Change in Scenery

The kinds of 'roads' we drive down to
find these ponds...

     Today was much the same as the last couple of days. Drive down a paved road until the GPS tells us to turn off in search of a pond, navigate the gravel roads avoiding pot holes and soft spots, get out, talk to the maintenance workers, sample water, and repeat. We decided to move our home base to a place that my father wanted to see, a beach resort near Si Kao, and I am not complaining because it is absolutely beautiful. Outside my back window, there is a view of a river with a koh in the background, and the breakfast patio from which I write this post overlooks a similar vista. Last night we went to eat dinner at a beachside restaurant a couple kilometers from the resort, same picturesque setting.
     I saw my first shrimp today. Usually, the ponds are deep enough and the water dark enough that my eyes cannot penetrate into the parts where the shrimp live. They are bottom feeders, so they would not be readily apparent from the surface. The man we encountered raised up a little net of shrimp, and we were able to see the size of these things. They were about ready for harvest, and they looked healthy although I am not trained to detect disease in shrimp. This man's operation was just above the most rudimentary of ponds; the pond had no liner, and the aeration was sparse. I can only imagine what sorts of yields the people we saw later in the day would be getting.

SHRIMPIES!

     We were making good time, so we decided to go check out another cluster of ponds. As we drew nearer, we realized that these ponds were enclosed by fences and gates. We had not encountered any enclosures until that point, and we tried driving around to see if there was another entrance. Although the people in Thailand seem happy and not suspicious of our motives, it is decidedly not a good idea to go hopping fences or crawling under gates, so we stopped the car outside one of the gates and started beeping the horn. We could see that there was a house just inside the gate, but whoever lives there was either ignoring us or out tending to the massive shrimp ponds we could see in the distance. After that gate, we tried a different one we had seen earlier, and there was a man walking by just as we pulled up. He opened the gate, and we struggled to explain what we wanted, and he was more than happy to let us in and talk to us. This cluster had 8 ponds, and 7 were operational at the time. After doing the water quality tests, it was apparent that these ponds were the most well-managed in the sense that the nutrient levels were optimal for shrimp growth, but not so great from an environmental perspective.

Dinner with a view: a typical Thai 'koh'

     That was the last cluster of ponds we did yesterday. We are returning to the same area in order to try and gain access to the other cluster where no one was home, but honestly I just want to enjoy this beach resort because it is unlike anything I have ever seen. The koh do not even appear real; I wonder sometimes if I am trapped in the matrix or something... EEK! Goals for today are to knock out the remainder of the Kantang group and start on the Si Kao group so that maybe I can spend some time enjoying the resort rather than sitting on the bathroom floor testing water quality all evening. Stay tuned!