A few days ago I was in Lincang County in Yunnan taking a short trip before the first tea tour begins as well as seeing about the Dian Hong black tea harvest. The good news is that a pre-harvest rain has come, thus avoiding a repeat of last year when drought conditions left the spring crop in bad shape. Droughts, like last year’s, happen, even though the weather in Yunnan is almost always “spring-like” because of its high elevation and its equatorial latitude, which is similar to that of tropics such as the Amazon. It is not coincidental that Lincang County, where the oldest known tea tree is located, and the world’s richest biodiversity area, the Amazon, share similar characteristics. These biodiversity hotspots are where tea originates, and it is also where I filmed the short videos mentioned in the following paragraph.
I have been working on this post for a couple of days trying to get everything to gel and have since left Lincang County where these videos were taken. Both Vimeo and Youtube are blocked here, so I had to find some Chinese geeks to help me through the Great Firewall. We broke through on my iPad, but failed on my laptop. The video was shot on my iPad, and by using iMovie to compress the video file, I finally got it uploaded to Vimeo (I got it to work using Vimeo’s old embedding code). Sorry for all the geeky talk. I am just really excited to post videos while traveling around China, especially on the tours, the first starting in a couple of days.
It is amazing to consider that a lot of the places that we are going to visit in the next couple of months didn’t even have adequate roads to make the trip possible ten years ago, but now I can be digitally connected through technology no matter where I go in China (as long as the batteries are charged). Not to give Apple an unneeded plug, but I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off if not for my iPad 2, the iMovie app, and a very fast portable Wifi device from China Telecom, who doesn’t need any plugs either. More importantly, it certainly would have been impossible without the help of a couple of talented Chinese geeks. Needless to say, it’s lot of work for some half-minute video clips, so I hope you enjoy them. Please excuse the production quality. We are just trying to have some fun.
A quick look at a Dian Hong Black Tea Garden…
On the way to the 2000 year old tea tree…