Portrait of an LBX

During my two rides through Yuanyang I have only been fortunate enough to see the areas directly adjacent to the S214 provincial road. There are many other beautiful vistas, but I think Tiger Mouth (老虎嘴) is certainly one of the most impressive! So impressive, in fact, that I had to make an extra-large version of this HDR shot of the valley to show all the detail! Click the photo to see it. The white dots are the tiny huts in which the farmers live during the planting and harvest seasons.

A brief valley respite while moving through the grueling mountains in the center of Hainan a few weeks ago.

Our restaurant at the end of our second day of riding on Hainan offered a beautiful sunset view of local workers finishing up their time in the fields. The short name for Hainan and the character seen on the province's license plates is qiong (瓊), or high-quality, beautiful jade. You can see where the name comes from.

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.

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).

A man stands in the entrance to a tulou (土楼) in Xiazhai, Fujian. Tulou are large, almost castle-like structures with a thick, circular, earthen wall around the outside and homes around the inside and a courtyard and well in the middle. The unique structures serve as both a means of defense in rough times and as a place to keep a large family together in one place. The tulou in some areas have been recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Those have been restored and of course have a hefty entrance charge slapped on them. We've been told the one we considered going to costs 120 yuan ($18) to get into.

An old woman in the Xiazhai, Fujian street market looks away from a conversation with a friend.

Pretty much all the cigarettes I saw people smoking (and there were of course tons) in Xiazhai (霞寨), Fujian were hand-rolled. We haven't traveled very far lately due to visa issues and sickness. I promise we'll be getting the blog back up to date over the next few days!

A little boy spends the day with his grandmother as she bundles up stalks in a dry rice paddy in Jingshan, Zhejiang.

We have ventured into the hills of Zhejiang, which are truly the most beautiful place we have discovered thus far. The area we are traveling through, within and surrounding the country of Anji (安吉), is known for its bamboo and white tea, and as we expected, the mountains are providing us with a picturesque and serene respite from the chaos of development in the valley. We were surrounded today by a sea of bamboo, undulating like waves up and down the green hills, broken only by the occasional tea farm etched into the side of the slope. This morning, we came across a crew of about five workers making bamboo brooms by the side of the road. They take bamboo branches of equal length and bind them together, then dry them over a fire, the smoke of which is reminiscent of incense burned at a Buddhist temple. After drying the bundles, each is put through a strange machine of whirring metal bars, which strips off the weakest of the bamboo leaves. Affix a handle, and you've got yourself a Chinese-style broom, which is quite unlike those of the West.