Yao Ladies

I spent the day walking around the Long Ji rice terraces near Ping An. It was more like walking up and down the rice terraces -- there were no flat sections on the narrow stone paths. (My god it was painful, I feel like I spent 5 hours on the stair master.) The rice terraces were jaw dropping, an amazing thing to see. It's also an awesome feat of engineering to make rice fields out of sheer sides of mountains.

The weather wasn't very good, there was a light drizzle all day and the mists came in the early afternoon -- visibility was really bad so it was tough to take decent pics of the rice terraces. (That's my excuse, anyway.)

I had hiked about 1.5 hours west of Ping An when I ran into 4 women from the Yao minority tribe. They tried to sell me a bunch of handicrafts and trinkets, but I asked them if I could take their pics instead. I guess they're used to this, because they immediately dropped their baskets and started to unbraid their long black hair. The Yao women let their hair grow down to their feet, cut it, but keep the hair to wind and weave around their heads.

I took a few pics, not too many because I felt really weird about it... It seems like such an intimate act, to unbraid a lifetime's worth of one's hair, and to do it front of a total stranger to earn tips seems, well, kind of like, um, a Yao version of the strip show.

Two of the Yao ladies insisted that I go back to their village and eat at their house. So I said ok, and walked another hour to Zhong Liu. The entire hike was over rocky paths made slippery by rain and prodigious amounts of oddly shaped donkey shit. I couldn't keep up with the two ladies, me in my hiking boots and them in their canvas sneakers. They do this 4-hour trek from their village to Ping An every day (there and back), over these unforgiving hills, to sell handicrafts or find work as tour guides.

My hosts live in a 3-story wooden house; there's electricity but no running water or heating, so there were lots of buckets around with water for washing and a small fire that doubled as the stove and the heating.

For lunch, they grabbed vegetables from their garden and used ready-made cured meat. Everything used in the meal was fresh, and grown or raised in the village (with the exception of oil and salt), from the vegetables to the rice to the yams to the pork to the eggs to the chili peppers. A simple meal never tasted soooo good.

(As time went on, some relatives and neighbors came by to warm themselves in front of the fire. The weird thing was that I only saw women and kids, no men. Where did the Yao men go?)

It turns out that this lunch-at-my-home thing is good business: once they get you in the door, they cook slowly, make you eat a lot, and then they start bringing out their high margin goods like hand-made bags, scarves, tablecloths and silver bracelets. It's hard to say no to people who have been so hospitable as to have opened the door to their home!