So much to see

On the next day I have arranged for a guide, a driver, and a car – all for fifty dollars, 9 to 6, gas included. We visit half a dozen outlying villages where we walk around as my guide points out coffee and chocolate trees, cassava, mango, jackfruit, and papaya trees, long beans that are really really long, corn, hot red and green peppers, fish ponds, the biggest spiders you have ever seen, rice paddies, traditional house styles, oxen and baby oxen, butterflies the size of sparrows, and medicinal plants. We talk with people. They want to know where I am from, am I really traveling alone, why, and how old am I? We visit tapioca chip and manioc “factories” that are really just long, hot, dirt floor sheds with squatting workers who earn six dollars a day, a noodle factory, a sawmill. It is all very engaging, very revealing, the architecture unique, the enthusiasm of the people contagious. I am having a grand time.