An unfestive, but fulfilling cashew experience

After an evening at the Cashew Fest, in Campal, Panjim, where the food and drinks were infused with cashew, and the artificial cashew tree in the middle of the ground, refused to even sway just a little bit in the breeze, it was but natural to go in search of real cashews on the trees in the forests rather than just tasting products made out of the fruit.

So, for the first time since the Pandemic, a few of us trudged through some hills of Tiswadi, checking out the cashew trees that were growing in the wild.

There is, however, a vast difference between the commercially grown cashews and those that grow on trees in the forested hills. We went in search of the latter.

It was mid-May, a little late in the season for the cashew apple to be hanging from every branch of the tree, so we weren’t expecting to find too many of them.

But, as we weren’t planning to pluck them, only desiring to get the natural feel of walking through cashew plantations that was so missing at the Cashew Fest, it didn’t matter.

Just a few trees had the cashew apple, in beautiful shades of yellow and red, hanging from branches and surprisingly, there were a couple of trees that had the cashew just beginning to blossom. It would take a few weeks to ripen, but that sight was enough to satiate us.

It was as natural as it could get, without the staid atmosphere of the fest in Panjim, with Bollywood music blasting in the background.

While the Cashew Fest drew a huge crowd on all three days, some who even braved the sudden downpour on Day 2 of the festival, and may have achieved what it proposed to do – which is promote products made of out cashew – the experience of trudging through the hills and sitting in the shade of a cashew tree, gazing up at the cashew apple and seed, is totally different.

Casual conversations with the cashew growers led to the them shrugging their shoulders at the poor crop this season.

These farmers were not those who grow the cashews commercially, but folk who have cashew trees in their properties or in the properties they tend.

Some did admit that the land belonged to another, but claimed that it was they who had planted the trees and were picking up the ripened fruit and selling them.

In another part of Tiswadi, at the ground level and alongside the road, some cashew trees made us stop and wander about.

One particular lady, a senior citizen of the area, who chatted about the cashews in the property, was quite animated speaking that passing tourists do stop and collect cashews from the trees, photograph themselves and continue on their journey.

"We don’t stop them from picking cashews. Some of them also tip us," she said.

That set me thinking. Wouldn’t it be a great idea to get tourists to saunter into cashew plantations and pick cashews themselves?

Himachal Pradesh offers tourists the experience of walking through apple orchards and picking up fruit from the tree. This also happens in other countries, and is not restricted to apples but other fruit as well.

Many tourists plan their trips to Himachal Pradesh to time it with the apple picking season, just for that experience.

Why not replicate something like this in Goa? We don’t have apples – well just recently somebody succeeded on growing some in Goa – but we do have cashews aplenty, and most hang at a level that they can easily be plucked while standing on the ground.

In fact, Goa can do one better than the apple-picking experience as the cashews that have been picked by the tourists can be crushed in front of them and the juice – neero – served to them fresh from the crushing.

All that for a price, of course, and definitely an experience that foreign and domestic tourists would opt for.

This is definitely something that Goa Tourism can look at and consider for the next season itself. It does not require much planning or infrastructure. All it needs is getting the cashew farmers to agree to hosting batches of tourists on their plantations.