Village View: The real village view: Guavas and mud

I've been wanting to visit as many villages as possible in Zunheboto area and this year the first chance came a few weeks ago - a visit to a village on the other side of Tizu River. It's been many years since I have seen Tizu and the villages around so I sort of forced my dad to take me along on his trip to Thokihyi Village - a small, quaint village on a hill above the gold and yellow paddy fields of Tizu... and what an eye-opening guava-experience it turned out to be!

The road to Thokhyi and how the vehicle almost turned ulta.

For me the trip was all about guavas - the rows and rows of guava trees laden with juicy, plump guavas - yellow and green and pink weighing down every branch and no one to eat them, not even pigs! :( Guavas ripening and rotting everywhere, on trees, in the small gardens around every house and on the roofs of make-shift toilets and pig sties, I even saw a bunch thrown outside the village church building so I helped myself greedily which amused the villagers quite a bit. (Sometimes it's not such a bad thing to let people laugh at your expense :)...the villagers brought me two big bostas stuffed with guavas!)

Guavas thrown outside the village church building.

Although the star attraction was guava, there were a lot more that caught my interest...mushuthi (pomello), sugarcane, gourd, bamboo, 8 wild fowls (killed) and roads as muddy as can be. It's a pity that our land has so much resources, fruits and vegetables that grow abundantly without much human effort and everything that grows here from a blade of grass to huge alder trees are organic but most of the produce go to waste like these guavas!