Up early enough the next day – 8am, and back on the bikes. This was a shorter trip – just 100km through to the capital of the highlands.
First stop was looking at a guy working on a pile of rocks by the side of the road.
He chiseled a hole into the stone, then hammered in pieces of metal to put pressure on the rock, and finally with a sledge bashed in the final piece of metal – and the rock splits neatly into brick-sized chunks.
We passed another place where we got to see the actual silk worm worms wriggling around. 800m of silk from one worm. Only 500m in Cambodia ;)
And mushrooms too… not sure how different this is to how they do it in Ireland (someone out there knows ;) they get the loam from the Rubber Trees (more on those later!), and then they heat it!? or so they said, to steralise the soil – then they wrap in plastic, and keep moist – and mushrooms appear. At least I think that’s what they said. The part that confused me was – if they get the soil, and then steralise them – where do the mushroom spores come from?!
Then it was onto the capital of the highlands, where we checked into our hotel and headed out to a national parky kinda place.
Where we had a pleasant walk by lots of waterfalls (quite impressive really)
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We were then left to walk a few km through the jungle and Loc and Hung would pick us up at the far end. It did decide to piss rain – but didn’t really matter as there was excellent shelter under the trees.
And slightly out of order is this pic of another factory we went to – where they made (Again by hand) vases, well all sorts really, from concrete.
oh, and the flower is a banana flower, the other pic of Mhairi and Loc
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That night we were left to our own devices for dinner (so far we’d been having our meals with Loc and Hung) WE checked out the place they’d suggested, but it seemed a little expensive (like $2 a main or something crazy) ended up getting some quite tasty fried chicken from a street vendor – and a soupy thing, for a dollar fifty I think it was.
The next day when we were saying this to Loc – he explained (And I remembered) that there was the whole bird-flu scare going on. An Irish guy out here said it was pretty hard to get – and if the meat is well cooked you should be ok.
But I don’t think I’ll be having any more chicken for a while!
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