I’ve just been looking at a bit of central China on Google Maps. This bit:
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I’m curious what this place looks like. I’m interpreting it as terraces on the sides of a river valley, but that’s an educated guess. Does anyone know better? Or can you suggest a more interesting explanation? And what’s the wifi reception like if you’re sat there with your laptop?
If we’re really lucky someone from there might turn up and tell us. Or they’ll just try to sell us some replica shoes, handbags and a new era cap (presumably celebrating the new era when England aren’t crap at cricket, so it’ll probably collapse in the middle).
(HT: Tom for the lead)
Why, they must be terraced padi/paddy fields of rice!
Interestingly – or not – thanks to a much more even climate than we ‘enjoy’ further from the equator, it doesn’t matter when in the year you plant your seedling rice plants. Which is why you can see harvested fields (beige in the photo) next to ripening ones (green).
Acknowledgements: PT Propan Raya (Indonesia) for giving my dad a job in 1994, enabling me to see more paddy fields than are available in Staffordshire.
Thanks, and you got in before the spammers (unless you’re spamming for PT Propan Raya). I love the way they’re their own contour map.
How kind of you to join us, yufg fghdgd. As you live in near these fields, would you like to tell us more about them? Do you trally grow sportswear there?
Definitely rice paddies! When the picture was taken they were mostly just water. It gets a lot greener later.
I saw rice paddies for the first time a few weeks ago, in Nepal, and was surprised ho steep the hills were that the terraces were on. They can make lots of very small ones on very steep hills to maximise usable area. These look to be a bit bigger, so probably a less steep hill.
Thanks, Eva.
I’m now wondering if you can make spam out of rice. Veggie spam, I suppose.
These are not rice fields. Here you see some ancient remains of an alien civilization that visited Earth long long ago (presumably before dinosaurs). I guess some important message to the humanity is encoded in this scenery. However, I suspect that their message is just a spam.
Intergalactic sportswear,eh? It’s a good job we evolved feet.