Sugar Cane Factory

So... last week while Monica & one of her friends were here visiting we went out with a local friend to visit a couple different villages.

When we arrived to a certain village we were directed to this factory to wait for the village leader to come meet us...

This is a sugar cane processing factory.  

Here is all the harvested sugar cane, grown in & near this village, waiting its turn in processing.

It is then fed through this machine where the sugar-juice is pressed from the cane and fed into the factory... while the shredded cane shards are dried out to fuel the factory's fire.

This poor chic has the hottest job there... literally.  She was feeding the dried sugar cane stalks into the furnace/ fire that "cooks" the sugar-juice.

The sugar-juice goes into the very back holding/ cooking pot/ cauldron.

Then as it is purified & processed it is moved to the front cauldron where it is boiled and boiled

and boiled...

Until it is pushed to a cooling area...

Where it becomes sugar cane carmel & is then stored.

You probably can't run out to the store and grab any of this... 

but we can!

As it turns out... this sugar cane carmel is used to sweeten many of our sweets & baked goods here!

After hanging out & waiting for the village leader for a while we took a walk out into the nearby fields.

Since we do stand out a bit (shocking, I know right?) we drew some attention & were able to meet some more interesting folks from this village.

We were offered fresh coconuts to drink, straight from the tap, and I was given some yummy local veggies from these sweet ladies to cook in my home :)

As we made our way through the different villages we met a large group of schoolgirls... 

who wanted autographs (not kidding) and pictures with the white ladies!

Then... of course... being in south asia... we could not have a trip without seeing a monkey...

this one really looks like a little rascal... missing a hand & everything!