Rubber trees


This is an interesting twist from our synthetic western world of rubber.  We drove past a rubber tree farm today. Shaji stopped the car and let us explore.  There were literally thousands of rubber trees and this is the original way rubber is collected.





They cut or score each tree in a spiral towards the ground. The raw rubber literally oozes each night down the spiral and into the little chute and into the little black cup. You can see it collected in the cup.  They construct this little rain guard out of green vinyl and this keeps the collection cup from filling up with water.  It is the end of monsoon season so rain does come into play.


Once it is all collected, the contents are poured into large vats and are mixed with acid and some other coagulant and it makes a blob of rubber. The press is shown in the background and it used to press the rubber into sheets that you see hanging and drying. They start white and are hung outside and then begin to yellow as they set up. This puts them into a form that can be shipped and the farmer basically sells it by the kilogram.

Rubber mats are drying and are darkening. The other cool thing is the ladder hanging on the wall that is acting as a drying rack. It is an original bamboo ladder used to harvest coconuts.  We say a guy today walking down a remote road with his head stuck between two rungs and he was balancing this on his shoulders.  Shaji said he was going to harvest coconuts. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

India's Independence Day (August 15, 2023)

Image
Tuesday, August 15 is India's Independence Day.   The Genpro office was closed and Craig McIlloy was here from the Edinburgh office.  He was staying at the Leela so we decided to spend the day there. Flower petals are used to decorate all over.  The Leela had a few displays with the Indian flag colors.  This was one in the middle of the lobby with a sunken seating area.  The boys were seated here while we waited on Craig. We had lunch at the Leela restaurant and had the Indian buffet.  This gave John a chance to try most of the traditional dishes. The desserts were incredible.  I had to get a little of many of them so I could taste it.  I ended up eating all of the desserts.  The white piece with the flag on top of the trifle was white chocolate.  One of the desserts had caramel in it.  They were delicious. Craig and Marshall needed to work on a presentation for the Catalyst officers so they booked a conference room and spent m...
Read more

Workers.....

Image
We saw a group of women gathered on our road one morning this week. Shaji said they are here for government work.  They are cleaning fields around us and they are paid a daily wage of 300 Rupees which is about $3.60.  When we got home Saturday night, they were just finishing for the day, so they must work six days a week. The government has this program in place to ensure people have a way to earn wages and meet the need of cleaning up around each individual village.  They worked along the road and cleaned across from our house yesterday. A man worked in our yard yesterday.  He was cutting the grass and with a short blade.  He also cut down dead banana tree branches with a ladder and worked hard all day. A man comes to clean the pool a few days a week.  He is wearing a dhoti. We see them everywhere and Marshall has decided he wants to own one.   . Today a man was yelling outside of our fence.  Marshall thought it was the pool guy so he opened the ...
Read more

Goodbye to Kovalam

Image
On Saturday, August 26, we decided to walk through Kovalam one last time.  Here are a few of the sights.  We passed this lady every morning.  She was selling fresh fish under the overpass as we got onto the bypass from Kovalam to the Technopark in Trivandrum. We always looked to see if she was still there at the end of the day.  Some days she was still there. This man is carrying milk on his bicycle. He would get it from the farmers and would ride to your house and then dip it out into whatever container. We watched him go house to house  For us, we bought milk in plastic bags from the market.  It was still very fresh and we would get about a pint per bag.  Our home is near Venganoor.  We turned left after leaving the Bypass.  If we turn right, we can go to the fishing village. The road signs are in Malayalam and in English.  We lived on the border of Kovalam and Venganoor. This is the last view of the fields across from our house. The w...
Read more