Yuanyang, China: The Most Beautiful Rice Terraces You'll Ever See

I was casually browsing the titles on the bookshelf of a hostel I was at in Shanghai, when I noticed that they had like 203980329 Lonely Planet China books.  So I maybe temporarily borrowed a copy. I borrowed the oldest one, in my defense (it's from 2013 - which in China, where everything's changing so fast, basically means the book may as well be 50 years old and completely obsolete anyway).  

Anyway, browsing through my stolen Lonely P's Yunnan section, the #1 recommended place to visit were the Yuanyang Rice Terraces. I was kind of like "Meh, I've already seen rice terraces" (first world travel problems), but then I looked up photos and it was stunning. Like rice terraces on crack. So fine, I found myself a bus and hauled myself out there.

What It's All About:

Yuanyang is an area in the Southeastern part of Yunnan - the entire area is composed of deep valleys and mountainous terrain chock full of GORGEOUS RICE TERRACES. EVERYWHERE.  Yuanyang itself really refers to a conglomerate of multiple little villages, which all perch on their own section of rice terraces.  The best time to visit Yuanyang is actually in the winter (namely, Dec/Jan), because the rice has been harvested and the terraces are filled with pools of water, which make for gorgeous, reflective photos. I happened to visit in low season (so everything is super green because the rice is actually growing in the terraces) but it was beyond stunning anyhow.

Stolen off Google, but THIS is what the terraces look like in the winter with the sun reflecting off them. Must come back.

The area is home to a lot of ethnic minority groups and it feels incredibly, incredibly local. Yes, tourists come and visit this area (especially if the Lonely P is singing its praises), but it hasn't developed mass tourism yet, considering it's still fairly remote and hard to get to (the highway from Kunming was built fairly recently). It mostly felt like very local, very authentic village life. It kind of makes sense, given that the main sights are actual, functioning rice terraces that are being farmed and used to support the surrounding villages - there aren't really actually places or sights built out for tourists to see.  You could just stop along the side of the road and see a breathtaking view anywhere.  It was the first place I've been where the minority women actually dressed in their traditional dress every day, and not as a song-and-dance for the tourists - but because they just did, normally.   It was amazing.

Rice terrace goodness

As a tourist, you have your choice to stay in many of the little villages - there's a dirt road that runs to each village and kind of forms a huge loop. Little minivans zoom along the loop daily, so you can easily hitch a ride from one village to another (each village has their own awe-inspiring set of rice terraces), and you'll probably get to share your ride with a local woman and her chicken, or a farmer heading to work.  All with VIEWS the entire way.  There's also big market days every day of the week, where all the women of the different tribes get together to trade, all wearing their individual traditional garments - it's apparently such a cool thing to get to experience. 

Cliffnotes of the Day:

• Kunming to Yuanyang is 7 hours by bus, and I didn't want to waste an entire day sitting on the bus, so I opted for a night bus. Strangely enough, there's only one night bus and it leaves at 6:30PM.  So it arrives around 1:30, 2:30AM.  Even weirder, when the bus arrives in Yuanyang, it leaves the doors shut and you can stay on the bus to sleep until around 6:30AM. WHY. Why wouldn't they just make it leave later and arrive later??

Oh dear. Maybe I should have asked for a couple more details about this "night bus."

If you were on the left side, you had to sleep THIS CLOSE to another rando!  And the mattresses smelled very heavily of B.O.  My only blessing came in the form of me tucking my backpack on the bed next to me under a blanket, which may have saved me from having to sleep 2 inches from a questionable stranger. #Chinawin

• After groggily being kicked off the bus in the main town of Xinjie at 6:30AM, I instantly found a minibus who would take me to my hostel, which I'd booked in the tiny little town of Duoyishu.  The man told me it would be 15 yuan when I asked, and then he literally turned around to the only other foreigners, a French couple, and indicated on his hand that it would be 20 yuan per person for them.  Blatant.  I guess being Chinese sometimes has its advantages.

Partway to Duoyishu, the taxi driver stopped and told us to check out the view. My first view of some of the terraces.

• Upon checking into my hostel (it was wayyy too early for them to allow me to check in), I started chatting with a British girl, Emma, in the lobby - she mentioned that she had met a group of people and they'd all booked a private car for the day to take them around to a bunch of the more famous terraces and sights, and offered for me to join them.  Even though the car was at max capacity, and the driver insisted on charging more money, the rest of the group coerced me to coming with them. It was the nicest ever.

Our private group for the day! L to R: Carlos and his sisters Faviola and Christian (all originally from Mexico but more recently from NYC, Dubai, and Mex City), Emma (UK), me (who knows), and Tom & Hannah (a Dutch couple).

Immediately stepping out of our hostel, we were greeted by the world's largest pig and her accompanying piglets. This is what I mean, the entire place was so local-feeling.  

You also have to constantly watch where you're stepping, because the path is also for cows

In some of these tribes, the women do all the physical labor. It was crazy, because you kept passing these tiny little women carrying HUGE, crazy-heavy bags of cement and rock and building materials. 

• There are four main well-known rice terraces for viewing, though there are dozens more you can choose to stop by or visit or see on the way. Our driver took us not only to three of the main ones, but also tons of small viewpoints along the way. I can't describe how cool it was - he'd drive down a little farm path, then we'd just get out and BAM there would be a view. No tourist buildout, no tourist shops, no set viewpoint or any indication that you should stop at that location - it was all very organic-feeling. Like we're just heading to this village and oh, by the way, look at this stunning, life-changing view on the road over. 

10 minutes into our drive, our driver stopped at the edge of a small road and there was life-changing rice terrace view #1!

I like the tiny little villages tucked into all the terraces

JACKET AND PANTS. IS THIS CHINA.

So, so many terraces. It kind of reminds me of a delicious, multi-layered crepe.  Mmmm crepes

Stop #2: more crepe-y goodness! Also, I have to clarify that I spent a day in these clothes, then slept in them on an overnight bus, and then zoomed right onto a rice field tour, sooo slightly homeless is the theme of the day.

These rice fields were some of my favorite.

My favorite part of this photo is the bird zooming above

We sat long enough to watch the fog roll in. It's crazy - one moment the fields are pristine and clear, and in the next 5 minutes, a thick blanket of fog comes in and covers them up. And then 5 minutes after that, the fog will randomly disappear. It seriously all changes by the minute.

We made so many stops at different rice fields that I've lost track of which one this was - it may just be a different foggy view of the last one

Then there was one that we could hike down into the terraces. It was awesome.

What do they do with the green stalk-y parts of the rice? Thought of the day.

This is one of the women from the ethnic minority tribe Hani, one of the original inhabitants of the area. You can tell the Hani women because of their traditional dress, which involves the royal blue blouses.

I'm only including this photo of me and Emma because I turned "Beauty Mode" on my phone - all Asian phones have this feature, which usually smooths out your skin/enlarges your eyes/makes your face thinner.  It seemed to only have enlarged one of my eyes, which makes me look super creepy. Gotta look at the positive parts of having my iPhone stolen and trading it in for a weird Chinese brand phone #BeautyMode

This was our last stop; one of the most famous rice terraces of all - called Tiger's Mouth, because apparently there's some terraces that look like a tiger's mouth open.  

We tried really really hard to see the tiger's mouth, but the best we could come up with with a slobbery-looking dopey dog mouth. If you look at the terraces near the middle that are filled with water and yellow - it kind of forms the upper part of an open mouth. Maybe.

I had been conned into buying an overpriced ticket to see some of the terraces from these official platforms - and I was the only one - so the driver would drop me off at the entrance and let me go wander inside while the others waited in the car. Then I would promptly go back to the van and declare to everyone that the viewpoint was the most amazing part of my entire trip to China.

Returning back to the van, Carlos had befriended a local boy named Ah-Fun. He was incredibly cute. Of course they were kind of just waiting for tips, but the boy was authentically cute and happy to interact with Carlos.

• We seriously saw more rice terraces in a day than you can ever believe. It got to the point where it was like temple-overload in Southeast Asia, safari animal-overload in Africa, but rice terrace-overload in China.  Except I was clearly not overloaded by rice terraces, because the set of terraces my hostel was next to (Duoyishu) is well-known for epic sunrises.  So I hauled myself up at 5:30AM to go see if I could see the sunrise over the Duoyishu terraces.

Sunrises in this area are kind of hit-or-miss, because there are so many clouds. The crew had gone the day before, and not seen anything because the entire sky was too foggy.

IS THE SUN GONNA BE ABLE TO BREAK THROUGH THE CLOUDS. So much suspense.

Sooo my new phone does NOT have a great camera, unfortunately, but this was the best it could do.
BUT THERE IS A SUNRISE HOORAYYYY

Apparently this view in winter is beyond epic - because the rice has already been harvested, the terraces are all filled with pools of water, which reflect the color of the sunrise and will apparently change your life.  

HOORAY SUN. Worth the 5:30AM wakeup.

• You know what happens when you haul yourself awake that early in the morning? You've done all this stuff, and it's still only 7:30AM.  The owner of my hostel had drawn me a little hand-drawn map on a slip of paper suggesting other places I could wander after the sunrise. One was a little village he referred to as "mushroom village," called that because the houses all have little reed-made, mushroom-shaped roofs.  I hitched a ride with a local van (my first attempt at telling him "mushroom village" led to mass confusion because I directly translated the words into Chinese and apparently that is NOT at all what it is called in Chinese. It actually has a Chinese village name. Oops). 

The village involved a 15-20 minute hike down a winding, muddy dirt path.  And then there it was! So small and so cute, and I was definitely the only non-village person tromping around, looking completely out of place.

I seriously felt like I'd been randomly dropped into the middle of rural China. Like I was in a movie or something. It felt completely removed from the real world somehow.

A rooster.

A pig.

I seriously loved this village and getting to wander through by myself so early in the morning.

With my poor Chinese skills, the only thing I can get from this writing is that it's saying it's equally good to have girl children and boy children.  I think maybe in parts of rural China, families often prefer male children because they provide for the family and carry on the family name - and because of the (former) one-child policy, there was a tiny trend of getting rid of the girl children in favor of boys.

A very mushroom roof.

I could not stop taking photos of this village

And once you reached the bottom of the village, there was a set of the village's own rice paddies you could walk through.

IT WAS SO PRETTY AND SO COOL

And then a local farmer came down to check on his paddies and thought nothing of this rando girl standing in his fields with a pink selfie stick.

I had to hike another 20 minutes back uphill to the main road to hitch a ride from a passing van back to my hostel. And all the local children were slowly wandering out of their houses to play, and they were so cute.

Seriously, local children can entertain themselves with anything. These three were playing with the water spout.

• I got back to the hostel around mid-morning, where I met Emma and we headed out of Yuanyang together.  It took a series of (two very long) buses and an overnight train, but we were headed to the city of Dali!  

Emma and I took one last mini-walk to the rice terraces near our hostel, a 1-minute walk away. Bye, rice terraces!

Our van to the first bus was super delayed because a truck was blocking the entire road (a hazard of having a tiny dirt road be the only passageway from one village to another) - so I took photos of village life out the window to pass the time. This is an elderly Hani woman outside her house.

These old men were just chilling, one of them more than the others. I think he's just smoking a huge tobacco pipe - I saw a couple other men with the same contraption, either made of metal or bamboo. Amazing.

Our first bus out of Yuanyang to Jianshui, this goose was trying to bust out of his box like whoa.

Fun Facts of the Day:

• This area is changing super quickly - there is tons of construction going on everywhere, and I think new hotels are being developed as we speak. You need to get out here ASAP.  It is so untouched and unspoilt and beautiful and unique.
• Ok so my Lonely P just informed me that best time to come out is actually officially November through April, as that's when the terraces are filled with water (there is only one rice harvest/year).  And the climate is fairly temperate, so it remains cool year-round.
• There are over 28,000 acres of rice terraces in this area! And some of these terraces are over 1,300 years old!