Banana boat

On our recent trip to Central America we saw LOTS of bananas!

Here are bananas growing at a botanical garden in Nicaragua.

Here's a guy unloading them on a street corner on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

Here's a drive-by shot of a big banana plantation on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala.  Unlike the unfettered fruit at the botanical garden, commercially grown bananas are coddled by being wrapped in blue plastic for protection from birds and animals.  I'm sorry we couldn't stop for a better photo op.

Each banana tree yields only one crop (i.e. one bunch of bananas).  So in the plantations, a small tree is started at the foot of each mother tree; the mother tree will nurture it, and by the time the mother has produced its bunch, the baby tree is large enough to start producing its crop in turn.  Perhaps you can see the small trees, here about four feet tall, growing right next to the trunks of the mother trees.