Rice planting

Up at sparrows again – opposite the hotel entrance there were 5 ice cream carts parked and a huge block of ice sitting on a hessian sack.  5 young men each carved off some ice and placed it on a container in his cart and proceeded to hack at it with a sharp prong until the pieces slid down the sides of the round ice cream container.  It was then compressed with a piece of blunt wood and the whole process repeated until it was full.  All four different flavoured ice creams had to be treated the same way so it took some time and the thumping competed with the Aarti devotional songs being broadcast from the local temple.  The ice cream was produced in a two roomed shack at the back of the hotel. 6 boys from Udaipur and their boss lived there and made the ice cream in a fearsomely noisy machine in the dinginess of the room.  One boy was cook come bottle washer to them all. From June till late August when the monsoon is on they go home to Rajasthan, otherwise they work 7 days a week.  First stop was to the chai wallah and then to a family that produces bamboo baskets for drying and winnowing grains, mats, cribs, fishing baskets or whatever you wanted. Lying on their low roof were a dead duck and chicken – lunch they said, Sunday special when everyone is at home.  Then we went to the wholesale vegetable and fish market in the town – lots of ice in the fish market too.  There is a huge factory on the outskirts of Koraput that makes vast quantities of the stuff – many people still use ice instead of a fridge.  We passed the jail on our way out of town. Apparently prisoners work for 50 rupees a day – making things like incense sticks and small handicrafts or anything else they can make for sale.  When they leave prison they have a tidy sum to collect to help them on their way.  We went out to see another village where many of the men made pots and passed through coffee and black pepper (always seem to grow together), eucalyptus (for paper making) and cashew plantations scattered at the sides of the jungle covered mountains and hills whilst in the gulleys and valleys rice paddies were being prepared and planted. There are lots of rivers so irrigation is no problem. Vegetable fields being worked too – but many of the paddies were lying fallow, waiting for the monsoon. We watched buffalo fighting and found a dead snake which although not poisonous had been killed by children.  On this trip I have only seen red faced monkeys and one kite – hardly any birds except sparrows, drongos, egrets and little pond heron  although on the way here I saw an open billed stork.  No deer, no wild boar, not even a lizard – very strange.  Next time you eat rice think of the work that has gone into getting it on your plate - preparing paddies, planting the nurseries, taking plants to the flooded field and planting in two's three's and four's and then the work of keeping the fields irrigated,  eventually harvesting (cutting by hand), thrashing, winnowing and drying etc. etc. and that is before packing and transporting...  The extra is of a fight in the farmyard.  PICASA PICS HERE