He's seen the Durian

On my travels in China there have usually been a number of prohibitory notices displayed in hotel and hostel bedrooms. These have generally been of the order:

1. No guns
2. No explosives
3. No fireworks
4. No inflammable goods
5. No gas cylinders
6. No smoking (not often seen, as hotels and hostels in China are full well aware of how little notice would be taken of such a sign. The one place it was effective, and meant, the hostel was entirely built out of wood, and the notice was backed up by penalties such as immediate expulsion from the hostel, with loss of all deposit and paid in advance room rates)

In southern China, and now in other parts of Asia these signs have often included a "No Durians" sign. Apart from the traditional circle and bar indicating prohibition, this sign also includes what looks like the top view of a cross between a spiny anteater, and a duck billed platypus.

Until today I did not know what a durian was, though it had been vaguely mentioned on one occasion many years ago that it was a sort of fruit. Well going into the local, to the hostel I am staying in, supermarket today they had durians on sale.  They were indeed fruit, and subsequent research showed that both that there is a huge variety of such things and why they are prohibited. They are a tropical fruit, and the specimens I saw were about two feet in circumference; had a stem about one inch in diameter, and looking very woody; were multi-lobed - each fruit having between three and seven lobes; had a skin which was waxy looking, spiney, bright green, and looked as if it would require a machete to open; each lobe was about 15-18 inches long; and the whole thing looked as if it weighed about five kilograms. The reason it is so disliked by hoteliers is its smell - in the reference above described as:

"The edible flesh emits a distinctive odour, strong and penetrating even when the husk is intact. Some people regard the durian as fragrant; others find the aroma overpowering and revolting. The smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust, and has been described variously as tert-ButyIthiol, almonds, rotten onions, turpentine and gym socks. The odour has led to the fruit's banishment from certain hotels and public transportation in southeast Asia."

Talking later to a traveller who had encountered the beasty led to a far less flattering description: terms such as a garlic eating, skunk, whose main job in life is cleaning the sewers by being dragged backwards through them, while wearing socks that have been worn and then left for long enough to turn into a life form of their own; being bandied around. I don't feel this description really gave full vent to the emotion the person concerned seemed to be trying to convey. So now I have seen the Durian.