to make up for the rain

Guinea is absolutely, without a doubt, mango country. These delicious fruits are so abundant in the rainy season, villagers in the Kindia region (a little north of Conakry) can hardly collect them all, let alone eat them all. With mangoes rotting beneath trees, roadside stands like the one we stopped at below practically give the fruits away. A large basket containing around 15 perfectly ripe mangoes cost only 5000 Guinean Francs, or just over 1 U.S. dollar!

So if you live in this part of the world and you don't like mangoes, you better develop a taste for them pretty quick! Don't worry, it's not a tough thing to do. I used to think I didn't like mangos. Well, as it turns out, I don't like the genetically-engineered, imported, tasteless, sorry excuses for mangoes that get picked unripe and sit on a container for a month or longer before landing themselves in Hannafords (or Whole Foods, or Føtex, or whatever it is where you are). For the record, I no longer consider those mangoes. I don't know what they are, but they don't count.

Fresh, locally-acquired mangoes, real mangoes, have a richer, deeper colour to their flesh. They aren't pale and stringy like the mangoes of my memory. No, they're just firm enough to keep their shape, soft enough to dissolve into syrupy sweetness as you chew them, and leave only the faintest, velvety tingle on your tongue. Delicious.

I'd send you some, but you'd never get past the customs officers with an armful of mangoes (because fruits are evil, plotting, little terrorists seeking world-domination, of course). So, I'll just have to eat an extra for you instead. Better get on that :-)