Festival Fruits

The streets were lined with bright strands of colored lights and music filled the air from a stage under a huge tent at the very top of the hill. We wandered down the road, looking and snapping pictures and slowly separating into smaller groups. Villagers set up in make-shift booths or on rugs and carpets spread on the sidewalk, offering fortunes told by caged parrots, kitschy stickers and posters, chances to shoot pellet guns at balloons, and food.  Great black kettles simmered over wood fires, fruits of all sorts, and honey collected from the forest tempted us to disregard our dietary caution; and we did.  We sampled jamund, amla, custard apples and jackfruit, the star produce of the festival.  The size of a watermelon with a skin the texture of a horse-apple, the jackfruit’s cross section looks a bit like a multi-chambered gourd.  They hung from their trees like hornet’s nests and were stacked into walls in the fruit vendors’ booths.  We watched two boys struggling together to carry a single fruit. They stopped and posed heroically for our cameras.  Jackfruit smell vaguely citrus and you eat the tender, pulpy pods which each surround a seed the size of a brazil nut.  They taste pretty good but my favorites were the star fruit and mangos, both sprinkled with a salty, spicy seasoning similar to the sort you can get on some Mexican street foods. We topped off our binge with coconut water and coconut meats. Full and happy, we wandered the festival until dinner.





Jackfruit Tree

Craig sampling star fruit with the spicy salt.

Cutting the Jackfruit

After the sun went down