My side of the mountain: Early morning at the fish market!

I should preface this by saying this was about two or three weeks ago, but I've just gotten around to writing up the post and adding pictures. Sorry for the delay, people I promised to!

So writing a blog sometimes really does work in your favor. About a week before this excursion one of the Access Academy (AA) faculty, John, apparently saw my blog and thought my photos were halfway decent (my words, not his) and thought I'd be interested in checking out the fish market one early morning. Backtrack for a moment, AA is the first year for students joining AUW where they do intensive courses in the basics (reading, writing, math, science, and history) so when they actually start their first year of undergrad (UG1) everyone has the same foundation in classes. So it was one of the AA teachers who took me out to the market.

Well as any good fisherman would tell you, the early bird catches the, well, fish in this case. That means these fishing boats are out early early in the morning and we needed to be by the fish market early enough to catch them as they brought their daily catch in. I woke around 5AM and walked down to meet John at the other AUW faculty buildings and we grabbed a tuk-tuk to the other side of town.

We got there just as the sun was rising and had to pass through open market areas where baskets of shrimp and fish were being slung from wagons onto tables. Huge, square blocks of ice were making their rounds on vendor's carts throughout the market. Honestly it smelled exactly as bad as you would expect an open-air fish market in a country with open sewage problems. After about a five minute walk through the crowded market, we emerged to the other side where the docks and boats were, and I was absolutely stunned.

The following is terribly picture heavy, and I'm not really sorry about that. You came to this blog, so now you get to look at these photos. It's the closest thing I can get to making someone sit down with me and go through photo by photo (which, incidentally, I make my roommate do... sorry Minoli).

Here I was thinking that we would see small metal trawlers not dissimilar from those professional fishers use in the US to bring in their daily catch. I was pleasantly surprised to see that every boat was a beautiful dark carved wood. John mentioned they were Portuguese style and I have no clue either way, so I'm quoting him on that.

We walked around for a couple hours, then got tea in a small local tea stand and headed back home all before 9am. Can't beat that for a morning excursion!

Back of one of these boats, not a great photo for the lighting but gives a good idea of the shape and materials of the boats. You can also see the carved paneling in the boathouse. Is that a boathouse? This is an exercise in how little I know about boats.

By this time, the ships had come in for the morning and so those who weren't hauling in the catch were working on de-tangeling and mending any nets that had been damaged in the night.

The sun rising gave a really pretty golden tint to everything.

Loading fish onto a cart for market

Woman holding a baby in waist-deep water talking to fishermen.

Hauling in a load of shrimp(?)

This kid saw I was taking a picture of the boats, and at the last minute ran and jumped up into my photo. Probably the best picture I got that morning.