Muara Kayong

Our eighth village is Muara Kayong. It is located on the Pawan river, which is chock-full of water right now due to nightly rains. I love living by large rivers because it means that bathing and using the WC are more pleasant experiences – instead of sharing a small river with many other users, each house has its own bathing spot, complete with a private toilet. As an added benefit, I can go swimming each evening when I bathe!

The most interesting aspect of Muara Kayong is it’s large, 10-year old oil palm plantation. My first day in the field we mapped the palm plantation, and for the first time (after over a year of studying oil palm) I saw mature oil palm and the fruit itself. Fresh fruit bunches are the raw product from oil palm trees. They are just that: bunches of palm fruits, growing where a coconut would on a coconut tree, between the leaves of the palm and the trunk. The fruits are quite pretty, red-orange-brown, the size of a plum, and very easy to harvest. The big drawback of oil palm fruit is the speed with which it must be processed – to make high quality palm oil, fruit must arrive at the factory within 24 hours of harvest. Unfortunately for Muara Kayong, the factory that supports their plantation doesn’t have a very large capacity, and much of the fruit goes to waste or is converted to low quality, low value oil.