Highlights

Minority peoples, buffalo & wet markets, Yangshuo Cooking School, cultural performances, old stone town, hiking, rice terraces, ancient paper making, drum towers, wind & rain bridges, river cruise and rafting.

Duration: 18 days
Start: Guiyang August 24
End: Guilin September 11
Maximum Group Size: 14
Style: budget
Early Booking Price through July 28: CAD$1995/person (airfare not included)
Regular Price after July 28: CAD$2495/person (airfare not included)

by Brian K. Smith

I met Yanhua one December day in 2009 when visiting the Longsheng Rice Terraces in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Chinese security had closed the only road for a visiting delegation from Africa. Yanhua asked me if I wanted to follow her down a trail to Huang Luo, her village, where we could have tea at her family's hotel. I gladly accepted her invitation and spent a pleasant afternoon there before continuing on to Guilin.

by Rick Green

It's something you'll probably notice on your first day in Taiwan. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the flashing blue and red lights indicate the police were responding to an incident. That was my first reaction en route to my hotel in Taichung. But as you get closer, you'll see no "black & white" or the boys in blue. Rather, they announce a glass-fronted booth or a small family shop selling betel nut.

Betel nut is a stimulant that is popular throughout tropical Asia. Taiwan's "betel quid" consists of a drupe from the areca palm (Areca catechu) wrapped with slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) in a betel vine leaf (Piper betle). In other parts of Asia, flavourings, spices, and even tobacco may be added. The Formosan variant, however, has none of these. Consumers only have a choice between different-tasting red and white lime pastes or single- and duo-drupe quids.

Betel nut, or binlang in Mandarin, is a Taiwanese addiction. It is thought that 20 per cent of the country's 23 million inhabitants are consumers. It's the nation's second-largest cash crop after rice, the demand of which has even displaced land once devoted to the leading crop. Clever farmers, however, will find ways of producing more than one crop on their land. I met a coffee grower who provided his shrubs with their necessary shade from areca palms.