Today I visited a rubber plantation, PromThep Cape(famous sunset overlook of the Andaman Sea and elephant temple), a cashew processing plant, a Buddhist temple (Wat Chalong) and a Chinese shrine at Sapan Hin. Thailand is famous for some of it’s beaches too but I didn’t visit any of them.
The rubber plantation was along side the road and a women came out of her building/home and showed us how she cut the tree and the sap/rubber ran into a little bucket. Unexpectedly, the sap moves slower the hotter the tree is. The price of rubber has dropped from 100 bhat/unit to 30 bhat/unit so many plantations are moving to other crops or selling the land for buildings.
I wasn’t impressed with the overlook but we were there during the peak of the day and it’s supposed to be amazing at sunset but the elephant temple was pretty amazing. If you make a wish at the elephant temple and it comes true you bring an elephant figurine to the temple. There were lots and lots of elephant figurines of every size so many wishes have come true.
The cashew net is at the end of a piece of fruit the size of an apple. After the fruit is picked and the nut removed from the fruit, the nut is dried a little bit and then the outer skin/shell is removed by hand. It is a source of income for women and families. The ‘factory’ gives them a bag of nuts with their outer skin/shell which the women take home. In the evenings they remove the outer skin and when they return the skinned nuts to the factory, they are paid.
Notes on Thailand
- 7-11 stores and KFC are all over the place
- They have amazingly tangled wires on the telephone poles- many of these wires are actually internet cables rather than electrical wires
- Pictures of the king/former king are all over the place
- Thailand is proud that is has multiple religions and they live in harmony
