I'm sitting here this afternoon with four layers of shirts on--it's a bit chilly here in my study.

Robert and I got back from our tour to Southern China the day before Thanksgiving.  Gunther and Eliza made a wonderful dinner and it was great to come home to the family.

We had a really good time--the 18 other tour members were ALL Chinese, so I was the only non-Chinese speaking person on the trip. It's a good thing Robert speaks Cantonese.

We arrived in Hong Kong and ferried to Macau.  Over ten days, made our way West to Guilin where those stunning, individual rock mountains jut out of the earth like shark's teeth--the ones that you see in Chinese scrolls.

I was quite impressed with my daily views out the bus window, watching the rice fields appear and disappear, and catching vignettes of people living their lives. I snapped as many photos as I could as we rolled by--sometimes at 5 miles an hour, sometimes at 55 miles an hour.  

The shots I missed because my camera shutter speed is slower than my artist's eye are:

• 4 different blue trucks, each carrying a load of live pink pigs
  
• a man driving a motor scooter with two metal cages stuffed with flapping, outraged red hens
  
• a man on a 3-wheeled, pedi-truck carrying a tall, balanced stack of 20 wooden chairs
  
• a truck loaded with two water buffalo bullocks, eyes round as saucers
• a truck loaded with several water buffaloes, packed end-to-end and looking bored

•  a dangling, wooden wheel barrow being lowered from a roof top
• endlessly repeating squares of harvested rice paddies, the dried stalks left in perky, little triangular stacks
• rice stalks burning, the smoke curling into the dusty sky
• 3 people squatting and chatting alongside a resting, empty wheelbarrow

• stone walls plastered with strings of red Chinese characters, announcing, offering
• tar paper shacks made of ancient and older layers of scraps upon scraps--sheltering a place to store tools--or nap between chores
• families in the fields digging, hoeing, gathering, reaching, waiting, eating, walking home

• a two-mile long straight lane bordered by an unbroken stone fence--one person starting the walk home at sunset, carrying a bundle

• a man quietly fixing his bicycle--wheels up-ended-- by the side of the roadway
• a six-year old holding hands with his four-year old brother walking "in the middle of nowhere" on the narrow side of  the roadway, no adult in sight
• two road workers wearing shorts, orange vests, and peaked, bamboo hats, squatting and smoking alongside the road
• a woman shoveling rocks into a wheelbarrow on a highway soil-erosion project, tiny ant-like figures above her placing rocks by hand
  
• a mother driving a motor scooter with a baby in front and a toddler hugging her waist in the back
• LOTS of mothers-- hair flying, one or two children huddled against her on the scooter or bicycle
  

• two Chinese scarecrows
  

Robert and I watch a lot of CNN and BBC News and financial reports, and often hear about "emerging markets." I loved this trip because I could see for myself how actively and rapidly China is developing--from the ancient plots of land to the seemingly endless skyscraper apartment buildings, some moderately new (thirty years or so following the Cultural Revolution) and some brand-new in Hong Kong.

I realized that if I looked hard enought, I could almost always find a person out in EVERY field WORKING--unlike when I drive Highway 99 or 5 through the silent, monolithic Central Valley here in California, where the agricultural tasks are industrialized, with machines and sprinklers and no person to be seen.

It dawned on me as I grew accustomed to the rhythm of villages appearing and disappearing that inhabited areas were spaced WALKING distance apart--maybe two miles or so. 

I don't think I saw more than one or two overweight people the whole time.  Everyone in rural China is burning off the calories by being naturally and continually engaged in productive activity-- walking miles to home, pedaling a bike, shoveling dirt and rocks, carrying furniture, stacking up piles of vegetables, casting fish nets, using tools, hoeing, hammering, culling, cooking, drying fruit, climbing and trimming trees, herding water buffalo, draining shrimp ponds, weeding--you know, all the things we avoid doing, or pay someone else to do, or use an automatic device for!

I've been in third world countries before, so I'm no stranger to old-fashioned squatting toilets, but the time we stopped the bus at a gas station which offered only stagnant, reeking pits gave me a whole new appreciation for whoever invented "flush" toilets, and all that term implies and provides. 

One day we visited magnificent caverns with huge rooms of stalagites (and stalagmites) soaring more than 150 feet high, brilligantly lit with colored lights--an emotionally stirring environment--fanciful, symbolic, warm and humid.  I was sweating after 30 minutes of walking through the place. I wondered about the girl who had the job of selling souvenirs in the cave day after day, underground with  no reference to the sun.  Probably a step up (or down) from the daily hoeing alternative out there in the fields.

Robert and I celebrated our 8th anniversary of meeting each other one morning by dancing a waltz in an immense open-air plaza filled with ball-room dancers, tai-chi groups, and fan-dance exercisers, when our group stopped to admire all the activities.  It was a beautiful day, and will be a long-remembered trip.