Thursday 9th Feb.

Vegetable seedlings

Planting around the bananas

Waking early to the sounds of the jungle had quickly become our norm. Breakfast at 7:00am and off to clean Khamlin's shelter before teaming up with Joe to select banana trees to relocate to the garden. Afterwards, we spent the rest of the morning working in the garden, planting vegetable seedlings around the newly transplanted trees, mulching with straw and sprinkling a mixture of soil and manure to enhance the existing sandy soil. Each bed received a liberal watering by hand, filling the watering cans from nearby cisterns.

Young Macaque

'Gib' the gibbon

After lunch, Derek took us over to the monkey shelter and with Chan, we were introduced to each of the Macaques, a couple of them only a few weeks old. The sole gibbon 'Gib" was visited each day by a wild female - but unfortunately, due to his being rescued from domesticity, it was not possible to release him into the wild with her, as he did not possess the skills to forage and feed a future family.

Banana plantation

Banana bandits

Later that afternoon, we all jumped into the wagon, pulled by the 'Cambodian tractor' setting off down the road to a local farm to cut banana trees. Long handled machete's easily worked their way through the thick and watery trunks and we selected the biggest trees we could find to load up on to the wagon.

Farming family

Our room mate!

A run to the local store for supplies rounded out the afternoon and we purchased some fruit flavoured sodas - the best being a lychee drink which wasn't too sugary and had some pulp in it. That evening we had free time to do as we pleased and the group congregated around the table outside, exchanging travel stories and enjoying the local beer.