A new machine in town

[The_Traveler]

Lao woman in Muong Khua, a small river town in northern Laos, fascinated by the new ATM.

 

[JustJazzie]

She does look quite fascinated! Nice catch.

I wonder who the puppy is with?

 

[snowbear]

I LOVE the puppy! I hope those receipts on the ground, and not bills.

 

[The_Traveler]

Lao is an odd place, a bit of 21st century sprinkled on top of the 1700's.
Foreigners are objects of intense interest and unabashed scrutiny.

I fantasize about living in Chiang Mai, Thailand, but that probably will never happen.

 

[Ron Evers]

The background - - building up or tearing down?

 

[The_Traveler]

Building up.
All forms are wood that's around and scaffolding is available wood but generally bamboo.
I've seen bamboo scaffolding up to 3 or 4 stories.
In the north I only saw one building that was more than 3 stories.
Rebar is bent, tied and welded by hand.
Concrete is mixed by hand and passed up in buckets.
Lucky this isn't earthquake country.
If you are interested I'll look for a couple of construction pictures I took.

 

[The_Traveler]

two different examples
up north, things are built mostly by hand.
human labor is cheap and there doesn't seem to be any code.

 

[Rick50]

Love this kind of construction. Figure it out as needed. Awesome ladder and the blue tarp I suppose for shade and keeping stuff off the guys below. I think life is the best teacher....

 

[Ron Evers]

Thanks Lew.
A construction inspector that once worked for me took a job with a consultant for an assignment supervising the construction of a bridge in (if I remember correctly) Indonesia. The stories he told of his experience was over there were incredible to us here. Falsework for the bridge constructed from bamboo, all wiped out in a monsoon & had to be rebuilt. Aggregates for the concrete hand made - men broke up large rocks to smaller fractions & the women & children broke them down smaller. So many stories that astonished us.

 

[The_Traveler]

Human labor is cheap, machines are expensive
Bamboo replenishes itself for nothing and is light and strong

Laying down a road

Carrying big stones to the crusher

Moving a very large boulder

 

[Designer]

The first construction photo is about what I expected, given your previous comments. I don't see any spiral wraps on the column steel.

The second photograph looks the same as is done in Mexico. All those form supports are the same length, and they use them over and over, taking them up to the next floor above.

 

[The_Traveler]

In Myanmar, on the Irrawaddy River, one sees large rafts of bamboo being floated down from the higher elevations to Yangon to be used in construction.
These people live on the raft for the time to float the river. The river police inspect the rafts to see if teak logs are being smuggled slung under the bamboo.
Different world, different rules

 

[Ron Evers]

Nice to see photos supporting the story.
So they had a mechanical stone crusher?

 

[Designer]

So they had a mechanical stone crusher?

Good question, Ron.

Any pics, Lew?

 

[The_Traveler]

I saw two, one larger one in the picture below that ran off an external engine and a much smaller one at a site much further in the far-out that I didn't get a picture of. These both were in Myanmar. In Laos the roads were much less sturdy and seemed to be a single layer of pea sized gravel with tar dripped on it.

I took this from a train and didn't get any chance at a second shot.