Because, contrary to popular belief, I don't exclusively eat junk food when I travel, here's a post about Colombian fruits!

This is one of the prettier cups of mango and
papaya I bought in Cartagena.  I eventually
stopped photographing these and started just
eating them, like a normal person.

Junk food is great and all, and it's important to try the local junk food specialties when visiting a new place, but I'm a huge fan of fruits and vegetables as well.  Besides, fruit is basically nature's candy, right?

Colombian produce is beautiful.  Buying and cooking vegetables here is a pure joy, as is finding those special fruits that you just can't get anywhere at home (at least not without taking out a second mortgage on your home to pay for their "exotic" nature at your local Whole Paycheck or similar "Sell us your first born child in exchange for this single organic strawberry" type store that exists in the center of most major American cities and caters to yuppies)...

Some of the fruits are familiar.  Mango, sliced, in a cup, sometimes with papaya or watermelon, is a popular snack in the cities.  The gringo price is usually around $2,000 COP, now about $0.65, and once I got a guy in Medellin to sell it to me for $1,000 COP.  It might have been the greatest moment of my Medellin experience.  I try to convince myself that he thought my Spanish usage and accent were better than a typical tourist, but I think the more probable explanation is that he was just being nice.  (You'd probably agree with this if you heard me speak Spanish.)

It's hard to go wrong with mango, and, while I don't LOVE papaya, I ate it a lot in Guatemala with my host family, served with the seeds, which add an interesting peppery flavor that I am quite fond of.

Some of the less common fruits (at least for us deprived Americans) include the following:

Sapote (Zapote)

This is my favorite tropical fruit.  I was introduced to this five years ago when a friend in Guatemala

I am a sapote.  I don't look nearly as delicious as I taste, but eat
me anyway.  You won't regret it.

described it as a fruit that "tastes like sweet potato pie"... I bought my first one soon after, and ate them as often as I could find one at the appropriate ripeness.  A sapote is brown on the outside, and you determine its ripeness the same way you would an avocado.  You want it to be soft but not too soft.  It not only tastes like sweet potato pie, but also, if it has reached its perfect ripeness, it has the same texture as well.

I found out that they also have these in Colombia when a European guy with obvious taste bud deficiencies came up to me on the street and said, "I just bought this fruit and don't like it.  Do you want it?"  I answered with an obvious yes, and delved into the sheer joy of the sapote once again...

The fruit dish featured above features: some seriously awesome
large blackberries, strawberries, and uchuvas (the orange things).

They're hard to find in Guatape, but are among the things I look most forward to upon returning to city life!


Uchuvas

The uchuva is a member of the same family as the tomatillo, which was a completely unsurprising thing to read after tasting these weird little sour orange fruits.  I wouldn't call the uchuva a sweet fruit, but I definitely enjoyed a few of them in a dish with assorted berries, drizzled with arequipe (dulce de leche goodness) and sweetened condensed milk.  I guess that's kind of cheating, but don't hate.  You would have done the same (and if you wouldn't have done the same, I'm left wondering why we're even friends).


Dragonfruit

Dragonfruit. You can't see the awesome, bright yellow, spiny
outside that well in this picture, but you can imagine it (or look
it upon Google, because it's 2015).

I got one of these basically because they look cool.  That they are also delicious is a bonus.   The dragonfruit, which, according to Huffington Post, is quite good for you nutritionally, comes from a cactus.  You eat it by cutting it in half and scooping out the insides with a spoon.

The dragonfruit is also known in some places as the pitaya, but I personally prefer to eat something named after a dragon.  It makes me feel like more of a badass.

While this fruit is beautiful and delicious, it is neither as pretty
nor as delicious as the ice cream that bears its name (maracuya)!  

Maracuya


The maracuya, aka, passionfruit, is slightly more common to the American palate than the other three mentioned above, but I've never had one, and my desire to eat maracuya was inspired by ice cream, so I thought it should be on my list.

I have to warn you: fruit, while amazing, is not ice cream. Now that the disclaimer is out there, however, I will also admit that this is really good fruit. The weird seeds on the inside are encased in a skin (inside the shell) that has a bread-like texture.  I'm not sure if I'm actually supposed to be eating that part, but I don't care, because I like it.

So there.