Coconuts in the Mail

Last year someone told me that US Postal Service considers a coconut to be valid packaging. In other words, at least within the United Stated you should be able to mail a coconut without packing it into a box or any sort of an envelope. While in Hawaii, we decided to take USPS at their word. The adventure of mailing a couple of coconuts turned out to be a rather amusing multi-step process.

Step 1. Acquire the coconuts
Despite the fact that large ripe coconuts threatened to fall on our heads practically everywhere we went, acquiring whole coconuts was not trivial. We stopped by a farmers’ market and three supermarkets before we could buy some. (Shockingly this seems to be a pattern with many local fruit.)

Step 2. Get the coconuts inspected and stamped at an airport
All the airports we have visited in Hawaii had multiple USDA stands. (USDA checks all luggage traveling to the mainland.) We took the purchased coconuts to one of these stands at the Lihue airport for government inspection. “Yep, that’s a coconut,” said a USDA officer after taking one of our coconuts into his hands. He then proceeded to carefully search each fruit for a smooth spot to stamp his USDA seal of approval.

Step 3. Address the coconuts
You might think that addressing a coconut is so simple and obvious that it does not deserve its own step. If you do think so, I challenge you in your free time to write your full name on one of these little fur balls. Legibly! We tried a combination of thin and thick sharpies, and eventually ended up with something acceptable.

Step 4. Convince the USPS worker to mail the coconut without a box
In the end our coconuts’ fate fell entirely to the mercy of the post office worker. And they (the coconuts… or maybe we) were very lucky. The cheerful post office man that greeted us shrugged his shoulders, smiled and started weighing each of our little “packages”. We knew we were lucky because another friendly post office worker came by to take a look, and he did not think that mailing coconuts without a box was such a good idea. In fact, he thought mailing coconuts should not be allowed at all, because they contain liquid.

In the end, the two coconuts we mailed to our friends on the mainland safely reached their destination in only 3 days! We were originally going to mail three coconuts, but it turned out that one of them was leaking. So we spared everyone involved in transporting mail and bestowed the leaky coconut on our friends, Ryan and Talia, who live in Hawaii.