Travel to Daqing

Today we went on a day trip to Daqing, a city about 120 miles north of Harbin. It was a beautiful fall day, and we saw much countryside. Roger, Mingruo, Mike and Joe traveled in cars. The rest of us rode in the van. We did not have a guide or interpreter in the van. We stopped once on the way to Daqing, at a rest area. Most of my photos were from the moving van, and so quality is affected.

The road was a 4-lane limited access toll road. The road was in excellent shape, better than many of our interstate highways, except that whenever we went over a bridge the transitions between road and bridge were a little rough. Bridges were typically over country roads; we did not cross many railroads or waterways. Traffic was light once in the countryside. We drove at 100 kph, which was faster than the cargo trucks, but we were regularly passed by black sedans and SUVs traveling much faster.

We saw people sweeping the sides of the road by hand.

We saw a lot of corn. I mean a lot of corn--mile after mile after mile--all being harvested by hand.

Trees have been planted along the roads and in other places. We have seen this elsewhere in our travels, too. It appears to be a massive program to establish tree belts throughout the countryside.

After corn, the next most common crop was hay. This was raked by hand into large piles and left in the field.

We saw only a few livestock, including beef and dairy cows, sheep and ducks.

The land was very flat all the way. There were none of the hills that we saw in Jinan. We were told that it has been unusually dry recently, and it looked it. We were told that the soil was a fine alkaline soil.