Traveling to a typical reservoir in Jiangxi province or the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region provides only a small taste of what life is like for the people charged with monitoring and protecting them - yet that taste is a long-lasting one.

Whatever excitement I might have had about visiting these picturesque places quickly disappeared once the bus left the highway.

From the downtown area of Liujiang county, it took almost two hours to reach the reservoir I visited. Much of that is over steep mountains and bone-shaking dirt roads.