Houses balance on steep hillsides beside tea fields and hazelnut orchards.
"You'd have these roadside restaurants overlooking the tea fields," he recalled.
Innovative solutions can help, such as a project in the tea fields of India which uses an SMS warning system so that humans can coexist safely with elephants.
After zipping past Tokyo's claustrophobic neighborhoods, tea fields and factories, they also leave you at Hon Kawagoe Station, an ideal place to start a walking tour.
There, amid the lush tea fields and rolling green hills, they are safe because almost everyone who lives in the highlands is Kikuyu.
Lao Huang's house was a low-slung shelter of stone surrounded by gardens and tea fields that extended deep into the gentle slope of a U-shaped valley.
Still, industry and labor officials expect a severe labor shortage in the coming years because many children of plantation workers are not interested in working in tea fields even at the increased wages.
It was a derelict plant nursery with a few shabby buildings and concrete yards, but it lay amid the picturesque tea fields of the district of Longjing, or Dragon Well.
The trail began at Dahedong, a village in the shadow of a great dam, and climbed up steep terraces of tea fields before winding along a dry creek, a tumble of boulders suspended in mid-flow down the slope.
I could see the emerald tea fields of the highlands, the waves of forested ridges going down into the Rift Valley and the flamingo-pink-fringed lakes on the valley floor.
