Thoughts about Food

As a vegetarian traveling in countries where vegetarianism (by choice) is not the norm, one does not expect to find much in the way of culinary excitement. Especially when you get off the beaten track a little bit. At the further detriment to my diet is my habit of 12hour bus journeys which pretty much limits both breakfast and lunch to meals one can buy through the bus window. In Tanzania when these days were more common, most of my protein came from peanuts, and carbs from biscuits (they call cookies, biscuits here [pronounced: 'bis-quit'] which makes them much easier to eat for breakfast). Plus the occasional banana, and of course a multi-vitamin every morning to balance it off. Dinners I am at least not usually in motion.

In Tanzania it was a lot of rice and beans, but that was fine, because I like rice and beans. When there was a little local spinach or some fresh chapatis I was pretty content. What makes all the difference is the hot sauce. And hot sauce is ubiquitous, but I've found it varies quite considerably by country. Despite the dozens of tribal and ethic groups within these haphazard borders created by spurious European conquistadors, it seems that pili-pili is truly unified nationally. In Tanzania the hot sauce was pretty mediocre, heavily processed, in ketchup looking containers, light colored, but quite adequate; it got the job done. In Malawi on the other hand, the hot sauce was exceptional. There is a local brand called Nali, made from "birdseye" peppers, that had a great flavor, they even have a garlic variety (pictured). Unfortunately in Rwanda the hot sauce is uniformly terrible. Even house-made stuff still has this distinct terrible taste, that is shared by all Rwandan hot sauce. It is hot, but the flavor is revolting. Fortunately, Rwandan food has other things going for it.

Rwanda like everywhere else I've been is pretty big on meat. I'm sure most Rwandans would choose to eat meat at every meal if they could afford it. However, another thing that seems to be very popular is buffets. I'm not sure if this is a Franco/Belgian thing left over from colonialism (the word sounds French to me, but it's hard to imagine Parisians digging into the steam tables like there counterparts here at the equator) or a homegrown institution, but they are widespread. And not only are they cheap, to be successful they have to have a lot of dishes, and that means vegetables! They aren't all the best quality, but after a strict rice and beans diet (which even I get tired of if it's more than once a day), the variety (if not the hot sauce) is the spice of lunch (sorry).

I am still refining me buffet dish selection process (these buffets are not to be confused with their American "all you can eat" cousins, you pay by the plate, so visual decision making is key), but suffice it to say that I am eating a far greater variety of plant species. And though I am still religiously taking my vitamins, Rwandan is of course the place that I got my first cold since Ethiopia..

Breakfast in Rwanda

The original plan was to travel all the way from Kigoma to Kigali in one day. While this journey is perhaps 100miles as the crow flies, and still only 300 by road, I knew this was an ambitious plan. When, just outside of Kigoma a truck spun out in the mud, blocking the road for a few hours I knew it wasn't going to happen. The rest of the trip went smoothly however, and I did make it to the (former refugee camp) town of Benako at the border just before sundown. I settled in at a derelict guesthouse (no running water) and went to bed.

I woke up early the next morning and went out to look for something to eat before I hit the road. After looking around, and asking a few people, I pulled up a bucket around an open fire with a small group of people where they were brewing coffee, and even had mandazi (soggy donut type things). The people were friendly, the breakfast was as good as expected, and soon enough I was on the back of a motorcycle headed towards Rusumo Falls (Tanzania/Rwanda border, [pictured]).

Most borders are hell, with overzealous immigration officers surrounded by disreputable towns. This border was thankfully a breeze (though if I wasn't American or a select group of other nationalities I would have been refused entry and would have had to go the nearest Rwandan embassy to arrange a visa [in Nairobi], a rare time when it paid to be from the good ol' USA, lots of other countries charge us 10times what others pay to reciprocate our generous immigration policies.) So I walk into Rwanda to await the next minibus headed towards Kigali. I had some time to wait so I walked around the Rwandan side of the border. It was immediately apparent that the standard of life was a bit higher on this side of the imaginary line. I stopped into a local restaurant for a 2nd breakfast (It was only 8 in the morning) and for less than $1.50, had an amazing breakfast of fresh chapatis, eggs, beans, and tea. Needless to say, this was a good sign of things to come in the land of a thousand hills.

Gombe

Gombe Stream National Park is where Jane Goodall's chimp research happened and is still happening. But it wasn't just the chimps that made it amazing.

Gombe is a tiny park squeezed into the shore of Lake Tanganyika. It's topography is more related to it's location between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria where Tanzania, the DR Congo, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda all converge, than the rest of Tanzania. It is basically a thin strip of mountains covered by temperate rainforest and the lake. It is beautiful. It is also very remote, about three days tortouous travel from Dar es Salaam (if you are not flying) and then a few hours in a boat from Kigoma (I was in Kigoma checking up on a VGIF site anyway). Since it is low season for tourists (rainy season), I had the place to myself. And I mean I was literally the only mzungu there.

The park only has the capacity to sleep about 25 visitors, but there wasn't another guest in sight. There were plenty of staff, researchers etc, but I was the only tourist. I had a private park for myself. I tracked chimps with only the researchers (and they really didn't seem to be doing too much research, more like sitting around and telling jokes) and had the good fortune to see a lot chimpanzees.

The pictures aren't the best (flash was not allow). But the best time was when I put the camera away anyway. I am trying to take more videos (if not upload them due to African bandwidths).

Here is a video clip of a baby chimp playing in a tree above me:

the Beach

The Beach, Gombe Stream National Park, Western Tanzania

Road Show

Here are some pictures from the last month and a half:

The Beach to the Jungle

Life on the Road

life on the road

The Art of Eating a Mango

Maybe I just haven't eaten enough mangoes in my life (I blame my mother), or maybe Tanzania just produces really good mangoes, but I have gained a lot of appreciation for this inimitable fruit. Considering the pretty much tropical locale, fruit really isn't that prevalent. Other than the mango, there is: papaya, bananas, pineapple passion fruit and maybe some hard local pears, oranges or apples, but that is it, and many places you'd be hard pressed to find any fruit at all. The one real exception to this dearth of fruit has been the mango, and alas it seems that their season is about over..

One of the reasons I have consumed so many mangoes is because there is no real juice culture here. In Ethiopia juice was very common (and thus cheap and good) so I didn't eat as much fruit. Here, juice is expensive ($2-3) and rarely sold fresh outside of tourist places, but the mangoes are (or were) available and exceptional.

There are two basic kinds of mango: the small green one's that are eaten unripe with salt and chili, and the big one's that get a little reddish when ripe (the regular ones you find at home). I like the regular ones. I like them a little bit under ripe like I like most fruit, for the firmness and tiny bit of tartness (I know many people consider this sacrilegious). The big ones look a little more intimidating than their small green counterpart, but they are really a good sized snack. The pit accounts for much of the size, which is the reason eating them is an art rather than a science.

There are many ways to eat a mango. The assymetrical ness is really what necessitates the creativity. One cannot (especially with the local, non-gmo big pitted variety) cut it half then in quarters or any other fraction very easily, you have to improvise. Some people peal the skin off methodically and to make sure they get all the fruit. This isn't always a good technique when you are sitting on the beach or in your hotel room due to the juiciness factor.

As any little boy can tell you, it is fun to cut things with a sharp knife and mangoes are no exception (and having been carrying my knife around for 5 months, it's nice to actually use it). The way it is served in restaurants here, the bigger (more fruit) half is cut off and then it is cut for easy eating with a fork or spoon. When I am eating my mangoes I like to slice into it and carve out sections. It is difficult to assess when you'll hit pit, so one must be ever vigilant and slice accordingly. No two mangoes are ever the same (like snowflakes) so every time you first pierce the peel you are engaging in a unique piece of performance art.

Malawi: Wins and Losses

The recent Malawi excursion is microcosmic of my whole trip; highs and lows, peaks and valleys, strikes and gutters. And generally more good than bad, but the bad stuff is more interesting to write about.

It started out inauspiciously (or auspiciously, I'm not really sure which), the border crossing was a breeze, but there was no bus waiting for me on the other side as promised (I really knew better). But I quickly rallied, miraculously there was a taxi one person short of capacity, and I hopped in at was in a major town 3 dollars and 45 minutes later. My luck ran a little short after that, the next 200k took about 6 hours on a slow local bus ending up in a crappy town where I was hungry and tired and choose to spend the night in a crappy guest house next to a loud bar. After that it picked up a little, I ran into this Dutch couple that I had run into 4 other separate times in Tanzania, and we went to this awesome spot on Lake Malawi, Nkhata Bay. I got a great deal on the nicest room of the trip so far (stone bathtub, quilt my mom would love, overlooking the lake, etc). I always looked down upon Midwesterners who talk about "beaches" on the Great Lakes, but maybe I should reconsider (though I doubt Lake Michigan has much in common with Lake Malawi other than semantically..) Anyway, I stayed on the lake for a few days, and then headed back north towards a VGIF site I needed to visit in Chitipa. On the way I stopped at this awesome place up on the plateau (Malawi really has incredible topography with amazing green mountains meeting the lake), I stayed there for 2 nights, and it was great..

After my extended Northern Malawi tour I headed back towards the Tanzanian border to get some work done. Chitipa is actually very close to Tanzania, but it is 100k from a paved road, and since it's rainy season, there is no regular public transport there. However I was told it was easy to get a ride in the back of a truck. So I walk from the Karonga bus station out to the dirt road leading west, and sure enough a truck rolls up after 15minutes or so. I was expecting to ride in the back (I should mention I had to hitch a ride in the back of a pick-up to get down from the Mushroom Farm to the main road that morning to get a bus), but this truck was full of cargo, the driver and his two buddies offered four of us (and a baby) to squeeze into the space behind the seats in the cab. This actually seemed preferable to bouncing around in the back, so I climbed in.

It was very cramped, since there are three guys sitting in the two actual seats, the four of us in the one and a half foot wide space behind them couldn't extend our legs. But the people were all very friendly, and I probably had the best spot (in the middle). It looked like it was going to rain, so it was nice to be inside, and the music the driver was playing was actually pretty good. With my spirits high I even took a video on my camera (which I'll post at a later date if possible).

About an hour into our journey (I was told it would take about 3 hours to reach Chitipa) it started to rain. It didn't even rain that hard or for that long, but it turned the top layer of the road into mud. This mud was very different than the New England mud season mud I am familiar with. The red African dirt (much like I imagine the mud in the American South from my extensive viewing of My Cousin Vinny to be like) turned into slippery slop that was even hard to walk on. The reason I know what it is like to walk on is because as soon as our truck hit an incline, it would lose momentum and its tires would just spin in the mud.

There were stickers on the windshield that said "Off Road" and "4x4", these were obviously blatant lies. This truck was no match for the slick road surface on any sort of incline, and while we didn't get stuck on downhills, they felt like we were surfing on mud with a 3ton surfboard. And this was a hilly road. We got to one hilly section and even with the help of the resident kids' hoes (our shovels were worthless) we couldn't get the truck moving. After about 45minutes when I was mentally preparing myself to sleep cramped in the cab, our guardian angel came in the form of a Caterpillar earth-mover type machine. The driver towed the truck to the top of that hill without too much difficulty, and we started off. We were stuck again within 5 minutes. Luckily the Caterpillar doesn't move that fast, and he was still within honking distance to tow us again. He ended up towing us for the better part of 3 miles, to the end of the uphill section. It really didn't even rain that much, and it seemed like the road was drying out a little bit, and we headed down the road. We crossed a river, and stopped to clean the mud off of us a little bit, and I was told we were more than half-way there, we had been traveling for about 5 hours at this point and it was starting to get dark.

Needless to say we got stuck numerous times in the second half of the journey as well. Luckily when we would get stuck we would spin out blocking the whole road, so other travellers were forced to help us so they could get by. A couple muddy spin-outs later in the pitch dark on a particularly long, slippery hill, a passing mini-bus full of passengers helped pull us out. I thought there was no way this truck was making it to Chitipa tonight, so I bailed out, paid my share and jumped in the mini-bus. The mini-bus passed the truck and I thought I was home free. Unfortunately at the next town the mini-bus money-collector guy got in a fight with some kid who was trying to steal our tail-lights.. This caused enough of a delay to allow the truck to pass us, and low and behold we were behind it again on the next hill when it got stuck. We got out to help, but it looked like the truck was going nowhere, we managed to get the mini-bus past the truck by pulling it through the mud on the side of the road. Running off into the night covered in mud in front of the mini-bus I felt a little guilty about leaving the truck behind, but at this point I just wanted to get to Chitipa.

The rest of the ride passed without incident. We made it to Chitipa 9 hours after I left, but I was just happy to get there at all. After dropping off a few people, we stopped to pick up some more, and low and behold it was my former fellow passengers from the truck, miraculously they made it to Chitipa just behind us, and they didn't even hold a grudge for me abandoning them by the side of the road.