Our Top 5 Tropical Fruits

One of my favorite things about Papua New Guinea is the amazing tropical fruit that grows throughout much of the country. Here are a few of our family’s top 5 picks for fresh fruit!

Papaya

Our kids LOVE papaya! They will eat bowl after bowl of this sweet fruit, and they have been known to fight over who gets the last pieces. Fun fact: our kids only know it by the trade language name, “popo”. 

 Papaya grow on trees in big bunches. There are two varieties, one has red flesh and the other has orange. We like the red a bit better, but both are delicious when ripe! To me, they taste like a softer, sweeter version of cantaloupe. 

Some red papaya

We sometimes get papaya from our people here in Wabuku. And we recently planted some trees in our garden, so we’re excited to start getting fruit off of those, probably sometime early next year!

A few of the papaya trees in our garden

 

Pineapple

Our family also LOVES pineapple!! When they’re ripe, pineapples here in PNG are far sweeter than ones we find in grocery stores in the States. There are a few different varieties that grow here… I’m not exactly sure of all the differences. But we definitely love them whenever we get our hands on one!

A HUGE pineapple we found at the market in town earlier this year

Before coming to PNG, I didn’t realize that you can actually cut off the top, bushy part of the pineapple and replant it in the ground, and it will grow into a new plant! Crazy! Each plant produces one pineapple, and they grow fairly slowly. But they are definitely worth the wait! We have a few pineapple plants in our garden that we planted soon after we moved into Wabuku, and one is almost ready! We’re pretty excited about that!

The pineapple plants in our garden

Mangoes

My absolute favorite type of tropic fruit is mango! There are several different types of mangoes here, and we have learned over the years that they are NOT all equal, haha! Some are really stringy. But our favorite kind is called a papaya mango. It’s really big, and when ripe, they are soft, sweet, and string-free! I can’t even begin to describe how much I look forward to papaya mango season!!

Several of our mission bases have papaya mango trees

That’s one thing that surprised me about mangoes… they are actually seasonal. I expected that we’d have mangoes every single day when we lived overseas, but sadly, we have to wait for that special moment each year. But I guess that makes them all the more special, huh? :)

Bananas

Bananas are probably our most common fruit here. Apparently, though, there are hundreds of DIFFERENT kinds of bananas that grow in PNG! It’s insane!! There are 2 main groups of bananas here: sweet ones and cooking ones. There are dozens of different varieties of each one. The sweet ones are what you’d expect from a banana, sweet when ripe and ready to eat. The cooking ones are actually more like a potato when ripe, and they usually have to be peeled with a knife and cooked in some way before you can eat them. We don’t use these kinds of bananas much, but the people in our village often do.

Some banana trees in our garden

Our favorite kind of banana here is called a “milk banana” in the trade language. The bananas are a lot shorter than our “American” bananas in the States. But they are so sweet and good! Our kids eat them like candy when we have a good bunch of them!

Clint cut the first stalk of "milk bananas" out of our garden last month!

We have several banana trees growing in our garden, and it’s been fun to watch them grow over the past few months! Banana trees are actually the world’s fastest growing grass! It only takes about 9-12 months for them to go from a baby shoot to bearing fruit. Once the tree produces fruit, it will never produce again, so it has to be cut down, and new trees will sprout from the base. The new shoots are very hardy, so they can also be dug up and replanted in new locations if you want. Really cool!

Here's another type of banana. The stalk was so big that Clint could hardly hold it!

Coconuts

Our last pick for fresh fruit is coconut. We eat these regularly in Wabuku, because the people have an abundance of coconut trees. There’s nothing quite as refreshing as cutting open a fresh coconut, drinking the water, and eating out the inside. Our kids especially love them!

 

Most people think of coconuts as having really dark husks, very white milk, and thick, tough meat. These kinds of coconuts are actually very mature ones, and, to us, they don’t taste as good as younger coconuts. We like them when they have a green husk, clear water, and thin, soft meat.

Coconuts have two layers. The outer layer is green when it’s young and turns brown the more mature it gets. When you cut off this layer, you get the actual coconut fruit, which has more of a tan husk that also darkens the more mature it gets. 

Clint is usually the one in charge of opening coconuts that we get from our friends in Wabuku. He uses a machete to chop of the outer husk and then cuts a smaller hole into the inner husk to allow us to drink out the water. There’s probably 2 or 3 cups of liquid depending on the size of the coconut. Once that’s gone, he chops the coconut in half and uses a spoon to scoop out the inner meat. The young coconuts have really soft meat that has all the taste of coconut, but won’t give your jaw a workout.

So there you have it! Just a few of our favorite tropical fruits here in PNG! We definitely miss a lot of American fruits (especially all the types of berries!). But it’s fun to have some delicious alternatives here in PNG.