Appreciate Cashew Nuts!

I am embarrased to say that until the other day I never gave it a thought as to where cashew nuts came from but boy oh boy do I appreciate them now. We packed the whole fam into our mini (as we call it) and we went in search of the Cashew Factory located in Phuket Town (phuket town is an adventure in itself).

A wonderful lady took us on a tour of the factory and the life of a cashew.
Cashews grow on this tree. The tree flowers… then a fruit grows…. and then cashew grows out of the bottom of the fruit. The tree produces flower-fruit-cashew once a year, this year has been late due to the weather.

 

Now we did not know but the fruit off the tree is used to make cashew juice, it is squeezed and the juice has excellent health benefits…………………….We enjoyed it alot, the kids drank so fast we had to get more.

These sacks of bags are full of raw cashews. You can not eat a raw cashew they must be put in the oven first because of the oil in the nut. So the process is…
from the sacks the cashews are boiled approx 1.5 hours then layed out to be dried. They boil them to make the shells hard so they are easier to crack open.

After the nut is dried they are then taken to the ladies who crack these nuts by hand, yes all of them by hand. On the day we came the workers had a day off for Chinese new years.

The ladies who work here are house wives and after the children go to school they come here to put in a full days work.

Inside a cashew nut is a very acitic oil that should not be handled by the bare hand. The workers spread coconut oil on their hands to protect them and then put on gloves. The cashew oil will stain and it can not be removed… that is why the work stations are so black.

This gentleman came over to show us a demostration on how they crack the nuts. We were blown away that these woman do this seven days a week eight hours a day. On the weekends our guide said it is like a daycare at the factory, all the worker’s children run around a play while Mommy works.

The woman who work here, their pay is based on Kg. They are paid for what they can crack. They are paid $17B/Kg = 70cents/kg. The average woman will crack 12kg/day = $6.00/day (canadian). I am amazed and the process is still not done yet.

These are all the individual work stations of each employee, 50 stations.

The woman who want to make extra money now take these cashews home and remove the skin off each cashew at night. For this they make 7B/kg = 20cents/kg (canadian)

We truly appreciate and enjoy the cashews we eat much more now!!!

After we toured the factory we went to the store to sample the many ways they season and cook the cashews. There was; roasted, coffee, chile, candy, sesame, chocolate, garlic, honey roasted… Our favorites were coffee, candy and sesame. The chili burned our mouths with the after taste, we could of spit fire.

After we purchased our nuts that I am sure Trent will eat in the next few days we went to watch the woman who sort and package the nuts. The cashews are individually inspected for quality and then passed on for packaging. So appreciate your nuts!!!

It was very interesting the visit here I would like to make a quick stop back when the ladies are all working to see how fast they are at cracking the shells.

On our way home from the factory Trent took us up a road that he saw on a map. This road had a large incline and all of a sudden we seen about 20 monkeys cross the road infront of us and a few goats. We passed a couple on our way and they were sweating buckets. This couple turned out to be from Toronto traveling for a year all the best to them.

Trent continued driving a few minutes and then there were hundreds of monkeys and a Thai man with them. We stopped the car and I was a little taken back by the numbers… there were so many monkeys I thought one could jump in the window.

Trent got out of the car and tried to communicate with the Thai man with no such luck in English but the man did pull out a little book out of his pocket and there were messages from previous travellers with comments about the monkeys. We have concluded he is the MONKEY MAN.

The Monkey Man gave Trent some corn kernals to feed to the monkeys, and then gave Emma a candy to give a monkey. The monkey came and took the candy from Emma and proceeded to open the wrapper and took out his candy… smart little fella, now he just needs to be taught to clean up his garbage. I do not have to many pictures of this event as I was filming the kids and the monkeys more. (sorry)

Our tailor Raj is a really great guy. Here Trent and Raj have matching shirts and they remind me so much of the movies “Twins” with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVido… Raj has Trent’s suit jacket and he looks like alittle kid.

Easton settled in and like a true man made himself right at home waiting for his daddy to finish his business… He is such a fun boy and he will amaze you when we get home…

I have mentioned that our friends the Olynyks were moving here before and they have finally arrived. It has been great for the kids and they have been having the best time. Tia is 6, Ty is 4 and Jaidyn is almost 1. Over the years we have met up in Mexico, Las Vegas, BC every summer and now Thailand. We have some wonderful memories.

We have been venturing around the island and the kids have been having a great time together… pool, beaches, dino park (mini golf) playing dressing up and any other waking moment they can squeeze in 🙂

One night for dinner we went to a shack on the side of the road and the kids were fascinated by the fish.. They loved to handle everything and take pictures. Emma is not girly when it comes to this, she loves checking it out and Easton of course was right in wanting to touch and hold everything on ice.

I caught the tail end of the sunset but it was still pretty amazing to see. There are times I wish I had my large SLR camera to get the great shots but my little digital camera has proved to be great to me. (I am not sure if you know this but I love to take pictures 🙂 … haha…

The gas stations here all close at 10:00pm. Out for a date and we were almost completely out so we pulled into the motorbike stop to put a few bucks in to get us home that night (trent always runs the tank nice and low) Good thing the bike pumps stay open late. Mostly I loved the intersting replica of the Shell logo on the stations pumps.

Trent and I have been away for a few days and now tomorrow night we are off again to Chiang Mai for the week. I will update when I get a chance.

I want to say to everyone who has been so wonderful in keeping up the messages to us, it has been an honor to have you join and enjoy our journey with us. Trent and I are so sad to leave here and time is speeding bye, we are not ready to leave, good thing Bonnie is having my nephew or we would be staying longer.

I must hit the sack, Trent and I are battleing a sinus cold and we do not have anytime to spare to slow down, the count down is on and we are scheduled to the hour until we leave… no joke!

Talk to you soon,

xoxoxooox Jode