Behold the utter majesty of a tree whose name sounds like the French word for cheese. Its bark is white and thorny. Its gargantuan, weird-looking roots usually protrude out of the ground from all sides at 45-degree inclines like skateboard ramps. According to neighbors, the fruits aren’t edible, but a mean tea can be brewed from the flower petals for headache relief. In terms of enormity, Fromagers look like something straight out of the rainforest, so I always do a double-take when against a barren landscape I notice a single four-storey tree that seemingly got lost and wandered away from his jungly home.

If you follow Burkina’s latitude line with your finger around a desktop globe, Fromager trees crop up in this climate on every continent. Amazonian tribes use the cottony fluff in the seeds to wrap their blow darts. And wouldn’t you know it—in Cambodia, there’s an overgrown Fromager posing for tourists at the famed Angkor Wat Temple.




Here’s another familiar sight among Banfora’s plethora of flora: the mighty Ackee fruit. When it’s ripe, the bottom pops open, revealing three black marble-sized seeds and yummy spongy stuff. Ackee fruits (as well as shea) contain fatty acids that make for top-notch traditional cooking. People appreciate it here, but not in the same way they idolize such Ackee-based dishes in the Caribbean. Apparently, ever since it was introduced by way of slave ships in the late 1700s, Ackee has remained a dietary staple for islanders and is Jamaica’s national fruit.



Baobabs with their abnormal rotundity and gnarled branches look like something Tim Burton would dream up. The trunks of some of these trees grow big enough to fit a car inside. Much like cactuses, they’re famine-proof desert dwellers with water reservoirs inside their bellies. The flowers smell like death and are bat-pollinated. The fruits, called “monkey bread” by locals, can be prepared into teodo, a pulpy bland-tasting juice with the consistency of apple sauce. Apparently it’s pretty nutritious, but there so many better local juice options I prefer: for instance, passion fruit juice, mango juice, hortchata (a soy-milk-like drink from the Bambara groundnut), and bissap.




In the picture above, the baobab is surrounded by rone palm trees. The rone may look like an ordinary palm tree, but it's actually a special type that’s vital to a key industry in Southwest Burkina: alcohol consumption. Not only do its nuts make tasty munchies at traditional bars, its wood helps build bar benches and secure walls, and most importantly the sap is extracted each day and fermented to produce palm wine or banji. Barflies like Tana and her dad Ken can sip this translucent white liquid out of a calabash like the one she's holding. This sap comes out just below the leaves on female trees, so the sap collector making his rounds has to repeatedly shimmy up two-storey heights. Ken liked the palm wine, but opted not to sample the menu option: caterpillar soup.