Lost in the Rain: Hiking in the Rice Terraces of Yuanyang, Part 3
We’re standing in the center of a field of rice paddies, soaked through, rain still falling, and it’s now undeniably night…
(Continued from previous post)
We set our packs on the damp earth and dig out our headlamps. There’s no shelter, and no obvious direction. It has been raining for hours — and though I usually carry gear, we packed light for this leg of the trip. I don’t have a tent, a sleeping bag, or even really warm clothes. Same goes for all of us, and we haven’t eaten since lunchtime. At least we have flashlights.
In our little pools of light, we stand hunch-shouldered to assess our options.
This story is the continuation of a series that begins here.
The last time we knew exactly where we were was over an hour previous, at the bottom of a slippery mud trail. Now, in a pressing-forward denial of our cluelessness, we’ve climbed it to its unwelcoming end.
Nobody remembers any promising trails. We haven’t seen any people. The last building we saw was a rickety chicken coop, all the way back down the hill — and it was fully occupied.
In general, we’ve been using a compass to check our direction, but in our tired dogged climb, I think we’ve forgotten. Or at any rate, nobody can give our heading with any confidence. Rick has a hunch we’ve come a long way south.
Lacking in options and loath to pick our way through rice paddies, we decide to take the trail back down to any fork that heads north and east. Tired but determined, we re-shoulder our packs and begin to walk.
We have reservations for tonight in Panlong Jai, beds in a guesthouse. We haven’t said it out loud, but odds for reaching the place seem slim. I’m running through shelter options in my head. I’m trying to remember if the chicken coop at the bottom of the hill has a door or roof. Scanning with my headlight beam, I check the foliage for banana leaves, wide and flat, but there are none. We have two umbrellas, four pack covers, a spare poncho, and five people. Is there any way to turn that into a bivouac? These are desperate thoughts, not real plans. I focus on my footing.
The longer it rains, the muddier the trail. The ascent was hard and slippery, but the descent is harder. Picking my way down the runnel, I count blessings in my head. We’re wet but not cold. No dinner, but lunch was big and late. Most importantly, despite challenging trail conditions, nobody has gotten injured.
The first fork leads north, so we take it, carefully slipping down the rocky path into a forest.
Our steep, dark path leads past a tiny stone building, about the size to fit a water buffalo snugly. There are so many spiders on the walls that I notice them even by headlight beam. No one responds to our “Ni hao” calls, so we assume there aren’t any people. We pass it to emerge again on the edge of a rice paddy.
Suddenly, in the distance, I see a light. It glows golden, like a distant window, then dims.
I call back to the group, and they come to see– but the light has dimmed. We’re all tired. The light is gone and nobody else is certain they saw it, even after we turned our headlamps off.
But our best path is in the direction of the light, so we continue onto the edge of a particularly cliff-like rice terrace. I edge out onto it, then retreat.
A couple of terraces above, there’s a cornfield– not great, but not steeping in mud. We choose this way and attempt to continue, breaking spiderwebs on rotting corn stalks as we push through. But our trail is gone. There’s no clear way to go. We back off the terraces, returning to the woods edge with the little spider-covered stone building.
We begin to look at it appraisingly. The door is padlocked. There are holes for windows, about the size of a couple of stacked bricks: not really big enough to fit both my face and a flashlight.
I try to look in anyway, and assess a low probability that there are live animals inside. Rick finds a curved tool and begins to remove the iron latch from the doorframe.
The latch pops out easily, and Rick swings open the door. No animals inside.
The roof looks solid, we’re tired and wet, and we need to stop blundering around before we hurt ourselves in the dark. We make a hesitant collective call: this is home for tonight.
To be continued…
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