Phuket Stories

Bananas.

When I was growing up in Dublin, my father came home for lunch everyday as we did as well from school, where my mum would have a hot meal for all of us, meat, veggies and gravy. For tea in the evening my dad always had a banana with bread and made great sandwiches. Actually our lunch was really our dinner and our evening meal was tea. I did not know anything at all about bananas or how they arrived in our local shop. They were always a golden yellow. My mum would buy a bunch consisting or maybe three or four bananas. Years later I was the radio officer on a “banana boat” sailing on a regular trip from a “banana republic” in Central America to Freeport in Texas. Texas USA that is. It took less than 3 days from Limon in Costa Rica to Freeport. I learned a lot about bananas on that ship. The bananas were picked green, washed, to remove all insects especially the deadly banana spider, packed into the company’s logo boxes and placed into refrigerated containers and loaded on board. The greenness of the unripe bananas was critical as to the length of the voyage and the final destination to the supplier. Every Sunday morning we would arrive in Freeport Texas, the containers were loaded onto trailers with a diesel generator, plugged in and the trucks would hitch up and within moments head into Texas and up into the Mid West of the US of A. The temperature of the bananas had to be kept at 13.3 deg C or 56 deg F. This stopped them from ripening. When they start to ripen they give off a gas, this gas was monitored on board in each container to make sure it did not exist. On arriver at the supplier’s warehouse the bananas were allowed to ripen at a rate depending on the demand of the shops. The bananas in our house would have been picked much greener because of the longer distance to Dublin. I love bananas but living here in Phuket it is to my horror that I cannot just buy a bunch of 3 or 4 bananas. They are so cheap that the smallest bunch contains 10 to 12 bananas and after 3 days most are thrown out. Sad. What would my dad think? When I visit my father-in-law on the Gulf of Siam with my wife and daughter, we return not with a bunch of bananas but half a tree of them. My neighbours love me when I return to Phuket.

Enjoy Bananas in Phuket, they are wonderful.

No related posts.