Portrait of an LBX

So apparently there's a lot of rice planting going on right now.

A woman transplants rice plants into a flooded rice paddy on a misty day in Guangxi.

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.

The fortress homes (碉楼 diaolou) of Kaiping, Guangdong province, turned out to be rather a disappointment. Lacking the unexpectedly useful books on Chinese ancient towns (古镇) that we picked up on a whim in the Sanfo (三夫) in Shanghai for Jiangxi and Fujian provinces, we picked a town where we knew we would find diaolou based on our Internet research. Unfortunately, that meant it was a tourist spot, and therefore charged an entrance fee of 50 yuan ($7.32) per person -- double the cost of our two hotel rooms at the only hotel in town. To our Western readers, this may not seem like a high price to pay to see a historical site that is properly restored. But I think you have to keep in mind that this basically excludes something like 95% of the population from learning about the country's culture and history. In the "socialist paradise" that is China, I would hope that some day they will find a model that will allow cultural and historical relics to be well preserved while affording anyone who wants to enjoy them the ability to do so. Fortunately, we saw a few of the buildings "in the wild" on our way into town in the rain, because we turned around and left for our next destination when we were presented with a ticket booth. This is one we saw on the way into town. The buildings were constructed by returning overseas Chinese in the Qing Dynasty, reaching their peak in the 1920s and '30s. They served the dual purpose of housing a family unit and as defense against warlords and bandits. Today, they are crumbling to dust, except those with exorbitant entrance fees.

Evan crests a hill in the Fujian mountains.

A woman carries a load of firewood down a treacherous slope in two bamboo baskets hung from a bamboo pole across her back. While the U.N. says that China has brought more people out of poverty in the past forty years than in any other country in history, many among China's massive rural population of some 800 million are still struggling to survive.