มะพร้าว - Coconut

In my family, I have a reputation of being cuckoo for coconuts. Not the brown, monkey-faced cannonballs that contain insipid water and hard meat that is excellent for shredding into dried coconut flakes. I mean the young coconut with its sweet, tangy liquid and opaque jelly.

Coconuts ripe for the picking, if you can get to them

I got hooked on these husky fruits in Hawaii, on the east coast of Oahu, when a friend and I stumbled across a fallen branch with five or six coconuts. We had an hand axe along a desire to learn how to fend for ourselves if ever marooned on a deserted island. We cracked them open and discovered sugary juice within each leathery green fruit, as well as meat so tender you could scoop it out with your fingers. Since that trip, I've given up the axe in search of more efficient tools for getting to the goods. A machete is manly, but not too effective. In a desperate but hilarious moment, Kevin and I resorted to hurling coconuts against the corner of a curb--this method is satisfyingly primal, but resulted in not a bit of success. After coming home and buying green coconuts from the local store, I found the meat cleaver is best tool for the task.

While getting into the coconuts can be tricky, actually getting TO them is another story. What I thought was the old fashioned method involves climbing the tree yourself. I have been instructed on two sound methods. First is the monkey style, in which you tuck your knees into your chest and place your feet under your body, and the leverage keeps you on the tree. The other style is the frog, in which you place both feet on opposite sides of the palm trunk, and your body weight keeps you up.

I rather believe the style of frog to be most efficacious in the endeavor of coconut acquisition. The other day, I spied a coconut hanging from a short tree just a few hundred feet from our bungalow, and employed the frog style with all speed. I shimmied up the trunk and twisted the giant seed, which is not botanically a nut any more than a tomato is a vegetable. It broke free and plummeted to the ground far below (um...maybe 14 feet, but hey, I got it myself). With no meat cleaver, I employed a kitchen knife to the work of opening my harvest, and snicker-snack, poured forth the delicious water into an empty pot. With a spoon, I dug out the jelly, which had just begun to harden and turn white. The cost of my labor is a scratched up chest, right forearm, and left knee. Not a bad payoff, but the soreness has kept me out of trees for the past few days.

So, the frog style isn't the most ideal method for me to get the coconuts if I can only climb once before taking off a few days to heal. Next time, I'd like to try the tried and true method that the Thais use; they get a monkey to do it. In the southern Malay peninsula, coconut harvesters train pig-tailed macaques to scurry up the trees, differentiate the ripe coconuts from the unripe ones, and bite the stems in twain, letting the coconut drop 50 to 60 feet to the ground below. Clearly, I am no monkey.

According to this article, humans have used monkeys to gather fruits for millennia. Here in Thailand, monkeys actually go to coconut school, where they receive the training they need to be productive workers in the coconut industry. This means, in addition to learning how to cooperate with their handlers and gather good coconuts, they learn how to put rodent poison in the trees.

In this area, there are no pig-tailed macaques. Instead, there are macaques of the crab eating variety. I've never seen them eat a crab. They seem to hang out on the beaches and, with their cuteness, bribe the tourists into parting with their food in exchange for photos, or alternatively, aggressively scare the tourists into leaving said food behind as they flee. Also, here lives a species of gibbon, the world's smallest ape, and a type of langur, which is a black monkey with a white-moustachioed face. None of these primates has a taste for coconuts.

Instead, the local coconut afficionado is a squirrel that the ex-pats like to call roof rats. These tree toppers gnaw holes into coconuts while they're still hanging on the tree. I'm not sure what they do then; maybe they tip the coconuts over to spill the juice so they can get to the meat, a senseless waste of delicious juice in my opinion. But I can't talk these squirrels out of it, or into saving the juice for me. They just cling to their canopy branches and bark angrily--the first time I heard one barking, its voice was so low and throaty, I thought it was a primate. But it was just a squirrel, and judging by the vast number of discarded husks with gaping holes strewn about, I can tell I'm not the only one around here who is cuckoo for coconuts.