From here it was another four plus hour drive back to Zhangjiajie City for a flight to Shanghai. You drive through rural China here seeing a lot of tractors on and off the road, motor bikes, and water buffalo everywhere, even in the road. Tricky to get around them at times. You see small and really small farms everywhere, as in China every bit of arable land is used. On this trip, what we saw lots of besides rice fields was orange groves and tons of them all harvested by hand and hauled to market and distribution in very small tractors and trucks. Hunan is truly a breadbasket province but it appears that most of it is handled all by hand, very few tractors or other mechanized farm implements anywhere.
The road to Zhangjiajie City was a fairly modern two lane road but what was most surprising to me was a concrete drainage ditch on each side of the road that was not separated from the highway with a guard rail. The pavement (concrete) stopped at the side of the road where the ditch was and the ditch was probably two feet deep and a foot and a half wide all made out of concrete. There is no parking lane between the highway and the drainage ditch. The only place it is covered is when the highway intersects a driveway or other street. You wonder how many end up in it.
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