The Hui on the hill: Huangsanwa

After leaving Danuohei we spent a night in the dusty city of Yiliang and tried to figure out where to go next.   Nina had decided she was ready to return to Kunming and prepare for her next trip, to "Shangrila."  

So that left Zhang and me

 to wear out our patience on each other.  Sunday went, well, ok.  The previous day Zhang had had a conversation with a neighbor at our guest house in Danuohei. She is from the Jiuxiang area and said there's buckwheat grown a lot around there. So the two of us rode to Jiuxiang, famous not for buckwheat but for its awesome psychedelic caves. Nina had been there a couple weeks ago.  We got off the bus where it seems all buses drop you off in Yunnan: yet another tourist mecca, featuring (surprise!) a culinary specialty (this time roast duck) and beautiful young women in ethnic costume.  

We walked quickly in the opposite direction to the highway underpass, and towards a village nestled among rice paddies and terraced hills.  We were passed by a guy in a horse cart full of green fodder who told us this was a Hui village.  The Hui are muslims, and there is a certain aura of awe (and suspicion) about them in China.   Upon entering the village we learned nobody there grows much buckwheat, but the guys up the hill do.  So we continued along the road up to the next village, passing rice paddies and corn fields, a mosque, a school, a duck confinement operation, and piles of manure cooking on the side of the road.  Near the top we saw the reservoir that filled the rice fields, looking very low.   

Here we finally found a few people who grow buckwheat.  We accosted a middle-aged man cleaning his hoe in a stream, who admitted to planting several mu (1 mu = 1/7 acre) of bitter buckwheat every year to feed his cattle.  Jackpot!  Then a young couple with a tiny dog and a motorcycle that plants 4-5 mu a year and even sell some if the harvest is good.  They were fertilizing their newly emergent corn crop, and plan on planting buckwheat in September after tobacco harvest. It appears nobody eats buckwheat here, and people think of it as a reliable animal feed if you don't grow enough corn.  The preferred staple for humans is rice, a sentiment we had heard the day before in the Yi village.   If you can't grow it yourself, sell your cash crops to buy rice.

The people of Huangsanwa (this upper village) had lost their buckwheat crop last year because of an unexpected early frost.  We also spoke to a woman who was not planting very much this year because of fears of a repeat of that rare event.  Apparently, early frost is only a problem once every few decades.  So I guess we'll see.

We headed back down the hill, and paid too much for lunch  at the tourist trap, and went then went to another village, Genjiaying, where nobody had apparently even heard of buckwheat.  It started pouring, and we returned to Kunming.