The Spice of Life

One of the things that I have always enjoyed about Africa is that they grow the kinds of things that America needs to have imported from faraway lands.  Bananas grow in the back yard.   Mango trees frequently dot the landscape.  Fresh, locally grown passion fruit and papayas are in fruit bowls on dining room tables.  I have eaten a lot of fruit, and I haven’t seen a single plu# sticker.

Zanzibar really kicked it up a notch. 

On my only full day on the island, my new friend Sr. Eunice and I started with a tour of a spice farm.  When you have been handling the red-capped McCormick spices almost exclusively your entire life, it is really mind-bending to see the spices in their raw, natural, living forms.  Our guide, Sisso, invited us to smell the alluringly sweet aroma of the ripening vanilla bean hanging from the vine.  He whittled a sliver of bark away from the cinnamon tree, bragging about the superior spicy quality of Zanzibar cinnamon, and handed it to me to chew. Better than all the Hot Tamales in the world!  Then, he used his knife to dig up a small bit of cinnamon tree root, and it amazingly smelled exactly like Vicks vapo-rub!  How could two such distinct flavors come from the same plant?  Cardamon, ginger, lemon grass, turmeric, cloves- each smelled more amazing than the last!  Sisso explained how the color of the pepper (white, green, or black), depended on when the peppercorn was harvested. We saw Henna, used for the elaborate painted skin decorations we saw on the arms of the Muslim women around town.  And the fruit!  We tried pickle fruit, shaped like a jalepeno, sour like a lime; star fruit, just shy of it’s true sweet ripeness, saw a young pineapple just starting to make it’s way in the world, and ate lichi by the dozens.  When lichi are ripe, they turn bright red, their spiky flesh making them about the size of a kiwi fruit.  Sisso would remove the rind so that I could eat the fruit, which looked and tasted for all the world like a peeled grape. 

A young man followed the tour at a distance, barefoot and wearing a trucker hat that read “Sex is not a crime.”  He hung back, weaving palm leaves together, and appearing magically at Sisso’s elbow whenever a tree needed to be climbed to retrieve out-of-reach fruit.  Towards the end of the tour, he twisted a rough looking rope around his feet, and scrambled straight up a towering palm tree to cut down a couple of coconuts.  There was something kind of aboriginal in the way that he climbed so easily, which made it all the more jarring when he answered his cell phone midway down the tree. Sisso led Sr. Eunice and I to a bench where we sat and sampled more local fruit- tangerines and custard apples (tasted exactly like apple Laffy Taffy- new favorite fruit!).   We capped off our taste adventure with samples of lemon grass and masala teas.  We dallied at the table of spices for sale for a while, but eventually had to tear ourselves away from the aromas and bid farewell to the spice farm.