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.