Photos

Jan 5th things got back to as normal as they get for me here. Jas arrived from Vancouver. We started to plan out what stories where achievable and put in his paperwork so he could begin working as a journalist here. Without you press card, you aren’t allowed to work.

Starbucks is here with over 400 stores and is now going to start growing coffee in Yunnan. Yunnan is known for tea and rice terraces, so it seemed like as good a place as any and we headed out on Tuesday the 18th and flew to Kunming, then to Pu Er. Nescafe is already working in the region so we went to their collection centre to get some pictures and meet some farmers.
It is small farming operations mostly and allows them to grow a second crop to the tea. As the quality increases so does the price and the farmers seem to be pretty happy with the increase of income. We then headed out to the coffee growing hills and shot a stand up for the story.

Next day was a very interesting 10 hour ride over the mountains from Pu Er to the UNESCO Rice Terraces in the twin cities of Nansha and Xinjie we stayed in Nansha, the new city. Luckily we found a man working his terraced field on the drive and where able to get some good pictures and an on camera for a story on rice and one on food security. We where to late to shoot on the Thursday when we finally arrived in Nansha, so headed up in the fog on Friday. After waiting a long time for the fog to lift we decided to try the other side of the mountain. As you can see from the photo’s it worked out well. It then took us about 6 hours to make it Kunming where we spent the night and flew home Saturday.
I think the photos speak volumes about the rugged beauty of the place. Both Fan Di, Jas and I worked on the photos.