Hiking in the Longji Rice Terraces
A rooster is crowing. Before I open my eyes, I can hear the steady fall of rain and smell the fresh pine of the walls. Rolling over in the soft, fluffy bed, I peek out through the curtains: light but not dawn, opaque with mist.
We’re hiking a loop today, just daypacks through the terraces to see the many views. It’s early when we set out. Coal smoke curls from beneath hot water tanks. A couple of dogs poke out from alleys, and a white one with a fluffy tail leads us for a while, pausing to look back whenever we fall behind.
The Longji rice terraces are a strange mix of touristy and not. The trails are narrow and muddy, often hard to find, but the villages are composed primarily of multistory fancy hotels. There are plenty of Chinese tourists out on the trails with us, and little snack and gewgaw stalls to serve the demand.
We think we’ve stumbled on such a tourist service when we turn the corner to see a group of women in traditional Yao costume: silver headdresses that jangle, bright-colored pleated skirts.
“You should pay them to get a picture,” Jia goads. It is a good shot: beautiful dresses on the edge of a terrace, view all the way down the valley. But as we approach, it becomes clear that these ladies are tourists too. They’re laughing and posing when they notice us coming along the trail– and then they want me in the picture too. This is a Thing: a westerner in your picture is some kind of coup. So I pose gamely while Jia laughs and snaps pictures of the whole scene.
Down the hill, in more worn traditional clothing, an old lady is weaving in a pavilion. She is selling little cloth things: bags, scarves. Jia, who has all sorts of good ideas for me, negotiates the price for the woman to let me try her loom. I don’t want things, but this cloth is beautiful.
The woman unstraps herself and ushers me into the seat. The main strap of the backstrap is a leather sole. This goes around my back and ties to two ends of a bamboo pole which holds the warp threads such that as I lean back, they become taut.
At her instruction, I thread a long shaft of bamboo across the threads– over/under, but not precisely. She has me pull a loop with my foot to shift the combs, pull the shaft from the threads, pull the bobbin through, tamp it into place with the smooth blade of a curve-handled wooden implement.
She won’t let me try anything more complicated than stripes (already in my skill set), but it is neat to get a feel for this loom style: portable because the back strap takes up much of the need for a big frame.
We reach the lowest part of our loop at Dazhai town– near where the bus dropped us off yesterday. Gondolas (direct translation: lazy cars) glide from the parking lot to the terraces’ faraway peaks, the whole distance of this valley called the Dragon’s Spine.
We note our error in trail choice from yesterday, then proceed to accidentally get off trail again somewhere else. But we end up on a worker trail in the paddies.
There are a lot of graves embedded in this hillside; the ancestors have a stunning view. Some of the graves still smell of gunpowder from firecracker tributes. A little further on, two men have set fire to a stack of oversized printed banknotes on the trail in front of another grave.
The rice plants themselves are not pretty in this season. It’s just-planted plugs or winter crops of daikon and rapeseed bolting where they haven’t been removed yet. But on the whole, the paddies still reflect the sunlight. The whole valley is terraced, a stunning feat that took some 300 years.
We climb past the prescribed route and reach the forest in its higher tier of clouds.
Unfurling purple ferns line the muddy forest path, and flat-needle fir debris covers the forest floor. We speculate that this wilder path might exist for the sake of forage– we ate fiddleheads with bamboo shoots for dinner last night.
It’s thick woods, stony ground. Not easy land to till. I imagine that the whole valley was once this type of forest– no wonder cultivation took hundreds of years.
Finally, we’re back out on the rice terraces near Tiantou. We close the loop by swishing our muddy feet in the puddles outside our hotel’s door.
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