Bali - Cool Fruits

There is a lot of fantastic, exotic fruit in Bali. During our wonderful (yet extremely over-priced) car tour of the area around Ubud, we stopped at a spice/fruit farm. And while it was questionable whether any of the spices sold at the farm were actually grown there, we had a great time trying out fresh Balinese coffee, hot chocolate, and an extremely strong ginger-lemon tea. We also tasted all sorts of great fruit: pomelo, snake skin fruit, mangostino, rambutan, cocoa, and more. I had no idea that cocoa would be so slimy inside. :) My favorite fruit is now rambutan, which tastes and looks (on the inside, anyway) like lychee. My absolute least favorite fruit is durian. YUCK! Crispin just wrote to tell me that durian is actually "wonderfully tasting." Well, in theory, durian tastes good -- if you can get over the smell. For me, they are too closely linked. Who wants to eat something so... fecal smelling?

The locals have an ingenious way of "peeling" fruit; the guy at the spice farm had really long thumbnails and pinkey nails. He would just stick his huge thumbnail into a fruit and rip the thing in half. Very... efficient. Of course, during my travels in Asia, I have seen the huge long nail used for other purposes, so I'll just assume that he had just washed carefully using soap and water.