Lazy Susan

After dad and I did the Living Land tour mum requested if I could do a blog post about it and, as usual, I was more than happy to oblige. So, with a bit of a sore tummy I thought would pass over, we set off on our last adventure in Laos.
On the way, we picked up some people from another villa. In this instance Min (or my grandma for readers who aren't family) would've said "Gee, it's a small world isn't it!" because these people ended up being an Aussie family with two kids, 10 & 9! Anyway, we were driving through some dirt tracks (another point for you Min - we passed Ock Pop Tok on the way!) when we arrived at this farm with a veggie garden growing everything from radishes to dragon vegetable (dragon fruit in vegetable form), glittering green rice paddies and in the middle a grand bamboo hut/house. We started our tour by meeting a water buffalo, named Susan.
Now, a funny story about Susan. Around the end of the activity I'll talk about next, Susan started getting a bit tired. So, our farmer/guide started saying "Lazy Susan!". We were all cracking up but the funniest part was that he didn't know what a Lazy Susan was!
Anyway, after we were introduced to "Lazy Susan" the guide said "Now, who wants to ride Susan?". I'd never ridden a water buffalo before so, naturally, I put my hand up. I popped on the buffalo and, oh my, it was an experience! The back had all of these ridges on it so as I started riding (remembering there was no harness on this animal) I started bumping up and down and up and down until the point when I thought I would fall off! After a few other people had had their go, they started attaching a plough. So I did two things I thought I'd never do in my life; ride a water buffalo and walk around thigh-deep in mud ploughing rice, while this huge water buffalo drags me along at what felt like 100 miles an hour!
Now that we were back on land we, naturally, had to harvest the rice. So, we got our machetes out (really, they got their machetes out for us) and set off to work. But it wasn't that simple. First, we had to go to the blacksmiths and sharpen our weapons. Look down at the photos, I think some of the funniest are from this activity. I think everyone's arms were tired enough but, nevertheless, we set off to harvest the rice!
The rest of the day went like this:
We dried the rice,
We shook the dried rice off the rice plant,
We carried rice around like the old women would,
We pounded the dried rice out of its shell,
We got all of the shell out of the rice kernels (most of the rice got out too!),
We made rice milk & rice flour
& we also made sugarcane juice, not to mention sticky rice!!!
So, after a walk through the beautiful veggie gardens we sat down to eat all of these snacks made out of, you guessed it, rice! And let me tell you, I loved everything to the moon and back.