on some trail mix, we spot a small tea factory and stop to have a look.

Mr. Li finishes eating lunch before offering the rest to us, by Andy

Inside, the smell of drying tea leaves surrounds us, mixed with a hint of coal and wood smoke. A man in a blue jumper is loading rolled, green tea leaves onto a machine that appears to be wood-fired.

“Hi there! What’s that machine do?” Evan asks.

“It’s the dryer,” the man responds, loading another batch of the rolled leaves on.

The man says we’re free to poke around the factory, and tells us his two coworkers are down below eating lunch.

We walk down a short set of stairs into another room where two machines are rolling up fresh leaves, which are strewn in piles on the dirty floor. Down another flight of stairs we find two more men in blue jumpers eating lunch at a small table in a kitchen-like space.

“Come, sit down,” beckons Mr. Li, a man in his mid-forties with a crew cut, high cheekbones and a vein pulsing on his cheek. We sit down on tiny little stools, and they tell us they’re just finishing up and invite us to finish the rest of their food, which we’re all too happy to do. The other man, surnamed Luo, short, skinny and with slightly greasy hair brushed straight down over his forehead, stands up and returns with a cup each of green tea and black tea for us to try, after which they both return to work.

Mr. Luo sticks rolled leaves into a machine that shakes the crap out of them, by Andy

The green tea is a bit too tannic and bitter for our tastes, but the red is soft and sweet, with a texture almost like milk.

As we eat, the crew-cut Mr. Li returns to chat.

“Where did you learn to make tea?” Evan asks.

“Everyone in a tea village knows something about tea,” Mr. Li responds. “Everyone knows how to grow and harvest tea, most people know how to drink and enjoy tea and quite a few know how to make it.”

Mr. Luo returns and Evan asks who’s the boss in the factory.

“I’ve never even seen the boss,” Mr. Luo chuckles. “He’s in Kunming and just has the factory as an investment.” Knowing how hard it is for all these Western companies like Apple or Nike or anybody else to keep things in order at their Chinese factories and avoid getting cheated, this strikes me as a little crazy.

Before we leave, we ask if we can buy some of the red tea.

“You’ll have to go to the city below for that,” Mr. Li says, “but we’ve got some here for ourselves that I can give you. Hold on.”

A few moments later he’s striding back with a large, zip-lock bag of dark tea leaves, insisting that we take the whole thing. We offer profuse thanks, split the tea into two bags at our bikes, and continue up the mountain.

A man carries a cage to be filled with rocks and used to hold back the river on the under-construction highway into Fengqing, by Andy

We crest the mountain pass at 2,100 meters, which is a new record high for the trip. As we begin our descent, we pass the welcome sight of a blue sig reading “Continuous downhill next 18 kilometers.” I get such conflicting feelings abnout these signs. They always come at a point when I’m dying to do anything but go uphill any longer, but I can never help but think about what a hole we’re going to have to climb out of when we slide into the valley below.

This is certainly no exception. We descend for over 20 km (wait, Chinese signs aren’t accurate?) on gentle turns for which we don’t have to break (my favorite!) into a wide valley covered with green, reflective rice paddies, and then we’re climbing again. We climb for 16 km and gain back most of the altitude we just lost!

The final 30 km is rolling hills, 15 km of which is under construction, but we manage to get in, eat a small second dinner and find a hotel, all before dark.