Buckwheat!

Antsy to see the buckwheat in the flesh, I hired a translator and a van and went out on a day trip south from Shangrila.   The translator was a friend of Ms Dai Lihua or "Poppy," a staff person at the local Nature Conservancy office, where I visited on Monday.  Yanzong is Tibetan, speaks great English, and has apparently traveled all over the area.  Not a mile out of town we saw buckwheat growing and stopped the van to have a look.  Looked like buckwheat alright.   Now what?

So I have a bunch of envelopes just for this unexpected occurrence, and I put a few leaves in each envelope at every place we stopped.  We talked to a bunch of villagers about buckwheat and their general farming situation, asked about the Sloping Land Conversion Program a few times, were given some seeds. It was good to actually talk to people even though I haven't quite worked out what I want to ask.  Luckily I brought an altimeter so I could check it at each location and feel very scientific. (Everywhere was between 10,300' and 10,500' above sea level.  Pretty high.)  

There was this traveling beekeeper from Yongsheng who had parked a hundred hives in a buckwheat field in a village called Lianghe.  She pays 100 RMB (about $14.70) to stay there for two months, and will move again in about a month.  Buckwheat has mostly finished flowering, but now there is rape (yellow in the photos) as well as wildflowers and clover everywhere.  She says she moves five or six times a year.  There seems to be a proliferation of these itinerant apiculturists up and down the road.

The guy we found to drive us around just became a driver this year, a Tibetan who tells me he's eighteen.  Yanzong says he told her he lied on his application, and that he's really sixteen.  A quiet and easygoing guy, he followed us around through the fields sometimes and sometimes waited in his shiny blue van with Mickey Mouse stickers.  I ran into him this afternoon in the parking lot at Old Town and he asked where I wanted to go.  So I guess it wasn't such a terrible experience for him, although we did take his car on some nasty tracks.  

The village people have been extremely friendly, even the people in the town here seem friendlier than in Kunming.  There are certainly lots of white tourists so I guess they're used to us.  The owner of the guest house tells me at this time last year every room was full every night.  This season has been very quiet by comparison, what with the riots and the earthquake.