Jinghong - Saturday 3rd December

A day just exploring around Jinghong today, starting with the largest covered market in Xishuangbanna at Menghai, a 25 minute drive away. And what an amazing sight it is, absolutely huge with all the meat and produce you can imagine, including a dog’s head (couldn’t bring myself to snap that). The spice stalls were just wonderful and the veggies really fresh and colourful. Outside in a back yard were the poorer cash-crop farmers with their daily pickings/diggings on the ground rather on the posh stalls – all wonderful, friendly people, happy for us to snap away at things we’d never seen before – people and wares! It was a camerman’s heaven!

One of the more surprising things in this area was the variety of head attire.  Western-style wedding hats were very popular! The very cool medicine man offered me things to help my joints – well, he pointed to his back and knees!  Did he think I looked elderly – surely not!!!

Then on to the Manzhau boutique tea processing “factory” – they collect the leaves from the best local hill plantations  and dry-fry, steam, roll and squash it with enormous stones to pack it into cakes, then sell it for huge sums to afficionados.  











We also experienced  “tea-tasting ceremony” which was interesting – and the teas were delicious, all the local Pu-er variety, but very different depending on the processing involved.

I loved these stone weights and wanted to bring a  couple home for the garden! 


The packaging is from the local paper-maker and made from rice stalks. This pack wholesales at HK$ 300+

We finished our day in the tea hills with a delightful hour’s walk (good to get out of the cars for a stroll) through bamboo and jungle to the oldest tea tree in the area – not the same as the tea-tree you get essential oil from at all, this is just a 400 year old tea bush gone berserk.We finished our day in the tea hills with a delightful hour’s walk (good to get out of the cars for a stroll) through bamboo and jungle to the oldest tea tree in the area – not the same as the tea-tree you get essential oil from at all, this is just a 400 year old tea bush gone berserk.


The food throughout the trip has been superb, but frankly I don’t need to eat any one cuisine for seven nights straight, so yesterday, German journalist Thomas and I were looking forward to the “Western-style deli” mentioned in the guide, and expressed our disappointment when we were informed that as we were such a gung-ho group, Peter had substituted another Chinese experience for us! Thomas has suffered particularly as really only enjoys pizza, and he hates coriander and most other things in Chinese fare! So at dinner tonight at a local river-side café – Dai cuisine, this time – Thomas was presented with a personal pizza from the deli.  Luckily, there were two, so we all got a slice - yummy!