During our first morning in Santa Cruz, we went to a market where we picked up a few fruits we haven’t seen before.

One was spiky yellow “ocoró,” with a large seed inside surrounded by some tangy meat. It’s supposed to be a relative of cupuaçú (though a much smaller one). Another one was “tumbo” – a miniature passion fruit, used for juices (“jugo de tumbo”). The next day we picked up another fruit in a supermarket – “achachairú,” yellow like ocoró and similar inside but without the spikes. The fourth interesting fruit (the name of which I no longer remember) was picked up from the ground and eaten after careful washing and an assurance from a friend that it was edible. Inside, there was a little bit of tangy meat (the whole fruit was about 15 mm in diameter) and a large stone. After cracking the stone I got some white stuff out of it which tasted like coconut, but the amount of it was so small that it hardly made the effort worthwhile.

Apart from those new fruits, we saw a grapefruit tree and plenty of mango trees with mangos falling on the ground. This abundance of new and old fruits didn’t last beyond Santa Cruz – as we moved on to the Altiplano we ended up just seeing the standard fruits (apples, bananas, peaches) and not even a particularly good selection of it. We did see many many different types of potatoes, though.