Careful followers of this blog may remember the Incident of the Fuzzy Fruit from 2009. (See comments here, pictures here).
For everyone else, what happened was this.
E, Milenka, and I were on holiday in Mozambique. Any good holiday involves randomly buying things you think might be edible off the side of the road, especially if you're driving for twelve hour stretches listening the same 5 mix CDs. Accordingly, we bought the fuzzy fruit.
After sawing at the fuzzy fruit for an hour, we finally got it open. Inside, we continued with the theory that it might be edible, though tasting it wasn't much confirmation.
Though we opened the fuzzy fruit, we never solved its mystery. Until--Return of the Fuzzy Fruit: 2011!
E and I were once again on holiday, this time in Kenya. A day at the lovely Gede ruins peaked when out guide pointed to a piece of fruit lying near the ruins. I squinted. It looked familiar.
"E," I said, "I think that's the fuzzy fruit."
"That," our guide pronounced, "is the fruit of the baobab tree."
Baobabs are kind of a big deal in Africa. They are enormous, old, and a pretty common sight in touristy places. I saw the one below in Botswana. You would think that after seeing so many of them, I would have figured out what its fruit looked like by now, right?
We told our guide our story from Mozambique, probably confirming any beliefs she had already that Americans are totally nuts. She also didn't quite believe us, but every look closer confirmed it: the fuzzy fruit is the fruit of the baobab tree!
It turns out that the correct way to open the baobab fruit is NOT to saw at it for an hour with a pocket knife. Instead, you're supposed to break it in one hard blow with any handy rock you can find.
Opening the fruit further confirmed it. The baobab fruit had the same little pellets of styrofoam-textured, slightly sweet fruit around seeds as our mystery fuzzy fruit did. It turns out, we were not poisoning ourselves--fuzzy fruit is edible!
A satisfying conclusion to an abandoned mystery! Eventually, everything comes full circle.
