Do not tell me that you do not like chocolate! You may not like coffee or tea but chocolate? Everybody loves it and our struggle for weight control usually goes down the drain when we see chocolate within our reach. But how does it grow? Tea and coffee growing is much better known but chocolate is kind of a mystery. Once I bought a coconut-like cocoa in the market in rural Guatemala but so far it eluded me to see it growing and finally this trip to saved me another one to Côte d’Ivoire, the world number one producer! Left, you can see, it does not have to be dug out from the ground. It grows on the branches of the cacao tree. In the rows hanging below the tree branches. What a beauty to look at them.
Cocoa is not the only unusual food or spice to be found alongside of the mountain roads of Toraja Land. After all we are on Sulawesi, a neighbor of Moluccas, the Spice Islands! On the tree just next to the one with hanging chocolate there is another attraction:
What this can be? Everybody has it in his/her kitchen and even if used rarely the smell can be recognized by all. We saw it for the first time on our honeymoon, well before the age of digital photography, on an island famous for it. Off the coast of Tanzania, its name even sounds and smells like it. Zanzibar Island and the spice is CLOVE. Here rather unceremoniously being dried next to road and clove frequently covered by the fumes of the passing vehicles. To strengthening its perfume magic?
