A day in the countryside (鄉間一日:內莞)

To city folks, the countryside always holds a certain fascination.


 

To eyes accustomed to seeing things in often regular geometric lines not more than a few tens of feet away, and more often within just three or four feet, the countryside has a vastness which is completely beyond all imagination. The change in the scale in their visual framing is most relaxing

It is a realm of peace, where you find more plants, grass, weeds, trees, flowers than men and women, something you'd never find in bustling metropolis like Hong Kong.

Our coach crosses miles and miles of land full of fields forests and hills

and from time to time, rows and rows of plastic sheets protecting the tender leaves of various kinds of products of market gardening

often the hills are covered by mists

almost all the land which could be ploughed have been ploughed



besides the newly built road, you find new village buildings



surrounded by the means of their livelihood

Private lands have been fenced off: a sign of the new property law taking effect.

it's heartening to see well organized development and not chaos.

The signs of an environmental greening program is evident in many places



Trees are planted along both sides of the river bank



No sign of rubbish on the river

The river water looks clean

The materials used in putting up country houses are usually simple: bricks, tiles, mud, mortar, wood, bamboo. Everywhere one looks, one finds a delicious sense of space.

The vegetables farmers grow have all got their own unique color, shape and texture.

How big they grow in the country, quite unlike those we find in our supermarkets !

 
Animals and domestic fowls are often allowed a limited time to run free in the fields, unlike those in the tightly packed cages with regular feeding time, injected with steroids or other chemical feeds in rows and rows of enclosed sheds resembling more an industrial production line than a country farm, before they are turned over to slaughter houses to be transformed  in chunks of chicken breasts, chicken drumsticks and wings or feet wrapped in cellophane and foam.

Never saw chicken so fat !

Logs are lying everywhere.

Obviously, they got more melons than they could eat.

What remains of our paddy after harvest. I suppose they deliberately leave behind the stumps to be ploughed in as additional nutrients when it's time to plant the rice shoots in spring

The fields are allowed to fallow for a while until they are next pressed into service again

villager walking on the paths

A vegetable almost as tall as the girl. I wonder how mother or grandma would prepare it

There were a few clumps of canola here and there

how luxuriantly they grow in the fields.

I suppose life is not easy for them either: they need to compete with each other for more sun, just that they probably have enough space for every one

 

I like to look at the different shades of green created by distance

and the shimmer of light on fluttering leaves, even if one can only look through the coach window

You can have as much space as you need to park your cars.
 

Shadows draw pictures on the ground

Plants outside the window of our passing coach

A clump of bamboos growing right in the middle of the field

The sun slipping through bamboo leaves

a bamboo sky

fern shaped sunlight

Sunlight dripping down the leaves. it's enough to fill the heart of one man with joy.