This morning I was awoken at 4am due to the sound of the boats on the river heading off to the floating market - we were due to leave at 6am! We had breakfast on the river, bread with jam or cheese, which was surprisingly fresh after yesterday morning's experience. We made our way through the poverty stricken countryside on a little river boat and arrived at the floating market at about 7am. There were heaps of boats all selling the same thing, the way you could tell was that there was a long pole on each boat and on that pole was a sample of the produce that the lady or man was selling. They would spend 3-6 days a week living in their boat at the market before heading back to the farm which could be up to 100km away to refill their boat with produce and then head back to the market. Imagine living on a boat full of prickly pineapples!

After the market, and a delicious pineapple each we followed the river along starting from the rice fields and saw the process of how rice noodles were made, from the rice field-rice factory where the rice has the husk is removed and the rice is polished to the rice paper farm where the rice is cleaned, then rice water is made for bathing in or drinking, and the rice milk is heated or cooked (they burns the rice husks to create heat and they collect the ash for fertiliser) where is turns into rice paper then it is then dried on racks in the sun before going through a shredder where it turns into rice noodles. It is then wrapped up and sold at markets or exported. Now all while this is happening, at any stage where the rice is not fir for human consumption it is turned into a sort of porridge and fed to the pigs, then the pig poo is collected in a tank and a hose runs from the tank into big plastic bags and from here, through another hose to the kitchen where they use the gas for cooking…so they really use every single bit of the rice form beginning to end which I think is fantastic!

Also along the river we were shown the seedling farm where seeds and seedlings are planted in banana leaves and fertilised by the rice husk ash, they grow there until they are big enough and then they are sold to farmers so he can grow his plants. All produce that we would usually transport on trucks is transported by boat along the river and it's many canals, the boats are filled up almost to the brim before they follow the river to wherever it is that they are going. If there isn't a lot of produce, say just a few bags of rice, it is transported by motorbike or scooter, mind you, I've seen families of 5 fit on a scooter with bags of rice hanging off the back!