We have a new chicken!!

Do you remember my Blog about the "missing" white Sussex bantam hen, which we found hidden under overhanging vines growing on an old water tank?
And she was clucky i.e. sitting on an egg or two.
We checked incubation times, and they are approximately 21 days.
Will she hatch an egg or two?

Here is her hiding spot....under the overhanging vines.

Here she is sitting on her egg/s. This was taken approximately 3 weeks ago.

I have repeated the photos to remind you. (I always enjoy looking at photos, so I hope that you do too)

The last few days here have been cold, and wet, and windy, in Ballandean.

But today the sun came out.

And so did our broody hen, with a small fluffy yellow chicken in tow.

"Mother and baby are doing well" as the saying goes!

..and here is the new chicken. Isn't it cute?

It appears to be a couple of days old, so we assume that she kept it under her wings, out of the wind and rain, for the last few days, in her hidden brooding spot.

We were very excited to see it at last.

She survived her incubation period, without being eaten by predators. 

That is amazing.

We hope that she can protect her chicken from predators too.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Our sleep-over in aYurt.

At beautiful Lake Karakul, far Western China, live a group of Tajiks, whose homes are yurts.  (A photo of the Lake and some of the yurts was included in the previous Blog)

And here is another photo of a yurt. This one is typical of the felt-walled yurts.

We were to spend a night in one of the yurts.
At first glance at our "sleep-over" accommodation we were a little bemused. The late afternoon was freezing, and the aforesaid yurts did not look too warm.
How wrong we were.

"Our" yurt was made with mud-brick walls. This adobe brick is common for building in countries which receive very little rain, and around Lake Karakul the annual rainfall is only a few scant millilitres.
(The red which you can see to the right of the photo is the door to the yurt.)

Most unprepossessing, I think you'll agree.
But inside is a different story.

It is a single room. No running water. No toilet. A stove burning yaks' dung in one section. Very very basic.
There is an L-shaped raised platform running along 3 sides of the yurt. It is carpeted, and we sit on the side of the platform to eat...feet on the floor.
We also sleep on the platform, but shoes MUST be removed before stepping onto this.


There are brightly coloured carpets hanging on the walls around the yurt, and the colours give a luxurious feel to this very humble abode. And keep out the cold winds too....excellent insulation.

Our hostess, in the background, and her  two daughters.

Our dinner/supper was a rice- based mutton dish washed down with yaks' milk tea. The tea is served in a small bowl, which you hold in two hands to drink.

Drinking yaks' milk tea, close to the stove.

After eating, our hostess was like a magician. She lifted some of the some hanging carpets on the walls, and pulled out mattresses. (you can see one mattress still on the platform in the 2nd  photo)  
8 mattresses.....our party of 6, plus our guide, plus our driver. Yes, we all slept in the yurt together.
Then our hostess, again magically, produced warm "doonas"....I am not sure what the Tajiks call them, but they were soft and very warm.

Calls of nature, throughout the night, were answered simply by going outside and finding a suitable spot. The night was cold, there was no sound, and the sky was clear, and the stars were absolutely magnificent. A privilege to see them. 


The next morning we were woken by our hostess stoking up the stove, with dried yak dung, and heating water on the top of it. (You can see the kettle on the stove above)
We watched the family, who took the kettle outside and used the warm water to wash their faces and hands. Naturally we did likewise.

Next our hostess prepared to milk the yaks.

She led the calf to its mother, and let it suckle for a few minutes.
When the female yak had let down her milk, the calf was physically  pulled off the udder, and our hostess took over the milking.

(Look at the surrounding landscape in these photos, and you will get an idea of how desolate the area is.  And also note the remains of frost on the yak's coat......the night had been very cold)




Breakfast was broken local bread, served with yaks' milk tea.

This is what the local flat bread looks like.

I imagined that the yaks' milk tea would be quite viscous and rather fatty.
It was nothing like that.
It was very tasty, with a mixture of sweetness and a touch of saltiness. Quite delicious.
It was like drinking tea with unhomegenised milk, just like we had in Australia as kids....so long ago.


Then it was time to leave.

Just before we left our yurt family, some of their friends called in.
They were heading off to a nearby village where they would attend a wedding.
Aren't they interesting?
You see whole families squeezed onto bikes, like this family here. (Our nanny state would have helmets on them all, and certainly not FOUR on one bike!)
And the men wear distinctive hats, which reflect the ethnic origins of the wearer.

This overnight stay in the yurt, with a host family, was one of the highlights of our trip to Western China.

Far Western China adventures...part 1.

Whenever we go to China our DIL (daughter-in-law) organises a trip to see places other than Shanghai. This trip we were venturing to the far west ,to the Xinjiang Province, and the hub of the Old Silk Road.

We flew to Kashgar via Urumqi (pronounced in either of two ways..."you-room-chi" or "wool-a-mooch-ee")
I am not sure of the reasons for the alternative pronunciations, but at a guess one is probably the Chinese pronunciation, and the other is in the local language of Turkic.

We flew over deserts of sand and stones, and magnificent mountains. 
These photos were taken from the plane.
Isn't the landscape stunning?

The season, when we flew over here, was early Autumn.
The mountains are very high, and snow-covered all year round, but you can see the dry zones of the desert at lower levels.
I am not sure of the name of these mountains, but the Kunlun Range forms the Eastern Border of Kashgar.

We had a short stop-over at Urumqi, which is the town/city in the whole world which is the furthest you can get from any sea. In this case it is 2250 km from the nearest sea.
(I thought that you would enjoy that piece of trivia!)
Then we were back on the plane for the flight to Kashgar. 

We were met at the Kashgar airport by a driver and a guide for our adventure into the West.
Although the members of our China-based family are learning, and speaking, Mandarin, it is not spoken in the western parts of Xinjiang Province.
The Uighur(or can be written as Uygur  and pronounced as wee-gar) people of this area are primarily Muslim, and do not speak Chinese.
So you can see that it was essential to have a guide/interpreter.( And the Chinese Government demands it)
His name was Wahid, and he was excellent.
He was a Uighur.
He spoke Tajik and English.

From the airport we set off on a 4hour, 200 km trip to Lake Karukul  along the Karakorum Highway.
The guide books tell us that this highway is the the highest paved highway in the world.
That's interesting because on our trip there was some good road, and  a lot of unsealed, very winding road, and other sections where only one lane was trafficable.  I think that much of the "paving" has been lost somewhere.
And we were climbing all the time.
Late in the afternoon we finally made it to the to Lake.

This is Lake Karakul, surrounded by mountains which are snow-covered all year.
It is a beautiful sight.  My photo does not do it justice.


It is at 3600m, and its colours are magnificent, ranging from dark greens to light blues. It is truly beautiful, and well worth the trip.

And here are the yurts, by the shore of the Lake.   We are spending a night in one of the yurts,
The people who live in the yurts are Kirgiz.
There are two small Kirgiz settlements on the Lake.


And wandering around the Lake are lots of Bactrian camels.
They seem rather docile.
And we were surprised to see that their humps are soft, and rather floppy.
I don't know why, but we had assumed that the humps were very firm structures.

Three camels with more yurts in the background.

I shall write about our yurt experience in the next Blog.
This one is long enough as it is, and I don't want to bore you!
And with all my pronunciation add-ons, this Blog is beginning to sound rather like a lesson in a classroom instead of an interesting read! Sorry!

The Recyclers of China.

We have just returned from our annual 4 week China holiday. (For those of you who don't know, or have forgotten, one of our sons, his wife and their two children have been living and working in Shanghai for almost 3 years....so we visit every year)

Before our first visit to China, in 2009, I had a very stereotypical, and as I found, incorrect, view of China. In Australia we are lead to believe that it is a polluting country, with no regard for the environment.
This is so wrong.


For me, watching locals collecting waste for recycling puts Australian efforts to shame.

This recycler is busy sorting his materials, before packing them onto his bike.

Can you see the bell in this man's right hand. He rings it as he rides the streets.

                                      

The locals use bicycles to scour their area.
And each person seems to focus on one type of material.

The local recycling centre near our house in Shanghai. Note bundles of paper, a fan and other materials.

Some collect paper.
Some collect cardboard.

What a huge pile of cardboard. It is an added skill to be able to ride a bike with a load like this!

A recycler's cardboard, ready to be piled onto his bike.

Some collect plastic.
Others collect glass.
Some collect timber.

Then there are bike loads of old metallic objects like fans, or air conditioners.

And you also see cloth/material/clothing being collected.

These people are on the streets all day, every day.
Some of them ring bells as they ride the streets. That way the locals know who is coming, and can come onto the street with their  "rubbish" .




They ride, or push, or pull, their laden bikes through the busy traffic of Shanghai's streets, in with the smart cars, and among  the buses, and taxis, and the hundreds of thousand pedestrians.
Apparently they take their stash to collection stations where they are paid for the goods.

Can you see that there are 2 tray loads of timber being hauled along this street?

It keeps the streets clean, and it certainly cuts down on waste.


The collectors' enthusiasm for their rather lowly tasks never ceases to amaze me.

I shall finish with a few more photos of these essential recyclers.
Don't you agree that they are better at this than we are?

That's a small sample of the resourceful Chinese.

This Blog is back, with another Chook story!

Those of you who have read previous Blogs will remember this set of beautiful poultry.
Who can forget? (Auction Blog was posted on September 11th)
We bought these 3 White Sussex Bantams at the Stanthorpe Poultry Auction.....1 rooster, and 2 hens.
They settled in quite well with our other two chooks....brown(of course!) Isa Browns.
The pecking order seemed to be solved relatively painlessly.

But do you also remember that these three roost in the branches of the chook-yard tree every night? No sleeping in the man-made roost with the brown hens. No sir. Up in the tree.
(There were 2 photos of them "up a tree" postedright at the end of September 24th's  Blog.)

Well, last week, for about a 4 days, we "lost" one of the White Sussex hens.
She wasn't there at dusk, when the other two had flown up into their tree perch.
She wasn't in the man-made roost with the browns.

Had she become a meal for the local foxes, or the local quolls? 
Either was possible.
We searched high and low for 4 days, wandering about the farm making soft "chook chook" noises in the hope of her mistaking us for fellow birds, and answering us!
Honestly, how optimistic was that? (Or maybe, how stupid??)

On day 5 we found her. 

 
What made us lift the vines of the creeper covering the old tank stand I don't know, but we were probably desperate, and looking in as many 'impossible" places as we could think of.
There she was, tucked away in such a glorious hiding spot.

Why? 
She is sitting on an egg. ONE lonely egg. She is clucky.

It must be a very safe spot for her, because she is at ground level, and sits there day and night. Night is usually when the predators are about.
She has not been discovered.
The foxes and quolls obviously can't see her, but I wonder why they haven't smelt her???

We hope that the egg is fertile. 
We also feel that one chicken may be a bit lonely, so we have managed to slip two other eggs underneath her...much to her annoyance, I might add. She pecks at your hands when you dare to invade her hatching space!

The incubation time for chickens is 21 days.
Keep your fingers crossed for us, and for her. I hope that she has not sat there for all this time for a nil/zero/negative outcome.

I will keep you posted!