Bamboo Season

Around August its bamboo season in my village which means lots of people who normally works outside the village like in Bangkok come home because the bamboo is starting to sprout its shoots and these can be harvested and prepared for eating then sold to large companies. Any village (such as mine) that has a good source of bamboo close get to do this (£6-£12) in a day which is much more than they can get doing any of their normal jobs (£3-£6) for the large population of none highly educated farmers that live in this area.
Well this all sounds like fun to me and a chance to earn some extra money so time for me to give it a go:

Here's a couple of pics in my mossie prevention setup which consists of long sleeved top, coat over top, hat with face protection, wellies and thick combat trousers.

This is the view from a viewpoint while climbing up the mountain/jungle:

The view down the carefully trodden slope of the mountain.

A pic of me and Team at a resting point up the mountain.

This is what we are after this is the new bamboo shoots sprouting out the ground.

We cut the bamboo shoots with a long slim shovel called a "siam" in Thai as one type of bamboo that we are mostly after today is thorny bamboo and it has thorns all around the branches but luckily not on the shoots themselves. This is Team with some cut off bamboo shoots and his job was to skin them and pack them in the bags so and then pile them all back up in base camp.

This is out base camp with all the freshily cut and skinned bamboo.

Homeward bound with bags packed tight, I ended up carrying 35kilos on my back this day and team about 28kilos through the jungle a few kilometers and down the treacherous mountain path.

The bamboo is all cut into smaller pieces ready for cooking and then consumption in plastic bags these are then sold to someone with a pickup truck who then I guess sells them to large companies. This is probably close to about 1 ton of bamboo here.

Yay I am home from a day in a bamboo forest which is mosquito breeding grounds without a single a mosquito bite :) My following days weren't so lucky but still not too many bites. It is quite hard to wear all that clothes in Thailand's heat and also trekking through jungle/mountains.

I'm cutting rice brb

Just a quick post to say since I am jobless you would think I would be posting more often but I have to take every opportunity that's available for work over here. For the last week I've been in the fields cutting rice and will do a post on it in the near future but my next post will be about harvesting bamboo shoots in the mountain/jungle which I plan to complete tomorrow.

Here's a pic of me in my bamboo shoot cutting clothes:

Chicken Tuesday picture

I didn't have a picture yesterday for the chicken Tuesday post but I took one when I was at the market not a good one but a pic nonetheless.

It's a boy

Some of my closest friends and family know already but to the rest of you who don't Moni is now 5 months pregnant with a boy.

Rainy season

As its draws into mid November today the rainy season has pretty much ended and we only get the odd light shower every couple of weeks. During the rainy season though it was a different story and we had a range of different types of rain, a couple of times it was very heavy rain and it lasted 5 or so days which meant lots of flooding around Thailand. In Chiayapum it's mostly flat land with some mountains and when it rains we get dried up rivers flowing with water, fish and the chance to see some nice waterfalls. This pic is of the flooding river near us and this pic was taken on a bridge, you can see how high the river came up as the trees are not normally submerged.

The flooding was not only around the sides of the river but flowed through rice and sugar cane fields nearby and over the "road to civilisation" from my village. Don't worry we like to make good use of the the flooding road and get our bikes cleaned. You can see how high above the road the water came by looking at the people wading in the background and they weren't even in the deepest part.

After about 4 days after the rain stopped, so the water becomes clear again, me and Moni's dad headed up one of those previously dried up rivers into the mountains/jungle for some fishing and a chance at catching some crabs. There was about 5 or so waterfalls on our way varying in size and im sure there is a lot more further on but we were stopping and fishing at the time so we didn't go too far up the river.

Where's Wally... i mean Moni's dad :P

Oh and yes we use bamboo fishing poles because I am what the Thai's call "Falang Khi Nook" which literally translates to bird shit foreigner and what it means is I'm a cheapskate. :P

Chicken tuesday

Its exciting day today as it's chicken Tuesday again. As some of you may be aware that most chicken out here are not what they would look like in the UK and they don't have as much meat on their bones but every Tuesday afternoon at our local market a nice woman sells precooked what we call "Gai Fam" which translates to farm chicken and they are ones we buy in the UK with lots of meat. They cost about £3 so not the usual bargain price im use to with Thai things but worth the extra money :)

In fact Thailand is a massive chicken exporter so some of what you eat will indeed by Thai chickens.

There's no I in Team but there is a lot of Thai whiskey

This post is about a young boy whose parents split up and couldn't/didn't want to look after so the Boonkhan's (the family I stay with) whom are relations of these parents decided to take him in and bring him up. This young boy has now grown up and is known to most people in my village as Sum (in Thai it means long chin guess why they call him that) but his real name is Team. Now Team mostly spends his days working in Bangkok as a builder (maybe builders assistant) at the age of 17 and he usually goes to work for about 2-3 months at a time and then comes home to give his parents (the Boonkhan's not his real ones) some money and to help out on the farm when a new season starts. So anyone who might still be reading at this point please meet Team:

He's my drinking buddy and we do a lot together like hunting and fishing, oh also by the way this pic is actually part of larger pic with him holding up a dead rice rat that we got, this can be seen again when i do a post about hunting. As I said we also drink Thai whiskey together called Lao Khao its vile stuff and tastes something like what I imagine gasoline to taste like but its very cheap and very potent so it does the job.

The iron buffalo

In my previous post I showed some pics of me rice farming using one of the common Thai little tractors. Over here its called an "Egong" (I have no idea how to spell it) and they're a very important part of Thai farmers life. Its other name in English is the iron buffalo seeing as they have replaced the water buffalo's job of pulling a plough. I believe they are about 12-20hp engine so inexpensive to run and only need very little maintenance. They come with various addon's but for the engine and 1 addon they go at about £1,000 for  a brand new current model. Almost every family own one and use it regularly for numerous tasks.

You buy the engine which is pretty much what you see me pushing around and it has a long steering column which end in handle bars similar to a bike. Now the one the family I stay with have is very old and only cost about £400 when they bought it and is very simplistic compared to the more modern ones were you get a gear stick (I know what you're thinking "wow"). Well I quite like this simplistic one it just seems more hardcore to me as when you need to change gears you have to take off the rubber belt and move it onto a different gear while the motor is still running and everything is moving. From what I have seen for reverse they put the belt on in a figure of 8 across the gears like the below pic.

This tractor has many uses like from what we saw churning the soil and water when preparing for rice by simply attaching the plough  and instead of wheels they fit rotary puddlers (you can see this in the pictures in rice farming). The most common use of it is turning it into a cheap running allbeit slow truck by pulling a long trailer for transport and hauling large heavy loads. A final use for this tractor is to turn it into a pump to pump water from a nearby river/lake onto the rice fields.

Farming post 3

Baz wrote a comment about liking my farming posts so here is another update. In my last farming post we planted corn in the fields we occasionally weed the corn but other than that there isn't much to do. If you were doing it professionally then there is more work like food for the corn and insecticide etc but we only do this to make a little money.
While waiting for the corn to grow though it then becomes rice season and everyone rushed to plant their rice, I unfortunately didn't have much to do with the rice planting process this season but I of course did make an appearance to give a helping hand so here is me using their cheap version of a tractor to do what im guessing is similar to tilling the soil but rice fields require a lot of water so it looks quite a bit different.

If I am still around when they plant rice next season I will do a more thorough version but in the mean time there has been some weeding and now is about time for us to harvest the rice (Nov-Dec) so hopefully there will be another update soon on this.

Work

I have been meaning to make a post about working in Thailand for a while and how I am finding it and its been 5 months now so here goes.

I have a little desk and office chair which I got cheap from a local furniture shop they were able to deliver it for me to my house for free. The desk is made from cheap chipboard type wood and water got into the wood so it expanded and now it looks like quite old but it works as a cheap work desk so im mpt complaining.
Next to me I have a fan which keeps me cool and keeps some mosquitoes away while im working. Each day just before work I light a mosquito coil and it burns for around 8-9 hours so it lasts the working day just about and they only cost a few pence per each coil. These keep most mosquitoes off me but nothing works 100% so occasionally I get bitten regardless.

That's Bamboo's bed to the left and his bowl, under the desk you can see one of my mosquito coils burning, my laptop had an accident recently while doing a visa run to Laos so I had to buy a monitor which you can see. I do plan to do something about the messy cables but haven't as of yet.

I also bought some long light material trousers and t-shirt to also help prevent me from mosquito bites but the mosquito's can be big out here so some can bite straight through one lair of clothes and of course its too hot to wear 2 lairs.
Work is fine and the internet works most of the time so I am able to do what I need quite easily. I usually start work around 2.30-3.30pm Thai time so that's about 8.30-9.30am BST and this means I finish work about 10-11pm Thai time and around 4-5pm BST as I don't normally stop for lunch.

When I first came out here I wasn't sure how long I would be here but my guess was at least 6 months. Those 6 months are now up and unfortunately my work has chosen not to continue employing me which is a shame but gives me more time to get up to mischief so im not particularly upset but savings are rapidly depleting.