2006-07-21 - 18:29
It's rather hard to get out to the longhouses in the wilderness, but for teh cinvenience of toursts there's a cultural village nearby where some of the different structures are shown. Ladies sit weaving on a belt loom or cooking snacks that can be bought. Not as cool as the real thing i'm sure but you get an idea of it with narrow bridges made from two bamboo trunks, stairs from a single tree with small wedges cut out for steps, and walls made of thin tree bark. One of the tribes does not eat rice but sage from the sago palm. WE ate some cookies made with it, okay. But in the palm are also a kind of white worm that our tour guide showed us how to eat, alive. I didn't volunteer to try but 2 of our group did.
Later that day we shopped in the sunday market--piles of fruit, mushrooms I'd never seen, dried fish that smelled horrible. I smelled the fermented shrimp paste and tasted a durian. It really is true; it smells like a toilet but tastes creamy like ice cream. It wasn't bad, but the smell lingers and i was dying for a bathroom to wash the smell off.
