Besides his
incredible enthusiasm and energy, the best thing about spending a day with Yuri
is the FRUIT. He knows every little spot to get every kind of fruit on the
island. To make some extra money, he harvests a bunch of coconuts and takes
orders for delivery. While I was with
him, he had to make several stops to drop off coconuts to his customers. He has
this little basket in his back seat, full of fruit, and every time we stopped
somewhere, the contents of the basket would change. He would drop off a few
tangerines and pick up a few star fruits, give someone some cacao and bring
back a stalk of sugar cane. Seriously.
Throughout the day, that basket held oranges, tangerines, bananas, cacao, star fruits,
papaya, lilicoi (basically like passion fruit), and tree tomato.
As we drove
out of one guy’s driveway, he spotted a ripe papaya. “Ok, I’m going to back up
to the tree and you’re going to stand on the back of the truck and pick it.” I
couldn’t reach it so he came around the back and said “I’ll poke it with a
stick and you catch it.” I braced myself against a banana tree and waited for
the papaya to fall. As it fell towards my face, I totally fumbled it and the
over-ripe fruit exploded on my shoulder, rolled off, and was caught by the
banana tree.
We jumped
back in the car - off to make the next delivery - Yuri grabbed the carved
coconut shell spoon hanging from his review mirror and we scooped out the sticky
sweet flesh and slurped the whole way home.
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| The bountiful fruit basket. Yellow sugar cane and a pomelo next it. |
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| The inside of a lilicoi fruit. |
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| Yuri opening the cacao pod. You can suck on the beans and then they are roasted and ground to make chocolate! |
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