Bamboo

Bamboo is a plant with million and one uses with some very hair raising tales....... hehehe!!!! My very first encounter with bamboo was with the leaves yes!!! the always so delicious bak chang my mum used to make, the delicious thingy is wrapped in bamboo leaves.

My early involvement with bamboo was making pop guns, fishing poles and kites as a kid. Pop gun works on compress air principle and the ammo was usually mashed newspaper. Bamboo is great for making kites because of its light weight and strong tensile strength. Haven't played with both of these self made toys for decades and used to have great fun playing with them ......... hmmm!!! maybe I might make a pop gun tomorrow.......hehehe!!!

The kampong I stayed in when I was a kid had lots of wild bamboo patches growing and of different species. The patch that is most suitable for making pop gun or kites is just about a hundred meters behind our house after the undergrowth. About ten meters after the bamboo patch was a house occupied by a scary looking old lady with a shrieky voice. To chop the bamboo from that patch, I used to use my mum's meat cleaver because it is razor sharp ........... errr!!! my mum doesn't know. A very sharp knife is required so that the bamboo can be cut very fast and dragged into the bushes and into our backyard before the scary old woman comes out shrieking. Later on I found out from my mum that the old lady told her that we can cut as many bamboo as we like. Guess it must be just imagination of a kid's mind that the old lady is scary.

I was a boy scout when I was in school and I always attend our camp fire. It was really fun during the campfire with all the singing, eating, jumping around and off course the girl guides. Anyway the campfire usually end around 10:00pm and my only mode of transport was by bicycle. I lived about eight kilometers from school and I had to cycle most part of the journey home alone. I am sure if you are in my generation and living in Malaysia you must have come across some kind of a eerie supernatural story right???? During that time the road was not that brightly lit at night and the road leading to my place after the town was quite deserted. Along the way there is a huge patch of bamboos just beside a mosque, on cool moon lit breezy night, the shadows and rustling of the swaying bamboo always without fail recall eerie stories like pontianak into mine mind .......... my legs will start to pedal real fast until I reached home ............. guess what I am not getting goose bumps ........ looks like it is not that scary anymore .............................

Today I collected some fence bamboo to make trellis for my mini farm :)