On The Klong

Well today I finally got to ride on one of the klong (canal) garbage collecting boats. I got to the boat area at 1 minute to 9am today after a 55 minute taxi ride from my room. I sat down with Khune Pee-koon one of the boat drivers outside his home which is above the canal. There was a drunk lady sitting with him who kept asking me the same questions again and again (10 times) she also wanted some money for whiskey from me, eventually sitting with us was a third person a polite woman named Wan-rop. I was thinking about walking out of the situation when the requests for money from the drunk women ( Aow) kept coming. Khune Pee-koon decided it was time to get to work thou so I followed them all down the boat which they loaded with baskets and various handmade tools. The device/tool they used to pick the garbage out of the canal water is a bamboo poll with the front metal grill of a fan tied to one end.

Three workers a driver Khune Pee-koon and myself got into the boat and we were off at about 925am. I started taking photos of the boat and the surrounding area, photographed the workers with their long poles, we had travelled for about 2 minutes, about 300 meters down the canal when the motor made a terrible sound. Khune Pee-koon pulled up the engine did a bit of work, started it again, same problem, same noise. After another 2 attempts to fix the engine we turned the boat around and paddled and polled it back to the peer area, my whole adventure had taken about 15 minutes!

I stuck around and photographed them trying to repair the outboard engine. Pee-koon had to climb into the canal water to take apart the engine drive shaft (think that's what it was). Eventually they got it all back into the boat and started taking it all apart using the most basic of tools, brown rusted crescent wrenches (also used as a hammer) and screwdrivers. Most everything they used was old rusty, to large and not working but they persevered and got one big part into 25 little parts.

I eventually found out from Khune Wan-rop that another boat would be leaving with a new driver and and some of the same workers from the first boat. At 11am I got on this second boat and we headed out into the canal!