Oberon resident Kay Jones, who is travelling overseas, has been sharing her experiences with Oberon Review readers.
I'm sitting on the front verandah of my friend Na’s home, watching as her village comes to life. It is 7am and I slept in today, probably because the air is so much cooler as Na tells me we had rain last night.
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Rain is such a blessing for me as it cools the air down - a relief from the sticky hot heat.
I am in Wungdod Village, one-and-a-half hours east of the city of Khon Kaen in north-east Thailand. I've come here to visit my friend Na, who I met in Chiang Mai five years ago.
Na brings me a cup of tea and two muffins. I sit here eating them, watching the road in front of her home. It is busy now with a village “taxi” ferrying people down the road to the farms where they work.
This taxi is nothing like the taxis we know. The village people call it “tek tek”. It really is a farm machine - sort of like a very elongated tractor with a wooden box trailer on the back that people can hop into. It really is a detachable plough that is used on the farms to plough the rice fields and to plant the rice seeds.
The main mode of transport here are motorbikes. Every family has two or three and they go past here all the time.
Na is out calling her chickens; they have gone next door. All the chickens roam free so they are truly free range chickens.
The roosters are raised as “cock fighters”. In front of me two young cocks are roaming on the grass, practising their cock fighting skills.
The main cock who rules the roost here is pecking around the verandah scavenging for any bugs he can find.
The verandah gets covered in bugs in the evening and Na sweeps them away in the morning, so there is nothing much for him to find here.
All the chickens in Thailand are very thin and scrawny.
The ones with the long, thin legs are the ones they use for cock fighting.
Na brings me a bowl of fried bugs to eat that her neighbour just gave to her. They look like large, fat grasshoppers. Yuk! No way!
Later Na is going to take me down to her farm to show me how she grows rice and check on her ducks, chickens and water buffalo.