Cows for Oliver and Charity...

Grandma has a few cows that are looked after by a caretaker at his farm less than an hour from her house. Grandma promised the kids that they could each pick a cow and she would keep it for them and put their initials on it.
We had to take a tro tro there because the road is so bad that a regular car might not make it in and back.
The road was bumpy but very interesting. We saw many rice farms at different stages of production and a rice mill.
We went through a massive banana plantation...I can't begin to guess how big it is. Basically you are going along the road and all you can see is bananas along the side and when you see side roads you look down and you can't see an end to the bananas. They wrap the bananas in a blue plastic to keep them looking good.
Along the side roads they have cables that look like a ski lift, they hang the bananas on it and send them to the packaging area.
I believe this is a foreign company that runs the plantation and they employ a lot of locals...I have heard that they aren't paid well but I don't know if that is true.
I don't have any photos of the plantation because the tro tro was bumping up and down and every attempt at snapping a photo turned into a blurr or a photo of something inside the tro tro :)
We were travelling away from the main village road and I was surprised at all the people who are working and living farther and farther off the beaten path...it makes me think that there must be villages somewhere in the massive continent of Africa that are still undiscovered...or at least extremely isolated...

This is the farmers house from the back... This is the "road" from the farmers house....

The kids had help to choose their cow...
Tony was pointing out the ones they could choose from...

These cows were staring me down...one of the ones they let out of the pen actually ran at us and Grandmas was yelling for us to get farther away...too bad we didn't get that part on video...we laughed afterward but it was shocking to see it coming at us....

The kids chose white female cows and had quite an experience at the farm...when we arrived we sat for a moment with the caretakers family and tons of flies were landing on us....farm living is something else!

Some of the rice farms look like a beautiful lawn but if you stepped onto it you would sink in mucky water...

other stages in rice production...