While I was in Nicaragua last week, I visited a remote field where workers were busy harvesting lovely yellow pods from cocao trees. I sat with them as they hacked the fruit open and extracted the seeds. Of course, I couldn’t resist sucking the delicious white pulp inside the pod and spitting the seeds at my fellow compadres. Delicious fun. More on that later.
Anywhoo, as the sun set, we headed to do some bird watching among the mangrove forests on the coast. (Tiger herons!) One of the guys on the trip, Jerry Garret, a writer for the New York Times, stayed behind and took this photo of us as we left the dock. He’s holding an unofficial caption contest with no prizes. I figured we’d have our own. Winner gets a bag of powdered cocoa (drinking chocolate) from a plantation outside of Leon, Nicaragua. (My entry was: “A pork in the river.”) GO!