Hi Susan,

You wrote:
"I would like to try jackfruit but I haven't seen any around here (BC), only
chips. What is it like?"

The jack is the bigest fruit in the world, groving on beautiful high trees, most of the times along the trunk. I like it very much and I'm lucky: I found an 8 kg one just this afternoon at the store of a friend whom imports organic fruits from Africa. It's a small one, not fully ripe yet.
Cempedak is alike but smaller and even more sweet and tasty, very nurishing. With the durian, these fruits seems to be the basic ones for us, all the others looking and tasting like small triflings at their side. Once, while on holiday in Thailand, I found a shop where there was always a big stock of cempedak. I ended eating almost only them for three weeks ! When I left and came back home, anything was tasteless.
Fortunately, I survived anyway.
In town there is a Chinese food-shop were there's sometimes jackfruit. Else, they can order it for you. Wait till they are soft and the skin starts to rot (getting brown on some spots) and so you can open it "monky way": pull away the skin with your fingers. When not fully ripe, some terrific glue will stick to your hands and mouth. It can be dissolved with oil.

Hope you'll find one. If none in BC there's plenty good, big and extremely cheap ones in Sri Lanka. But I don't remember when is the (long) season.

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/jackfruit_ars.html
http://www.asiafood.org/malayproverbs.cfm

Jackbest,
Francois