Thursday, February 22, 2007
Road to Lijiang
After leaving Pan Zhi Hua for Lijiang, one of the first things you see are mountain sides of coal that fall directly into the river. there are factories with smokestacks and coal elevators, a cable car with only containers for coal that is carried from the mountains to the riverside industry. Three nuclear power plants also help to warm the river just outside of town.
As the city traffic tapers off, the roads become full of big trucks overloaded with coal. The small towns along the way have traffic jams of the big blue dump trucks of coal. In small yards along the way, black dogs are chained to guard black ground where people with black hands and faces pound powdered coal into perforated round bricks for cooking. The sky is a smoky blue, even when there is nothing but terraced hills of rice in sight. These lonely country roads are arteries of coal being carried out past poor peasants in massive blue trucks that don't stop in the villages.
We passed through a valley full of beautiful rice paddies beginning to change color with the seasons. Terraces with rounded edges climbed up the steepest hills. Farmers worked in some, putting the rice into cone-shaped bundles to dry. Goats, water buffalo, horses and cows all shared the road and grazed along the unfenced fields. Everything up to the cliffs was terraced. Even small islands in the river had been completely conquered by rice. Where there was no rice, corn was grown on the terraces.
Past some of the most b beautiful scenery I've ever seen, our bus took us along a road carved into a cliff above the river. Across the river, we could see mine after mine with an alluvial pile of tailings cascading down into the river. Some were just like a doorway into the mountain, and others were entire hillsides with switchbacks for trucks and no trees. Where there was room, people were living on the tailings, in small hand built houses with black yards.
It is no wonder that China has "cancer villages" where 30 -40% of the people have cancer. I wonder if any fish can survive in those brown waters below the mines.
