It's a beautiful sunny Saturday morning and the path up to Five Cloud Peak is busy.
Sun-Ling and Uncle review our route at the top of Five Cloud Peak.
The three of us standing next to the symbolic cloud stone image at the top.
Heading over to the Longjing tea plantations.
April is prime season for picking tea leaves and the pickers were out in force with baskets, aprons and straw hats.
Walking the ridges and saddles.
Time for a lunch break with a view to Longjing Valley.
The walk down is quick but scenic.
A parade of workers returning to the fields from their lunch break.
Hats, aprons and baskets.
Down in Longjing (Dragon Well) Village one can see the freshly picked tea leaves first get aired dried and then pan-roasted. Then one can have a tasting before buying.
When we visited Longjing in 1991 the heat for the pan roasting was from a wood fire, today it's electric.
These folks are tasting.
Turn right at the end of the village and it's a pleasant walk south through more neatly terraced tea fields on the ancient path called Nine Brooks and 18 Streams.
Uncle and Sun-Ling.
And bicyclists too.
I enjoyed seeing pictures of the tea leaf pan roasting process. Interesting that the process has evolved from fire to electricity. I image the flavor is different with the absense of smoke.
ReplyDeleteOops - auto-correct changed Liz to Lizzie (yuck!)
ReplyDeleteTo follow on Lizzie's thought, so has the carbon footprint increased or decreased with the evolution from fire to electricity. I would think the losses in electricity transmission would make it the loser but there are too many factors in the equation.
ReplyDeleteGood points Ed and Liz. I don't have anything to add.
ReplyDelete