Mack Adventures: Bali - Day 7- Goodbye Sudaji

Our last day in Sudaji, Zanzan told us that he would like to take us on a walk to his fathers rice field...which is now worked by another family member. Earlier in the week, Zanzan had told us the story of how he decided he did not want to be a farmer. When he was a young boy...old enough to work in the fields, his dad gave him the job of shovelling the manure out of the send with the cows and placing it in the rice fields. It was hot, hard, stinky, wet, mucky work. He told us how he swore with each shovel full..."I will not be a farmer, I will not be a farmer". Before quitting to start the bamboo cottages and the OMunity idea in Sudaji, Zanzan did in fact go to school and worked in the hotel industry...

Of course we headed out walking....our first sight was some people harvesting cloves from the tops of the trees using a long bamboo ladder...basically a long bamboo stick with rungs along it...certainly the right tool for the job.

Climbing up

The worker thought it was great we were taking his picture so he waved!

The rice in the family field is quite a bit taller than the other rice because Zanzan's family grows the Balinese white rice which is a 6 month rice instead of the 3 month variety that most people plant.

Zanzan showed us where the water was diverted into the field which used to be farmed by his father. At that time, his father had been the leader of the village. Zanzan was showing us how the width of the water channel had been adjusted. When his father was the leader of the village, the water channel was wider because part of his payment (as leader) was in water. When he was no longer leader, then the channel was made smaller again, so he had the same amount of water as everyone else.

All of my readers who understand the growing of rice may laugh at me, but growing up on the Canadian prairies did not really give me much context for rice production. I didn't know (or I guess had never thought about it) that the water in the rice fields actually flows from one field to the next and that the rice is actually growing in moving water. Ok, it is moving really slowly, but it is moving. It is an amazing feat of engineering that the water runs from field to field to field. I was suitably impressed by it all...

Back to my day...next to the rice fields that used to belong to his father, there is a little yard and hut area. The hut holds the cows which the farmer uses to help plow the fields, but which also produce the manure that is used for fertilizer. Zanzan said that his family's rice field has never had commercial fertilizer on it.

There was a passion fruit vine in one of the trees and Zanzan knocked down some the fruit for us. Another thing I didn't know about passion fruit is that it is a vine that grows up into other trees, and isn't actually a tree itself.

The fruit

The fruit broken open to expose the juicy seeds,

All the seeds are gone...

While we were there a woman came along with a bag full of snails that she had collected from the rice fields...escargot soup for lunch!

We walked back across the rice fields to the village.

r Sanur. Though the distance is under 100km, the trip took more than 2 hours because of traffic and narrow roads. Occasionally there would be a less busy area and it would seem like we were flying along, but Bob could see the speedometer, and we actually were going about 70 at those super speedy times.