The bus was late arriving in Yuanyang.  We'd spent an hour and a half waiting by the side of the road whilst the driver ran a delivery service of HP printers in a local village.  Us passengers sat by the side of the dusty junction eating mandarins or sucking on sugar cane and hoped that our bus would come back.  Once we were back on track the driver tried to catch up with the timetable by careering around every corner. We whizzed over the Red River that runs into Vietnam, then up and up and round and round bamboo forested hills, zoomed through low cloud and out into the land of rice terraces which shone like a mirrored contour map on the hillside.

 

Yuanyang is famous for its rice terraces and many a postcard has been made of the layered puddles shining orange or gold in the setting sun. Perhaps because of the clouds and also because we arrived for market day we found the farmers who tilled the terraces with their water buffalo to be more colourful than the fields.

 

Unlike elsewhere in rural China the hill tribe women in Southern Yunnan wore trousers, this in itself is unremarkable, but somehow their roles in society seemed more equitable than elsewhere. Women joined in card/mah jong games with the men; most of the taxi drivers were women; it was women we saw building long rice terrace walls. In the market an argument broke out where a man (waving two shiny cockerels) was trying to intimidate a livestock saleswoman, she eyed the man calmly and stood her ground. There was something there and throughout the whole of Yunnan that made you feel that there was more equality. Anything to do with wearing the trousers? There's a PhD in that!

 

From there we forged on into the jungle, skirting the borders of Vietnam, Laos and Burma and to the tropical provincial capital of Jinghong on the Mekong river...

 

H