Lychee Picking

A couple of weekends ago my friend Lulu and her parents took us to do some Lychee picking outside of the city near E-Da Theme Park, which is this huge amusement park to the east of Kaohsiung. It took us only about 20-25 minutes to drive there and we entered a world so completely different than the city we live in. It was so hot and humid as we made our way around this lush, deeply green and bountiful farm.

First of all, the lychee trees were so much bigger than I expected. I'm not even sure what I expected but not this. Each branch was loaded with lychee with the weight bending each branch down so it was easy for us to break off and collect.

We each loaded bags full of lychee as we tasted samples along the way. What is amazing is that each tree had fruit that was slightly different in taste. Kei, our host and this is her father's farm, said that the fruit can be different on the same tree depending on what side it is on and how much sun it gets. Crazy right?

It's hard to describe the flavor. You peel off the tough outer skin to get to the grape-like center. There is one big seed in the middle and you eat around it. The flavor is a cross between a grape, watermelon and strawberry with a distinct finish that is all lychee.

The hill surrounding the property were green and lush with workers picking lychee and trimming the trees all around.

There weren't only lychee growing here but bananas, pineapple, guava, papaya, mango, bamboo and other plants I didn't even recognize.

This is a fruit related to lychee but called longan. This is in a lot of local dishes and is similar to lychee. Look at how big and loaded the longan tree is!

We then went on a stroll around the farm and went through this group of workers who were cleaning and packing lychee for sale. This was at the tail end of the process and harvest so I can't imagine how many lychee have gone through here.

As fruit grow on trees, workers will cover each fruit to protect them from insects and other elements. Those are guava above but they do this for each and every mango too! Much more patience than I have!

There were chickens, roosters and this loud and welcoming group of geese who were not to happy to have us wandering around.

As the pineapple grow they are covered with branches or each gets a little "hat" to protect the fruit from the sun. Again, so much patience needed to be a farmer.

It was a hot and humid trip but leaving the city, even for a couple of hours, was such a nice way to spend a Saturday morning. And now I have a big bag of lychee to enjoy! Yum!