OUR FIRST TREE IN SOUTH AMERICA!!!

Fortunately for all of us, our lovely hosts and friends, Fabiana and Rolo at Hostal La Morada in Cafayate were planning to plant a nice tree in front of their hostel but hadn’t yet got around to it.

When we asked them about planting a tree at La Morada they were just delighted.

A lovely young orange tree was planted in the place of a dead bush in front of the window of La Morada’s common room.

Fabiola and Rolo, we’re so pleased to have spent time with you in Cafayate and to have been able to plant this tree for you. May it grow tall and strong and when you pick your fresh fruit, may you remember the good time we had in La Morada together.

We congratulate you on your great achievement of becoming independent from your city jobs; you are an inspiration to us! We look forward to seeing you – next time.

Location: Hunua Falls Reserve, Auckland, North Island, New Zealand.

This magical spot in the Hunua Reserve is now home to three more indigenous trees, planted on our Planting Around the World mission. Naturally, we had to plant a tree in New Zealand as part of our visit, but not to forget, we still owe one to Vanuatu.

Actually we decided to plant three trees. One for Vanuatu, one for New Zealand and another just in case we end up in a situation in South America where we don’t manage to plant one. (Or if this doesn’t occur then we’ve planted one extra.)

Since Mother’s Day this month, we also named after and dedicated these three trees to our mothers (one of them of course being our GRAND mother).

On the East side of the river, sits Zuhal (Alectryon Excelsus / commonly known as Tītoki):

On the West, Jennifer (Alectryon Excelsus):

And on the East side at the base of the waterfall, Esme (Beilschmiedia Tarairi / Taraire):

Happy Mother’s Day to you!!!

And thank you New Zealand, for showing us another beautiful piece of our planet. Your nature conservation efforts are outstanding. We hope that our small contribution is appropriate.

What better place for a tree to be, than in the heavenly sunshine of this precious little island of Fiji?

No nurseries around here, but that won’t stop us continuing on our mission. Tropical islands tend to go hand-in-hand with an abundance of coconuts. And coconuts come from the coconut Palm Tree!

Countries we still need to plant for are: Singapore, Vanuatu and here, Fiji.

Scattered on the beaches here it’s possible to find coconuts that have been moistened enough to germinate, but they lack a stable bed where they will not be swept up into the sea. We pick up a couple of these and find them a new home.

The first, for Singapore, we planted on land-edge of the beach directly opposite Dolphin Island, on the South-East tip.

The second (for Fiji) was planted in the Zen garden in the South-West.

This tree is named after and dedicated to Ebru’s brother Savaş. Savaş, of course you now have a duty to visit this point, but don’t worry that’ll be the easy bit. The difficult part will be having the will to leave.

Our Australia trip ends up in Petri, just outside of Brisbane. We lodge here with the Ritti’s, some old friends from Austria – or South Africa (?) for a week before our departing flight.

This is our final week here so it’s time we get going on our tree planting mission. The last tree we planted was in Indonesia. However, we haven’t planted trees in Malaysia and Singapore, due to the short time we spent there, so we do have some catching up to do.

In Petrie, right behind the Ritti’s house, there’s a beautiful park by the North Pine River, called the Mungarra Reserve. So we have a safe location for them to grow up in; now we need to find the trees.

Luckily this is not too difficult either. Just up the road we find Theo’s Nursery and Garden Centre. The ladies there help us identify good, resilient, indigenous breeds, and we buy two Citridora, one for Malaysia and one for Australia.

We pay for the trees and stick around a little while to chat with the ladies from the nursery. We tell them the story of the Planting Around the World mission we’re doing, and they’re so pleased about it that to support us, they refund us the cost of the trees! How generous is that??

Well, we take the trees down to the park and get them planted, both about 10 metres from each other, so that hopefully when they’re fully grown, they will be “right next to” each other, and make a pleasing picture to the eye.

Ebru has a bright new idea and decides it’s time to start naming and dedicating trees as well, so one of these receives the names of, Zülal, her sister.

We’re really pleased that we’ve been successful in another step in our mission. “Grow little ones, grow!”

And thank you to the lovely ladies at Theo’s Nursery and Garden Centre, Petrie, for kindly supporting us in our endeavour. It motivates us and encourages to continue, when people voice positive sentiments about our crazy little idea, so thank you!

Tree number 8!

We have come through Indonesia starting from Jakarta on Java, and moved our way East, over Bali, and found a most restful spot on the North-Eastern tip of the beautiful Island, Gili Trawangan.

We spent about two weeks here in total, not keen to move from this spot of blissful sunshine, clear snorkeling waters, brightly coloured coral fish, a bungalow overlooking the bright beach and good company in form of the Indonesian, Chaia, managing the HiStory Bungalows next down the road.

Chaia was very keen to support us in our tree planting mission and kindly allocated us a spot in the garden before the HiStory Bungalows.

Here we planted a local breed called “Magnolia”, according to the local sellers whom we bought it from. They came down the street with these trees and plants in a cart, probably a day-trip from Lombok. A mobile nursery – who’d have thought?!

It should flourish in this climate and hopefully, in years to come, provide some much needed shade to guests of these bungalows.

Our thanks to Chaia and HiStory Bungalows for allowing us to plant in your garden! May the tree grow strong and healthy and grace your space, attracting many good, peaceful guests.

This tree is for Indonesia. May if flourish along with the wellbeing and prosperity of your people. – Something indeed needful, given a painful history (and in part, present) of brutality and exploitation.

Another two trees in the ground!

Once again we are planting two in one country – one for Cambodia and one for Thailand.
Why not Cambodia in Cambodia? Well you see, we only stayed in Cambodia for about 48 hours, barely enough to see the Siem Reap complex and have a good night’s sleep.
But we entered the country so we can’t really cop out on planting a tree can we?

Location: *L* Koh Lanta Island. About 100 miles South of Phuket in the Andaman Sea, Koh Lanta is – as we found out – a real jewel where time runs slow and days are spent enjoying the subtler things in life: resting, eating, drinking, swimming and watching beautiful sunsets.

After nearly three weeks in Thailand we found a little nursery here and decided it’s time to get our hands dirty again. As far as we could gather from the staff at the nursery, we bought a Muang tree and a Lucky Plant or Pusetii which has white flowers. Well as far as I’m concerned, as long as it grows it can be called what it likes!

On our hired scooter, we set off on a reconnaissance around the island, two trees and a large digging implement in hand, search of planting ground.

Tree number one was planted on the South East of the island, on the road side about twenty metres before the Panorama Restaurant. This is a nice isolated little place where people stop by on their scooters to come relax and dine whilst taking in the beautiful view of “Homer Simpson?!” Island and the stretch of sea between them.

Jack the owner is a really friendly chap who believes in making people feel really at ease in his little place and he was even kind enough to offer to take care of our tree for us and put up a little plaque by it so it can be identified when we return in years to come. Thank you Jack!

The second tree found a home a few minutes drive further South. Where the road ends there is a school named Sang Ga U School, where we found a lonely looking patch in need of some vegetation.

There were a few children around, playing in the school grounds, but it must have been a holiday because there didn’t seem to be any other activity at the school.

Once we started planting however, more of them started appearing and soon enough we had a proper little audience. The ground was hard and as I struggled to dig up the ground it started raining, which the children found very funny indeed. However despite getting me soaking wet, it was helpful in softening the ground for me.

Tree firmly in the ground, we waved our goodbyes and set off to a small beach-side bar for a refresher. Ebru, walking in with a large pick-like tool in her hand, looked like she’d just walked off a murder scene. LOL

That’s Six and Seven done! How many more to go? I wonder…

Grow little ones, grow!

Planting Around the World Mission, Koh Lanta Island – Ağaç dikme operasyonu, Koh Lanta Adası

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Firstly, why do we have missions 4 and 5 happening in one country?
Simple: as you may have read in our Vietnam post, our time in Vietnam was so fraught with frustration that even the thought of looking for a tree nursery was unbearable. Had there been one in our vicinity, we would certainly have been subjected to one or more scams in just getting there, so the transport and nerve costs would have likely brought us beyond the point of no return.

Thus we decided that the Vietnam tree would be planted in Lao instead, along with the Lao tree.

Picture a country littered with so much live explosive buried underfoot that even farmers have a hard time making use of their land and children are at risk on their daily walk to school; you will appreciate that we were reluctant to go bundu-bashing around the Lao hinterland in search of a nice sunny spot in which to immerse our digging implement and plant a tree.

Having found a nice little nursery on our bike ride into Luang Prabang from the North, we knew this was the place to plant. However without the knowledge of a safe area to plant in, we had to be creative, and so it was that Ebru set her eyes upon a lovely little establishment called WAT PAPHAIMISAIYARAM, a Buddhist monastery in the centre of Luang Prabang.

The monks there approved our request without question – in fact they seemed quite happy about it. I’m not even sure they looked surprised – I just recall that they seemed to think it was a good idea and told us to go for it.

Of course they were all present during our little “planting ceremony” and even helped us getting the job done and promised to look after the little fellas in our absence. Thank you guys!

There were two perfect planting locations in the courtyard: one was an empty little flower bed in front of the stupa – which became home to a lovely little Fire Blossom tree – and a fruit tree went into the ground in the larger flower bed near the accommodation building, left of the temple entrance.

It was all good fun, planting in the warm sunshine, all the young monks standing around watching and helping out. Really a fond memory.

We were then invited to attend the evening chanting and meditation at the temple, which we did later.

We trust our friends at Wat Paphaimisaiyaram will take good care of our little green friends and we hope to see them all again when next we have a chance to return to the lovely town of Luang Prabang.

May you all live in peace and happiness and be free from all suffering!

Today we decided to make an excursion to the remote Paga Beach on the North end of the island. We started with a long walk up the entire white beach and then around the rock outcrop to the next small beach called Diniwid and from there to the main roan leading vertically through the island. Along the way I couldn’t resist taking a dip with the local men who dived to the sea bed and used thin, sharpened bamboo sticks to catch sea worms out of their sand burrows. Apparetly very good to eat, but the sight of a penis-snail is not very appetizing so I took a rain check on that opportunity.

We took a tuk-tuk to Paga Beach in the end as it was much further than we had expected and did not spend more than an hour there as there was nothing much happening or to do.

On our return journey to our guest house at Angol we spotted a nursery from the back of the tuk-tuk, and thus our job was now clear!

We returned to the nursery and another unusual conversation later, off we went on the back of a tuk-tuk with a little fire-blossom tree in hand. Needless to say, we got a lot of looks from all around.

Finding a place to plant was again a puzzle, but since we noticed the owners of our “LM Residence” guest house were clearly plant lovers, we decided to chance finding an easier solution by asking the owner’s daughter whether she would allow us to plant the tree in their garden.

To our surprise she loved the idea and immediately summoned family members to decide on the right location. She told us about how her father, a lover of plants and gardening, had recently taken very ill and this was the reason why the many plants we saw potted around the garden had not yet been planted in the ground as intended.

So, cameras in hand and smiles all around we dug and planted and patted and watered, the little tree finding its luch new home between a couple of large trees at the front of the garden, just behing the road-side fence. All being well, we hope one day to see this tree much taller and in full bloom, showing its lush yellow blossoms to all passers by and offering more privacy to the guest house’s inhabitants.

To the LM Residence family, we would like to offer our thanks for a wonderful stay, for allowing us to plant a tree in your garden, much pleasure with your new green “family member”, and our prayers for the quick recovery of the father of the house. May you be enjoying the pleasure of gardening again very soon!

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Once again, with time very much against us, our mission has been accomplished! This time, Hong Kong, China.

Seeing we only had about 4 days in Hong Kong and with apparently not a hope in hell of planting – or finding anything to – plant in the massive cities of Shanghai or Beijing, that’s pretty good timing I woudl say.

Almost having given up hope on our mission in China (and definitely not expecting any results in Hong Kong of all places), we took a nice little excursion to Lantau Island to see the big Buddha statue on day 3 of our visit. Harldy had the bus left the station at Mui Wo, we passed a small nursery at the road side and (subconsciously) a glimmer of hope was kindled in us. We spent the rest of the day enjoying the sights of the Big Buddha at Ngong Ping (truly impressive) and the small fishing village of Tai O.

The following morning after brekfast, we made off to the road to enjoy our second-to-last day in Hong Kong. Not really sure of what to see or visit, our powerful sense of responsibility and purpose surged and we decided to set course straight back to Lantau Island to fulfil our tree planting mission, mission number two.

Finding the nursery again (in the village of Pui O) was easy and trees they did have. So after careful consultation and selection we decided for a stiff, young Papaya tree, perfectly adapted to the local soil and climate and ready to bear fruit in the following year. Cash exchanged, snaps taken and smiles aplenty, off we trod to find a place to plant, tree and digging implement (I found a metal shaft in a building skip) in hand!

Finding the site was a bigger issue. I preferred the bald top of a nearby hill on the east side of the road, though this was not much of an option as afternoon was upon us and we’d never find the way up there and do the deed before nightfall. Ebru preferred the more practical option of any available patch on the west side, however this area is densely overgrown with trees and shrub, so if making our way through it would be possible, the tree might not survive in the overgrowth and, would we ever be able to find the spot again in years to come?

Clearly the practical option had to be chosen due to time constraints, so a few hundred up the road from the nursery, we followed an uphill walkway which led past an old semetary and then continued as a dirt path, becoming more and more impassable as we continued: the overgrowth becoming denser and denser across the path. When we weren’t able to continue through the vegetation, we returned to the semetary, dripping with sweat, itching from mosquito bites and our sandals caked in red mud.

Here we found an area where some trees had been evidently planted by man; not well looked after, yet, we thought, least likely to fall victim to the Axe of the East, bush-whacker, panga or whatever Hong-Kong-ese tool is customary for clearing a path. This was our spot! And we’re positive the spirits of the deceased will be honoured with the fruits this tree will bear in years ahead.

Hard was the ground, saturated with small stones, sauna conditions prevailed and the mosquitos were having a feast; but our hole took shape and we planted our young sapling firmly and confidently into the ground, like a golf ball after the precision put of Tiger Woods.

A few quick blessings were administered and a high-five signalled it was time to go. Mission accomplished!

SEE MORE HONG KONG LANTAU ISLAND PHOTOS

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