Community Lunch in Tiga Wasa Village

The name of this three has escaped me. That’s a real pity because so much of this post is going to be about it. I’m going to call it a palm for convenience sake, but don’t quote me.

After we walked around in the rest of the village, we found hooked up with our host for lunch. He made much of his living off of the palm trees growing randomly on his land.

One of the main crops for him was the sap from the so-called palm. He put a slash into the bark, then attached a spigot. He covered the whole thing with plastic as protection. Every so often he would climb up to the spigot and fill a hollow gourd with the sap.

This particular spigot wasn’t placed very high above the ground. Others can be quite far up. He chose one close enough for us to see what he was doing. The host is in his 60’s, yet he thinks nothing of climbing several stories high to collect sap.

He makes his gourds himself. They are hollowed out, then finished off with flame. At one point he switched to a different, less traditional container. The sap didn’t taste right, so he switched back.

He handed the gourd full of sap over to his wife. While she cooked it down along with some other he had collected that day, the rest of us were put to work making the sacrifice and cooking lunch.

The wife cooked the sap into candy over an open fire. Once it was thick enough, she scooped it into coconut shells. The shells had holes drilled into the bottom. A small piece of palm leaf is placed over the hole to keep the candy inside. Then the filled shells are set in a rack to cool. Once they are cool they are turned upside down, and the candy poked out through the hole.

They sold the cup sized candies to us for the equivalent of fifty cents a piece. It tasted like a cross between brown sugar and maple syrup. A word to the wise. If you want to keep it, store it in the freezer. Mine went moldy.

We went on a little buying frenzy. A really nice woven basket for holding rice got bought while I was still trying to justify the price to myself. Soon the offering and food were ready. Before we could eat, the offering was placed on a high altar attached to the side of the house.

Lunch consisted of a verity of stir-fries along with rice. They use circles cut out of palm leaves as paper plates and set these inside flat circular baskets. It was all quite tasty.