The Wretched Vallee
Go see the Vallee de Mai, go see the Vallee de Mai, go see the valley, go see, go see, go see. OK. Definitely sounded like we needed to go see this place. It is a national park or protected area on Praslin Island where the Coco de Mer palm tree grows and is protected and flourishing. So we dutifully drove up the hillside and found the place and parked. On the way into it to get our tickets, we were approached by a local who explained that there were toilets and a café and gift shop here, none in the forest, and that they were all local guides and could take us into the forest and show us around so we wouldn't miss anything. Sounded promising. We went to the ticket booth and noticed there was a sign there that said free guided tour at 10 a.m. and it was exactly 10 a.m. So we latched onto the free guided tour with the young lady.
We spent the next hour going about 500 yards, maybe. OMG. I have never shuffled so slowly through a densely packed forest on a small hot trail that went up and over some steep hills. I’m sure it was interesting because my hubby wanted to listen to her but I was so terribly, terribly bored!!! It was like being in a museum with the same painting on each wall but we would move slowly to each "painting" and get a tiny bit more information about the painting each time. There were more than one type of palm tree in the forest but mainly the coco de mer and that’s what she talked about.
So what I learned about the Coco de Mer from her. Grows on the tree after about 20-25 years and requires a male and female tree which cannot be determined which is which until about that time. The trunk doesn’t grow for the first 15 years. It has a basket shaped set of roots so that it kind of circles in a high wind rather than sways back and forth like, say, a coconut palm. The fruit grows in a husk, like a coconut, and can weigh something like 20 kgs. Needless to say, don’t get hit by one falling, but it takes several years for the fruit to grow and get ready to drop. The male produces some kind of small flower which pollinates the female and smells quite flowery and nice. The pollination takes place from the wind or from small birds
. The nut, when out of the husk, looks like a female abdomen and that is what makes it quite popular in paintings and such. Oddly enough, she never said what it is used for mainly although she did say it can be eaten. And oddly, we haven’t seen any products on any of the islands yet that say “coco de mer”! The plants in the forest are protected and governed and the nuts are registered and sold carefully, probably to high paying clients! And the palm fronds are quite good at making roofs and such. And that’s what I learned in an hour of hard shuffling through the dense forest. And it didn’t cost you anything and you didn’t get sweaty!
What I learned from the Doctor’s House museum on Curieuse Island, where they had a display in his house (the doctor’s house was for the appointed doctor who took care of the lepers on Curieuse Island – usually a Scotsman appointed by the King). For years, nobody knew where this mysterious double lobed nut came from. It had washed up sometimes on the shores of India. They finally thought it came from the Maldives and so its scientific name is something Maldivian. But explorers of the Maldives didn’t find the tree and the locals said that it was a tree growing underwater which is how it got its name Coco de Mer (coconut of the sea). Finally the trees were discovered in the Seychelles. I give you this information as a bonus and you still didn’t have to walk through the heat and stand in the heat for an hour!
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