Traditional basket for carrying purchases

Tea for sale

Local market

Cutting cheese

Local market

Local market

Local market

Chillies

Brown sugar

A calligrapher

Beautiful corn

Butchering a pig

Pressing rape seed for canola oil

Measuring out the weight of the purchase

Pig snout

Eggs

Eels

Fresh fish

Rice noodle making factory

Rice noodles hanging out to dry

        We stopped inside an old Bai house that was owned by a wealthy family until the Cultural Revolution when they fled.  The house is in poor shape now and four families share the house. 

       We also stepped inside another house where a woman was making cheese fans to sell at the market.  Cow’s milk is heated to separate the curd from the whey.  The curds are gathered, squeezed together by hand, and stretched on two poles to dry.  We ate some later at our tea ceremony.

Rice paddy

Street light driven by wind and solar power

More creative electrical work

Making cheese

Drying the cheese

        We looked into a shop where a family was preparing maman rice cakes to sell.  (Wheat cakes are called papan.)  The rice is boiled, ground through a meat grinder, pressed into 8 inch strips, like making lasagna noodles, stacked about ten high, and cut into round pancakes with a cookie cutter.  A buyer then cooks them on a griddle over charcoal after adding herbs, brown sugar, etc.  We watched the process and then tried a salty rice pancake and a sweet one.  They looked like pizza and tasted like pastry – they were very good.

Maman rice cakes

Maman rice cakes

He was waiting for us to offer him a maman rice cake

        We drove to Shacun village, walked through the village, and got onto horse carts to take us to Erhai Lake. At the lake, we put on life vests and boarded a long punt.  Our paddler took us out to watch cormorants dive for fish.  The boater captured the cormorant with his fish.  After showing the spectators the catch, the man kept the fish, rewarded the bird with a handful of little fish, and sold the fish to someone on another punt.  One cormorant dove and came up with a fish but by the time the fisherman got to the bird, he had swallowed all but the fish tail.  The man squeezed the bird’s neck until he had "milked" the fish back out.  Interesting to watch.

Horse cart ride

Boats waiting to take us to the cormorant fishing

Cormorant fishing

Cormorant fishing - got one!

Attentive cormorants