coconuts

There are a ton of coconut trees on the Rarotonga Backpacker's property – this is cool because we can get free coconuts anytime we want, but also a little scary because falling coconuts apparently can be lethal. Fortunately the hammocks are all underneath the beach bungalows – I thought this was just for shade, but maybe there's more to it.

One of the Kiwis from the spearfishing group had showed Sabrina where to look for coconuts and how to tell if they were okay to eat or not while I was on the hike on Sunday. Paul (hostel co-proprietor) showed us how to us the husking spike and crack the inner shell with a machete yesterday, so we decided to try it out on our own today. We missed the husking goal time of 10 seconds by about eight and a half minutes because it seems like it would be really easy to impale yourself on the spike while trying to impale the coconut, but Paul assured us that would be impossible since the spike is blunt. I'm not ready to test out my insurance policy just yet so I'll stick with the slow-and-steady method. The machete part is fun – you hold the coconut in one hand, and whack one of the three stress lines with the blunt edge of a machete until it pops open.