Taste of the Tropics

My dad was a traveller. Not a camper, and certainly not the sort of traveller interested in lying on some white, sandy beach. He was a fly by the seat of your pants sort of traveller, an adventurer, an explorer. When I was growing up, every few months he would get that undeniable itch that needed scratching, and the only way he knew to scratch was by boarding a 747 and heading off to a foreign land. Fortunately for me (or my sister), he often brought us along on his travels.

We would take leave from school and a-travelling we would go. My dad would board the plane, with a pigtailed little me following him and besides the final destination, and maybe a few business meetings along the way, my dad never had a solid plan about what we would do when we arrived. Meticulously planning where we would stay, or even landmarks that we wanted to see was not my dad's style. He was lucky, and a little bit crafty, because most of the time the trips went off without a hitch, leaving me with childhood memories of slurping ramen with the local fishermen in Japan, eating buttery crayfish swimming in cream in France, and experiencing the sweet, tropical flavor of this gorgeous fruit in Hong Kong.

The mangosteen. A fruit I had only eaten once, and had not had again in close to 20 years. We were on a trip to the Far East, where my dad had yet again, not made reservations at any hotels. He simply picked a hotel at the airport's tourist desk, and we barreled through the crowded streets of Hong Kong to our destination. My dad, with his fast-talking ways gabbed his way into a hotel room for our stay. The room was standard, but set on a coffee table, near the foot of the bed, was the most splendid fruit basket, filled with luscious unknown items just waiting to be peeled or cut into.

There were crisp starfruit lying next to pruney passion fruit. Mangoes by the handfuls luxuriated next to smooth skinned bananas and tumbling forth in the center of this basket were what I later knew were the slithery, tiny mangosteen. The rough, hard shell of this fruit adequately hides the delectable fruit inside. Pick it up, knock it around, try to bruise it-- you would never know its contents. But peel it gently, and an off-white orb pops out. It is slippery and cool, segmented like a tangerine, but with a taste like no other. It feels like a peeled grape in your mouth, tastes a bit like a plum, but has a uniquely tropical flavor that was like nothing I had ever tasted before.

I promptly ate all of the mangosteens in that fruit basket, and made my dad stop in to buy more mangosteens at the markets throughout our trip. I was mangosteen crazy. There is more that I remember about that trip, like the air being so humid and stifling that when the clouds finally burst, and raindrops fell quickly to the ground, the water evaporated on contact rather than pooling into refreshing puddles on the cement. But it is that fruit basket that I remember most.

I had heard and read other Westerners' accounts of the mangosteen, it appeared that I was not the only one so taken with this fruit. I had even read about farmers trying to grow them in the West, but I had never seen them for sale. That is until walking through a market in California, when I saw a small basket and a sign scrawled with the word-- mangosteen. At $16.50 a pound this fruit was like gold, but still I had to buy at least two to give them a try. They were remarkable, sweet, juicy, strange-- just as I remember. Maybe they were even better, or maybe it was just that I was so thrilled to finally eat them again.