Oddoneout’s Adventures!

Well, it has been awhile since we’ve blogged about our adventures. Please forgive us, we’ve just been so busy lately, caught up in a flurry of one activity after another!

E is now a proud new father of a precious baby girl, Donna. As for the rest of us, we’re going to be proud owners of a new office! More about that later once we’ve made the transition.

Recently, we had the priviledge of visiting a durian plantation in Pahang.  I must say,nothing beats the taste of a freshly dropped durian than the beating your non-durian aficionado buddy gives you when you burp in the car and there’s no exit for him. Joy. For us at least. Probably a hellish nightmare for him.

I don’t know about you, but it’s never really occurred to me what the whole process of collecting durians is like. To me, when I think of durian and any form of processing, it usually starts with breaking open the shell, popping that fleshy seed into my mouth, licking my fingers and starting all over again.

Not to these workers though. You know that little ditty? Planting rice is never fun, bent from morning till set of sun? At least rice farmers don’t have to trod all over hilly regions searching for thorny fruits. These guys do, and these aren’t kuching kurah hills we’re talking about. Steep and at times, dangerous ones – in the forms of the local fauna.

We went up to one plantation after hearing that they had caught a snake. We couldn’t tell what species it was and we couldn’t speak Thai either, so we left not knowing what it was, only that it didn’t look too friendly!

Another time we were at this shack where they were packing the durians onto trucks for shipment back to Singapore and I over heard one of the workers speaking to the foreman in Chinese that they found tiger paw prints in one of the other plantations.

I guess every job has its occupational hazards. Oddly enough though, we found out that in the 30 years the plantation owner had been in business, not once has any one of his workers been injured by a falling durian! Apparently there’s a saying, “Durians have eyes. They watch where they fall.” Reassuring as it may be, it just didn’t feel safe whenever we heard a loud “thuuuuck!” right behind us, and we had no interest in setting a precedent!