Going totally nuts over coco de mer: A very long journey for a very unusual coconut

As my partner and I are neither beach people nor enthusiastic swimmers, we find ourselves remarkably often on islands surrounded by nothing but endless ocean. We already paid the price for this once by getting stranded on New Caledonia, a French territory comprising dozens of islands in the South Pacific, during a riot, only to be evacuated two weeks later by the French army.

It makes for a good story - and a column on this page two years ago. But once safely home, we solemnly vowed to stick to megacities with boutique cafes, serving organically sourced single-origin coffee. So, when we announced we were off to the Seychelles, eyebrows were raised. Not interested in resorts, what exactly possessed us then? The answer can be summarised in one word: coconut.

The island of Praslin is one of the few places where the 'coco de mer' still grows in the wild. Its French name translates as sea coconut, although, of course, it's not the sea that produces them, but improbably tall palms.


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The Seychelles entered the European colonial imagination surprisingly late. Portuguese sailors mapped the islands in 1502, but for centuries they remained uninhabited. Arab seafarers had long known of them, using the archipelago, much like the islands of Mauritius and Reunion, as a stopping point without ever settling there. It was only in 1756 that France formally claimed the islands, by which time their extraordinary flora had evolved largely undisturbed by human hands.

Curiously, coco de mer was already famous. For centuries, its enormous nuts washed up on beaches in the Maldives, giving rise to myths of a mysterious tree growing beneath the sea. Sailors carried them back to Europe, where their unmistakably female shape - somewhere between voluptuous buttocks and a vulva - fuelled endless fantasies about their origin. After repeatedly stumbling across them in Amsterdam antique shops, I eventually concluded that I could no longer live without owning one myself. The obvious solution was to travel to its place of origin.

This turned out to be easier imagined than accomplished. Coco de mer is among the world's most tightly protected botanical treasures. Every nut sold legally is individually certified, and the prices are appropriately eye-watering for what is, in the end, an absurdly oversized coconut.

The seed is the largest on Earth, commonly weighing 20 kg or more. Palms take around 30 years to bear fruit, and each fruit needs another 6-7 years to mature on the tree before it can be harvested and prepared for sale.

The joy of journeys like these lies precisely in their idiocy. Why travel halfway around the world to search for the perfect coconut? The question answers itself. We visited every shop on Praslin that supposedly sold them before deciding the most authentic specimen could be found at a small roadside store near Vallee de Mai nature park.

This is also where the palms themselves can be admired. More botanical sanctuary than untamed forest, the reserve has become something of a pilgrimage site for people who, like us, become disproportionately excited about astoundingly daft things.

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Spotting another coco de mer palm beside the road on our way to the beach for sundowners, my partner muttered, 'Remember when you made me hunt for the dodo?' He meant Mauritius, where I had dragged him to the geological formation of Mare aux Songes, near the airport, where the largest concentration of dodo bones has ever been found. Not that there was one to buy.

Earlier that week, I had visited a crocodile farmer who owned several reconstructed skeletons assembled from genuine bones, enough to conjure the vanished bird. It wasn't quite the same.

Nor, for that matter, was our determined search for an authentic Labubus in China when they were impossible to find. Dodos remain extinct. Labubus have already passed out of fashion. But our coco de mer now occupies pride of place in the living room, radiating its peculiar mystique. A monument to the glorious madness of travel.