Moving to the Moo Ban - Permanently????

[El Gibbon]

Yesterday I volunteered to help the family to lay a new water pipe from a gov't res. to a pond in their garden. This pond services a mangosteen orchard as well as a couple of gardens for personal use in growing vegetables.

The gov't pond is one of several around the area and the water is free as long as you provide the transport.
The idea was to lay a kilometer of pipe along with the elect. wire to run a 2 Hp pump.

This is where we started from.





This Komatsu digger was rented with driver for B400 / hr. Quite efficient actually.



We dug across this dirt track and then down the left side. The farm pond is located at the base of the hills in the background.




We laid right at 1000 meters of 2" pipe that came exactly to the edge of the pond to be filled.

It went quite well. Once we got within a couple hundred meters of the pond we traversed a rubber orchard. In this orchard are several monsoon drainage ditches. The digger got down in the trench and started clearing the brush, grass etc.

I continued merrily along gluing up joints until the ladies started hollering NGU! NGU! in unison. I was backside to the digger and BANG the bucket hit the ground a couple of feet behind me. I turned just in time to see this fella being bashed into little pieces by the digger guy and his bucket. In less than a minute the dude was history and buried.

With only a quick glance at what was rapidly being reduce to a pulp this is what I believe it was. It is the only snake in Thailand that even resembles in color and pattern what was at my feet. It is a Malayan, or Blue Krait. Very nasty flokker it is.

I found this pic on a website as I didn't have a chance to photo it myself. In fact I didn't take a lot of photos after we started since I was pretty grimy and gluey damn quickly.



All in all a good day, 1000 meters of pipe and cable laid and water running in slightly less than 8 hours. Of course many hands make for quick work. The ladies generally passed me pipe, glued one end and prepared the next section. The BiL ran the cables through a couple of fields/orchards and did the pump stuff.