Coconut Trees and Funny Hats

Thursday, September 8, 2005

Still at the Butterfly Spice Farm, we drank coconut milk fresh from the shell and nibbled on large chunks of the coconut meat.

Coconut undoubtedly tastes much better when they are not sweetened and shredded and processed. That much is certain.

But nice as they taste, coconuts seem a more dangerous fruit than most.

The fellows who hacked up the coconuts for us seemed utterly unconcerned for their own safety as they hacked and chopped at them with machetes, blithely pulling the knives up in arcs that came perilously close to their own faces.

As well, another man demonstrated the tricky task of scaling the coconut trees to pluck the fruits. Those trees are tall !

He wore a sort of fibrous strap between his ankles as a climbing aid, but that was all the safety equipment he had.

Our guide Ali said that he used to climb coconut trees as a job when he was a boy of twelve.

Question: Did he ever fall?

"Oh no!", said Ali with a belly laugh. "I would've been kaput!"

As well as good eating, the coconut tree leaves could be put to a variety of uses, including making funky bags and peculiar hats for the spice-tourists, as our friend Simon demonstrates.