Pepaya Kalimantan

I'm sorry, it was gone before I knew it. Couldn't help myself.

In Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, I came across this pepaya, or papaya as you may know, brought by my dear friend Rina Ahdalina. They call it Pepaya Hawaii. But I don't think it was the same as Pepaya Hawaii I once found being sold at Total Buah. This pepaya was smaller, way smaller, and way sweeter.

In between baking cookies for the next day seminar, we enjoyed spooning these babies and gulping its succulent burning orange meat like monkeys :D

I brought back some of them --so did Nadrah --, and yeah, you can see they're gone very fast.

Indonesian fruits are amazing. I always prefer our local grown fruits from the fake-fresh imported ones. Unfortunately not many of them make it to Jakarta. In many cases they are directly sent overseas to importer countries, usually the best variants in the bunch. And the locals were left with limited stock, only enough for them to eat, not enough crops to be sold to other parts of Indonesia --and Indonesia is indeed a big country.

So every time I go places far from Jakarta, I have so much fun digging the local treasures of produce. I found navel Berastagi, mangga udang and martabe in Berastagi, North Sumatera, along with its famous markisa and terong belanda. Mangga Probolinggo was sent from the area by a family friend. I bagged many mangga gadung in Surabaya, world class quality kelengkeng in Semarang, and grabbed matoa anywhere I found them laying on supermarket fruit shelf.

By the way, in Balikpapan I also came across Lai, a fruit similar to durian but smaller and said to be less pungent than durian. I haven't got the chance to try it, but I plan to come back more and more to Kalimantan, so I'm hopeful.

Besides, I need to eat this papaya again :)