Hail to Pamplemousse

Hello All,
I have been wanting to write this story for a while now. I will take you back to the first time we set foot in the Marquesas Islands. It was a wonderful time where everything was new, the people the country and the fruit, oh the wonderful fruit of the Marquesas islands. One in particular was the Pamplemousse. This green citrus fruit ranges from 6 to 8 inches around and has a very thick skin. What is inside is laid out pretty much like a grapefruit but that is where the similarities end. The taste is sweet like an orange but with a slight sourness of a grapefruit. You can eat them like an orange with no extra additives to make it taste sweeter. It is heavenly just like it is.
I tried to find out the origin of the magical fruit but every time I googled it I couldn't read the history because it was all in French. The one thing I do know about it is, that it's grown in the Marquesas and sent to the rest of French Polynesia and sold at fresh fruit markets. You can get them for free from the locals in the Marquesas, in fact on one of our walking tours we had 4 locals give us 10 of them, our packs were so full we had to carry a few in our hands. Almost every one there had a Pamplemousse tree in there yard. Those were the days. After leaving the islands we never saw any more. If you wanted one you had to buy it from a market and I could never bring myself to buy one when I got so many for free. So I decided the Pamplemousse will just be a good memory, until yesterday when we moved the boat to the east side of the island. Jon and I took the dingy into shore on one of the Motu's and met a local that lived there. We talked to him for a few hours and told him all about the trip. He offered us some Pamplemousse that his dad sends him from the Marquesas and I was in heaven once again.


HAIL TO PAMPLEMOUSSE,

I will miss you.