Sunday, July 19, 2009

Day trip to Malaysia

I haven't seen my gran for ages, and this being my last week out, we decided to make a day trip in. This time we brought Yx's mom and brother along too, in addition to mom's usual rambutan-picking kaki, Leng-leng. It happens to be the rambutan season, so there was plenty to do!

Before we reached gran's place, we made a detour to one of our suppliers' garden. In addition to a chicken-rearing fascility, he has a private stash of dragon fruit plants. I have 3 plants at home actually, but they are just being gross and refuse to flower or fruit.

The flowers are actually very pleasant. Huge, though.

Mom & Leng-leng are somehow fast friends with the chaps there, so even when the boss isn't around, they are entitled to free pickings of the fruit. I really didn't expect that they'd harvest a barrow-full of the stuff though.

My uncle's pulasan plantation is teeming with the fruits, as well as duku langsat (Lansium domesticum).

Tonnes of pulasan! We ate as we worked, and ended up over-indulging in fruits.

Hmm .. were we harvesting them or eating them?

Mom looking quite un-glam.

Harvesting the duku was quite a challenge though - the fruits are borne on the top branches of the tree, necessitating a climb up.

2 monkeys on the duku tree - Leng leng on left, mom on right. And Yx later got inducted as a third monkey!

Dad cheating & collecting the rare duku that are borne on the lower branches.

The harvested fruits are later sorted (Yx doing the sorting here!), and the green ones and split fruits are discarded first, followed by sorting by size.

This pic makes them look a little like baby potatoes.

There was this other tree with fruits that is very similar to the duku, but I was told it's a separate entity altogether. True enough, the tree looks different, and - if you'll believe it - the fruits are even higher up on the tree! Unlike the duku where the fruits come off easily from their stems, this other fruit is held together in bunches that are horribly tight and difficult to extract.

I actually managed to retrieve a few fruits using a long pole, and they tasted a hell lot nicer than the duku! We were upset that the rest of the fruits were way beyond reach though (see the picture below. The tree in question is that tallest one just to the left of the centre of the pic, and you can just make out a brown mass on one of the branches - that's how high they are!) Leng leng was not to be defeated however; she took an ultra-long pole, and marched off to conquer.