LumpiaLife

Over the next few days we build our new bamboo fence out of the recycled bamboo we got from the fish pens. We cut, cleaned, and quartered a good amount of the newly acquired bamboo and got to work. It took Mario and I three days to complete the fence, working about 7 hours each day. Once the bamboo was cleaned and cut, we put up twelve whole bamboos as posts. It took us two days to do this. It has been raining each day, but we had to keep going to get things done. When all the whole bamboo posts were up, it was easier to put everything else done. I can say that, the process of preparing the bamboos (acquiring, transporting, cleaning, and cutting) are by far the hardest part, although building the fence is not really that easy as well. There are still a lot of leftover bamboos, so we offered the rest to Mario so he can replace his old and rotten bamboo fence.

This blog covers two days in the river. The first day Mario and I finished tearing down the second fish pen which took approximately 6 hours of working in the river, and the second day consisted of towing the two loads back to our beach house. Again, it was not an easy task to recover the bamboo as the river depth was sometimes over our heads and with zero visibility I decided to not even wear my mask this time as it was more of a hassle than helpful. The bamboo/kawyan poles were caked with many shells (Taba), and we saw lots of purple and leopard looking crabs. Some even were crawling all over me (and yes, a little creeped out about that) as their homes were being torn down. We started the job around 0700 HOURS and finished around 1400 HOURS. I'm pretty sure this was the hardest day of working since I retired. The second day was to collect all the bamboo that we had put together from the two fish pens. We hired one of Mario's friends that had a pump boat (A pump boat is an o...

What a crazy adventure and work I did today, working just a few feet away from a cemetery and amongst mangroves. I had to ask if there was anything harmful in the water such as alligators, snakes, or leeches. I was assured no alligators or leeches, but the harmless water snakes do come out at night. We set off from our beach house and paddled about 45 minutes against the slow current of the Masao River passing many fish pens. It was so surreal to be amongst all the different culture that I had ever seen in my life. We saw a few fishermen in single dugout canoes, making it feel like we were paddling up a remote river and tribes might start lining the shoreline. Once we arrived to one of the fish pens we purchased, we slowly guided the boat to the shore. The first thing I saw upon docking was a cemetery located a few feet from the shore. Mangroves lined the shoreline, and the partially disassembled fish pen was ready to be recovered. The ground was very soft, slimy sediment, and every...