Ever since the mudslides caused by Typhoon Khanun, the store manager hasn’t been able to visit the tea regions in Cuifeng and Tunyuan Qilai Mountain for over a month. Hearing that the road to Tunyuan was finally open, we headed up the mountain just a few days ago.
Nanfeng Village is mostly cleaned up, and the gas station is almost ready to reopen. The unfortunate one is the nearby 7-Eleven, which doesn’t even have its sign back yet—looks like it won’t be doing business anytime soon. The road conditions from Nanfeng Village up to Cuifeng in Cingjing are “fantastic,” with almost no visible disaster damage.
Things are pretty rough around Lushan Tribe and the Tunyuan trailhead, though. They’re passable, but there’s a lot of debris and mud that hasn’t been cleared. Over at Duda Village and Jingguan Tribe, traffic is regulated with scheduled openings (8:00 AM, 10:00 AM, 12:00 PM…). The engineering crew said it’ll take well over half a year to get things back to normal, but considering how much the roadbed washed out, we really have to hand it to the crew for their efficiency!
As for the tea gardens that everyone is so concerned about, the Cuifeng tea garden doesn’t seem to have been affected too badly. However, with the heavy rains in August, a lot of the fertilizer definitely washed away. That’s why follow-up fertilization is “crucial” moving forward. Growth is still up in the air, so we’ll need to check back a few more times as winter tea season approaches.
As for Cingjing Qilai Mountain and Jingguan in Tunyuan, the store manager couldn’t make it to the tea gardens because we didn’t check the traffic control schedule beforehand. Oh well, we’re planning another trip for late September or early October, and hopefully, the road conditions near the trailhead will be a bit better by then.
