I said goodbye to Yanzong yesterday morning and rode a van down to Weixi alone. She got a ride back to Shangrila with her younger brother, who is directing the Yunnan Golden Monkey National Park project in Tacheng. He's a very nice guy and an amateur photographer, so he showed us his photos of birds, flowers, and the mysterious YGM on his laptop. We've been meeting up with him in the evenings, Yanzong chattering away in Tibetan and him obliging me with Chinese. He's staying at the nice hotel down the street from ours, with a dozen other management staff, and will be living in Tacheng off and on for four more months.
Arriving in Weixi I checked into a guest house downtown, only 30 RMB a night and wireless internet - not bad, I'm thinking. I took a walk around the town to get my bearings and climbed to the top of a hill overlooking the town. Weixi seems like a pretty average Chinese city, pop ~150,000, dirty and loud and reeking and busy and unhurried at the same time. I guess I'm a little spoiled after Shangrila, but this place seems unremarkable and unfriendly by comparison. Also, it's kinda boring traveling alone, especially when you can't speak or understand the language. Sigh.
Anyhow, today I walked up to a few villages just outside town, to see what's the real deal on Buckwheat. Everyone said the next village up probably grew it, until I got to the top and they still didn't. Seems like there's a wild relative that people don't recognize as buckwheat, that is an agricultural weed cut green for fodder. Also amaranth is planted for pig feed (hence the common name pigweed I'm just realizing), and people occasionally eat the greens and grains too.
The agricultural diversity I saw today was frankly quite amazing. In one day, almost totally on foot, I saw four field crops I didn't recognize, which besides for mulberry and the Chinese medicine in Baoshan, hadn't yet happened to me yet in China. In one village, Yutang （鱼塘）, people planted fields of rice, soybeans, corn, sunflowers, radish seed, rape, buckwheat, potatoes, burdock, some kind of lily, another broadleaf minor grain I had never seen before, amaranth, an annual oil crop called qigui, and walnut, huajiao, and guava trees. In another village a vining crop grown vertically called shanyu (山芋), or "mountain tuber". That's not counting the vegetables in home gardens, also quite diverse. And those were just the things I saw growing today, on July 15th, 2008. So I did see a little buckwheat, but only in very small patches. One guy I talked to today summed up the situation: "bu mai, bu zai" - if you can't sell it, don't plant it. He was a young, sad Lisu guy in Zhanzikou, the highest altitude village, drinking moonshine by the bowlful from a one-liter Coke bottle at 10 am. I tried some, but decided to stick to tea.
Photos: Pile of pine needles for compost and a few pigsties in Zhanzekou, Weixi city, a donkey, the crazy mountain tuber, and one series of fields in Yutang showing radish, sunflower, corn , beans, rape, and walnut trees.
Finally, a rant about dumb china: The guy running the guest house called me at around noon today while I was out in the villages, wanting me to come back at once and properly register, because last night he didn't know what to do with a US passport. He said, and I believe this, that he doesn't get foreigners at his guest house, and didn't know what to do. When I got back in the afternoon, he came into my room and we filled out this laborious residency form for half an hour. Then he had to call in a co-worker from the Education Bureau to recopy it because he can't read or write English and for some reason didn't like the way I had filled it out. Then we all went down to the police station to register officially (this is for three nights at a hotel) and I took the passport to a copy shop. Finally we got back to the hotel and he said, oh, the girl who let you in didn't know the price for foreigners is more; 50 RMB a night, because you know, so much trouble. So much for never having foreign guests. I wanted to laugh, shout, slam the door, throw him out the window. But what do you do, this is China, and it's only an extra $2.95. So I paid.
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