In Which the Same Sketchy Plan Doesn’t Work Twice: Hiking in the Rice Terraces of Yuanyang, Part 2
Pugao is known for its beauty at sunrise. The town overlooks an eastward-facing valley which is covered in thousands rice terraces, flooded this time of year. They should reflect the pink and orange of the sky.
We wake up in time to see the sunrise, but the weather has changed. We’re in a cloud; visibility goes to about four terraces. Everything is white.
This story is the continuation of a series that begins here.
We shrug it off. There’s a long day of hiking ahead, so after a few bananas and some plain bread for breakfast, we’re off down the road.
All morning, the weather fluctuates as though someone is fiddling with the dial for rain. I wear a T-shirt and carry an umbrella, which I open and close again and again throughout the morning.
I learned the T-shirt/umbrella trick in Taiwan: it’s optimal in humid climates. It serves me well through the hours as we hike up a road, through a village, across a guessed-at shortcut which fortunately pans out as an off-map trail past a pagoda and a blueberry farm.
It starts raining more after noon, and I put on long sleeves and a raincoat while Ert and Rick retreat from another attempted shortcut.
It rains steadily into the afternoon. We arrive in a town and have a hot, late lunch of bok choy, pork, tofu, and banana flower.
It’s day two of hiking, and we’re soaked, but we have a long while yet before our hotel in Longshuba. We catch a taxi to our next trailhead and set off again.
It’s still beautiful: Hani women in embroidered blue clothes carry heavy things on their backs, shirts protected by pieces of plastic burlap against the brick piles, stick bundles, baskets of vegetables, bags of cement they carry by way of a wide forehead strap.
It’s hard to resent the weight of our Osprey packs when barefoot old women are passing us carrying heavier loads.
We don’t take pictures after a while, because things don’t seem strange. Villages have mud houses with thatched roofs, water buffalo graze in fields, the rain falls.
Ert’s routes, traced solely from satellite imagery, are implausibly good. We track each left and right bend of the trail. We gauge distances down roads and know to turn off onto narrow footpaths which- sure enough- appear before us.
We even, incredibly, find a path he has marked up an overgrown gully. I don’t know how he found this path from satellite. I dub it “Rainpants Trail”, because by the time we brush against every soaked plant, all of us are soaked at least from the hips down.
The route maps are incredibly well matched to what we see on the ground. Until, suddenly, they aren’t. A road appears that we don’t expect, and a farmer herding ducks has to tell us where to backtrack and turn.
We get back on track, arriving in a village just as more ducks are being herded home for the end of the day. We just have a couple more maps of potentially sketchy trails before a paved road from Panlong Jai takes us the last mile to Longshuba, dinner, and sleep. We’re looking forward to hot showers, hoping they have them.
We walk out of town on a distinct path, affirmed as the correct direction by passing villagers. We pass a hot pepper farm and Ert and I nibble, lips flaming spicy from just the tip of a fresh-picked pod.
The trail leads to a river with no bridge. On the other side is a narrow, steep track, so we cross. It’s fairly shallow, and our feet are already wet. They get cleaner in the river.
The steep track takes us up to a field of rice paddies.
With all the farmers and buffalo walking on the paddies, they seem stable, like a web of paths. But with a pack in the rain, they aren’t so appealing a prospect. The gray mud is clay-based and slippery. The edges cave a little as you walk, and they get mushier with increased traffic. They’re thin, and the rice paddies are muddy pools to either side, one side much lower than the other. By the time our fourth person passes over, it’s a feat to stay upright.
We make a dubious path across the terrace to a chicken coop, where we find a tiny trail. We follow it up, guessing at the path and checking compasses for an easterly trend. We cross a cornfield, and the path ends at a river.
Another fording. It’s raining still, so we don’t see sunset, but the late hour presses a sense of urgency upon us.
There’s no trail on the other side of the river, but there’s nothing for it. I scramble up the hillside, grabbing handfuls of grass to pull up, and reach another set of terraces, these drained for corn. I’m leading as we cross the cornfield, scouting ahead for anything path-like.
I’m so relieved when I find a path that I don’t even check its direction with my compass. In the fading light, we surge uphill.
The trail goes into woods, out past terraces, into deep woods, but mostly up. We rush, hoping desperately to reach Panlong Jai and a paved road before darkness falls.
The trail is very clear, but it’s slippery and steep. After a few slips in the mud, I dig out my headlamp for Eileen. We keep climbing, and I hear the sound of a car in the distance. Any minute now, I think.
Finally, the trail opens out at the top of the hill. We stumble out, jelly-legged, into the last of the light, and look up across another stretch of pathless rice paddies to a single stone building.
We climb the terrace to the building and call out:
“Hello? Ni hao?”
No one answers.
We circle around the building and see that it’s abandoned, overgrown inside, missing a wall, devoid of a roof.
We’re standing in the center of a field of rice paddies, soaked through, rain still falling, and it’s now undeniably night.
To be continued…
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