Day 12

Nothing on the schedule today except a bit of vacation planning for our last week.  We leave here on June 5th and then travel around a bit until our return flight on June 9th.  "I still can't believe we're really doing this, " says Jacob.  All that we did today was take a quick trip to Uvita, a town to the south west of where we are, to get cash and a few things from the market.  We also ran up to the road and met the fruit and vegetable truck for some more yummy produce.  This time we bought yucca (a lot because we LOVE it), carrots, onions, cabbage, sweet peppers, cilantro, chayote, 2 enormous pineapples, tomatoes, string beans and lots of bananas.  $16 (8,000 colones.)

Picking coconuts

A freshly picked young coconut

 Today Jacob took us down a steep sloping hill behind our house to a small grove of coconut palms.  Beneath the palms are several banana plants bearing 4 foot bunches of green bananas, and a myriad of herb beds at the foot of the trees, protected by their shade.

Jacob demonstrated the use of a 20 foot bamboo pole with a wire basket at the end of it to pick the large yellow young coconuts.  These are most valued for their water, and the fruit is thin and gelatinous, not thick and fleshy.

He's getting pretty good with that machete, the blur in his hand

Next, he used a machete to cut away the fibrous husk and we collected about 2 cups of coconut water, a super nutritious electrolyte drink from Mother Nature.

We would later make banana, lime, coconut smoothies with it.  The Ticos call fresh fruit smoothies frescas.  They add sugar.  We didn't.






We were also able to pick more starfruit from the tree outside of our house, and more limes.

Star-fruit tree outside of our house.

Samuel inside his fort

Close up of Passion Flower

When we returned to our house, we had some relaxation time.  Jacob built Samuel an elaborate fort with all the couch and chair pillows.  We also looked back at some old family videos we have stored on the computer and laughed a lot.

Passion flower- looks like a mini martian glaring at you!

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There is a flower here which is particularly gorgeous.  It's called a passion flower and it's the flower of passion fruit, which is an oval fruit with a tough outer skin filled with edible seeds covered with a gelatinous stuff.

Passion Fruit

We brought one into the house today to study.  Here are two pictures of it.  You can see that it has 10 petals, 5 on top of 5, and 5 anthers, and what look to me as 3 stigma.  I'm not sure if that makes sense, though. The black frilly things beneath appear to be modified petals.  I'm sure it's all designed to call the hummingbird which pollinates it.

Anatomy of a Passion Flower