We had a driver pick us up and drive us to Khao Lak where we will stay for the next 5 days. We made a few stops along the way so the driver could show us some interesting Thai countryside. We had been talking about cashew nuts. When we were in Cambodia, we bought a kg. of roast cashews for $6 US. We were told that standing under a cashew tree when it rains can burn or irritate your skin. Our driver pulled to the side of the road and showed us a cashew tree. Each cashew nut grows on the top of a fruit. Locals cut up the fruit, mix it with sugar cane and eat it. The driver climbed onto the roof of the SUV so he could reach a fruit with the nut on the top. Then he got a plastic bag out of the car and held the green cashew nut inside the plastic bag and then broke it open. The nut was not ripe, so the shell was soft. Inside was a miniature cashew nut attached to the shell by what looked like a little umbilical cord. The oil of the nut will burn your fingers. The nuts are picked and then roasted over fire and then they become edible. He showed us a video on his phone of locals cooking the nuts. The pot was literally on fire. They were using long sticks to stir and handle the pot, so possibly the fumes from this procedure are toxic as well. When all the nuts in the pot were black, they were dumped on the ground where they promptly started the grass on fire. They used the stick to rub them around on the ground until the fire was extinguished. Now they could be eaten.
We were also commenting on these stands of trees that were roadside. They were in orderly rows, but didn't many leaves. The driver said they were rubber trees, used for making tires. He pulled over and showed us where the bark had been cut and used to fashion a spout. Below the spout was a bowl (coconut shell) whose inside was all black. He said on average, it takes about 3 days to fill the bowl, some trees will fill it in a day, others take 10 days and it's still not full. The rubber is white as it comes from the tree, but turns black over the course of a year. He picked up a piece off the ground and we gave it a good stretch. It was just like elastic, or a piece of caulking. As we passed other rubber tree stands, we noticed that some of the cups looked like they had a white ball sitting in them, so they were full. There was a man with a black garbage bag on his back collecting the rubber. They cannot collect rubber during the rainy season.
We made one more stop and that was to see the pineapples growing. We have seen them before at the Dole plantation in Hawaii. I've always had the notion that pineapples grow in trees, but they actually grow on the ground.