Around the World in 50 Years (27 page)

Among the more memorable culinary experiments was an anteater Steve and I found recently run over on a road in Panama. Not wanting to waste a good source of protein, we chopped it up, added salt and pepper, wished we had a box of Roadkill Helper, roasted it over a campfire, and it tasted … awful, like a burger marinated in formic acid.

And a platter of sea cucumber—a cold, black, warty little creature served as a gelatinous, forbidding-looking dark lump—which, once ingested, tasted like a mix of Jell-O, lard, and library paste.

Rats are, in contrast—and after you overcome any squeamish cultural bias—rather tasty, especially the big ones eaten in Africa, where they're called “grasscutters,” an appealing appellation doubtless bestowed by the branding consultant who renamed the Patagonian toothfish as “Chilean sea bass” and the slimefish as “orange roughy.” The locals skin the rodents, split them down the middle, spread them out flat, and roast or grill them. Each tastes exactly like what it ate. If it lived in a cane field, it tastes like sugar; if it lived in a pineapple patch, just Dole it out.

Unfortunately, the elephant dung beetle I ate in Kenya smelled exactly like what
it
ate, but I overcame this olfactory impediment with a liberal application of OFF! insect repellant under my nose. (Better to use perfume or aftershave if you try this experiment at home.) I felt guilty eating it because the dung beetle performs an invaluable service in disposing of animal waste, a dark and lowly job, but somebody has to do it. (On my short foray into Kruger National Park, one of my companions was a leading authority on dung beetles and gleefully rushed from one pile of hyena droppings to another with his magnifying glass. I tried to imagine his backstory, what childhood trauma impelled him to that career. After all, he could have been a proctologist.)

On one hungry morning near the Arctic Circle, I became an instant legend among the Inuit after I stopped at a riverside village while they were smoking a batch of just-caught
Oncorhynchus kisutch.
I purchased a live one, bit off its head, and ate the rest raw, savoring the freshest salmon sashimi possible, while the bemused villagers watched in horror.

Although I attempt to adhere to the know-what-it-is-you're-eating rule, that's not always possible and led to an unsettling experience at a small eatery in Iran. After learning that the
plat du jour
was a meat-and-vegetable stew, and after carefully ascertaining how much they'd charge us for the stew, and how much for the use of their bowl, and the cutlery, and the tablecloth, and the napkin—we'd learned from the unexpected fees restaurants had hit us with from Alexandria to Baghdad—we ordered the stew and enjoyed a delectable dinner.

I wanted to know what meat we'd eaten so I could order it again, but since I spoke no Farsi, and my Arabic was pretty much limited to “How much,” “That's too much,” “Where's the toilet,” and “Screw off!,” I pointed to the empty bowl, contentedly rubbed my belly, blissfully closed my eyes, and spread my arms in the universal “What is it?” gesture, and suggested, with proper inflection,
“Moo, moo?”

No, the waiter swiveled his head back and forth; it was not a cow.

I tried the
baa baa
of a sheep, the bleat of a goat, and the whinny of a horse, each to the same negative response, and had consequently exhausted my repertoire of farm-animal speech, except for the
oink
of a pig, which I was not about to insultingly suggest in that devoutly Muslim nation.

I again pointed into the bowl and gave the waiter a puzzled look and a questioning shrug.

In response to which came his reply:
“Bow-wow, bow-wow.”

(I need to learn to let sleeping dogs lie.)

In some situations you have no choice but to eat whatever is put in front of you, as when you're someone's guest in a land where refusal to partake is considered rude, and would cause your host to lose face. Steve and I were such guests of several Hong Kong dignitaries who'd been helpful to us. They took us to a gourmet restaurant in the colony's Wan Chai district, where we were seated around a circular table that had a grapefruit-sized hole in the center. Because of my strong convictions favoring conservation, I had much difficulty ingesting several of the courses, particularly a bird's nest soup and a jelly made of shark fins, but I had no way to decline without giving great offense.

Then came the killer: Near the conclusion of the meal, the stony-faced waiter brought out a live monkey in a basket. He deftly slipped the unsuspecting simian under the table and brought his head up through the hole in the center. Before I could comprehend what was happening, the waiter, with a hard, practiced swing of his cleaver, hit the little guy with a sharp blow to the middle of the forehead that broke through his skull, and, still with the same sweeping motion, flipped back the top of the animal's head to reveal its brain, gray and moist and pulsating inside.

With my hosts eagerly demonstrating the proper technique for scooping out pieces of the still-living brain with a demitasse spoon, and exhorting us to eat while it was still warm, and assuring me that no creature feels any pain when you consume its brain, I reluctantly dipped in.

That was not a dinner I'll ever forget. Or want to repeat.

At other times I've not been able to obtain a local delicacy. This happened on my first visit to rural Scotland, where I searched for some haggis, but was told it was served only on Bobby Burns' Eve. It also occurred in Dominica, where I'd been looking forward to the national dish of stewed “mountain chicken”—that branding consultant again?—but had to forgo it because an unknown disease had been ravaging the forest frog population.

I also failed on my quest to eat a mouse. I'd heard, at my campsite in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, that some rural folks ate whole mice charred on skewers. Although I am ever eager (within reason) to eat strange stuff, a mouse offered a unique experience. While I had previously ingested many crustaceans and aquatic entities in their entirety (e.g., clams, oysters, shrimp, baby octopi, snails, sardines, and fingerlings) and had consumed the main meaty parts of a few small animals, like rats and guinea pigs, I'd never devoured an entire mammal in one bite. The challenge of popping a whole mouse in my mouth—head, tail, feet, fur, guts, bones, heart, and all—was simultaneously exciting and intimidating, like my first—it was also my last—frightening dive off a six-meter board.

For starters, I needed to check out the cautionary tale I'd heard that these mice were dangerous to eat because they'd been killed with cyanide. I found this allegation to be false (probably started by the chicken farmers) and learned that the mice were dug out of their holes in the fields by children trying to help balance the family budget.

It took a lot of asking around Lilongwe—I got the sense that mouse-munching was frowned upon by the sophisticated city dwellers, and even regarded as a disgusting relic of colonial poverty—until, on my last day there, I tracked down a bearded old-timer at the main outdoor food market who told me I could find the mice shish-kebabed at a stall way out in District 36; whereupon, he (for a $10 fee) and I took a minibus far out to the boonies and, at about four p.m., found the sought-for shop—greasy but empty. We searched around it and located the butcher/chef out back, cleaning up. I asked if I could get some roasted mouse.

He gently scolded me: “We are all sold out for today. Come back tomorrow around noon. Your customs must be different from ours. We eat mice only for lunch.”

During my travels I've consumed a variety of mystery meats—grilled, fried, or stewed—where the species was often unascertainable, as was the precise nature of the body part, having been cut into tiny pieces before being cooked. I'm sure I've chewed and swallowed countless meatish morsels, which, when home, I'd never want to think about, much less eat, even if the Board of Health would permit it. But on the road, I dutifully suck it all up, so far without obvious harm.

The only foreign staple I loathe is
injera,
the ubiquitous “bread” of Ethiopia and Eritrea, a foul concoction of teff, barley, wheat, corn, and sorghum having the consistency of a kitchen sponge, the look of a lunar landscape, and the taste of a week-old pancake gone sour. I don't think I could long survive in Ethiopia, where it's famine one year and
injera
the next.

The meals I've had the most trouble getting down are the ones I cooked myself, although these were, thankfully, quite few. Anything beyond scraping a carrot exceeds my ability; I lack any culinary genes. I had the gas stove in my apartment turned off when I moved in 40 years ago, and I've never regretted it, nor have any of my visitors, who get taken out to a decent dinner.

Since I don't cook, and since I can munch only so many cans of sardines, bags of nuts, or bunches of bananas when traveling, I usually seek a hot meal for dinner, generally at roadside stalls and street vendors rather than restaurants, counterintuitive as that may seem. Since sanitary conditions are a serious concern in poor countries, I don't want to take a chance at the restaurants, where I can't see what's going on in the kitchen. At the street-side stands, in contrast, all is in the open, and I can watch everything from the food prep through the dishwashing, if any. I usually carry chopsticks and plastic spoons and ask the vendors to put the food on a paper plate or a fresh banana leaf, so I don't have to worry whether someone with a deadly disease dined from the dish before me. When I have a choice, I select only stalls where the equipment looks clean and orderly, the food is covered, the flies are few, and the cook appears robust and healthy; I figure that if they've thrived on their own cooking, then the odds are in my favor. This approach has worked for me, and I have suffered not a single incidence of tourist trots, Tut's Tummy, Burma Belly, or Montezuma's revenge in my last 30 years abroad.

I'll eat almost anything, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed a bowl of fermented mare's milk mixed with salted yak butter served to me at a Buddhist monastery high in the hills of Bhutan. Yet there was no way I was going to let the monks know how awful it tasted to me.
Claus Hirsch

I regularly travel with a supply of cayenne pepper or chili powder, for both its taste and potential medical benefits. The active ingredient is capsaicin (8-methyl-
N
-vanillyl-6-nonenamide), which releases such intense heat in the body that some physicians believe it's the reason why dwellers in pepper-popular regions get far fewer colds and infectious diseases than expected. I have a great love of, and tolerance for, red pepper, winning several jalapeño-eating contests in Mexico, and usually covering a standard slice of pizza with three tablespoons of it. And I have not had a bad cold or flu since college.

When I do eat at a restaurant in the undeveloped world, I avoid the fancy ones catering to tourists, and head to the inexpensive little ones on the side streets, where the indigenes eat. Just don't let the names put you off. You can get a fine meal at The Bung Hole and Dirty Dicks and excellent ramen at the Phat Phuc Noodle Bar. If you find the fare at Virgin Tandoori too dry and unseasoned, you'll probably like what the Happy Crack puts out. And not to be overlooked are Hung Far Low, My Dung, and The Golden Stool. (These names are all legit; I lack the entrepreneurial vision to make them up.)

 

CHAPTER 16

Snow Beneath the Southern Cross

After visiting every state in the Western Hemisphere, I planned to finish the rest of the world in three big bites, each a year apart. The first chomp was the biggest, all 13 nations in southern Africa in 65 days between July and September of 2009.

But we all know what happens to the best laid plans.

It went wrong right from the start because I was unable to obtain a visa to Angola before leaving the States. Angola was notoriously stingy about granting visas to tourists, assuming that the only reason anyone visited their war-ravaged country was to steal diamonds. Angola's government was particularly hard on Americans because we'd backed their opponents in their long and bloody civil war. No one I knew had ever been granted a visa. The Angolans held my application for more than three months without taking action despite my exhortations that I needed to leave for Africa. Whenever I called their embassy for a status report, it was always the same, and always delivered in the same inscrutable monotone: “We are waiting to hear from Luanda.” My only hope was to pursue my application when I was in an African nation in which Angola had an embassy, and the only such nation on my route was Mozambique.

This was my twelfth journey to Africa and presented the usual litany of pestilence and petty annoyances, all accentuated by prejudice and poverty: bandits, pickpockets, muggers, con artists, and bag snatchers; corrupt officials who demand you pay them for doing what they are supposed to be paid by their governments to do; dodgy border guards seeking shakedowns; some race discrimination (with me a member of the minority); a couple of in-transit nights sleeping on airport floors; the almost-constant threat of malaria, dengue, schistosomiasis, chikungunya, and a score of other unpleasant pathogens; platoons of snakes, spiders, and scorpions; squadrons of mosquitoes, mites, midges, sand flies, and sand fleas; and battalions of bedbugs, helminths, and skin-burrowing parasites. This was exacerbated by the hardscrabble situation of millions of Africans who had been crushingly impacted by the burgeoning global financial crisis. Their economic losses, combined with the jump in food prices, could mean the difference between life and death. All compounded by linguistic difficulties (with two countries that spoke Portuguese and at least five that palavered in an oddly accented French). Then there were poor roads terrorized by recklessly driven, poorly maintained buses and vans; the brutally dry deserts in the Kalahari of Namibia; impassable swamps in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, freezing nights in the foothills of Lesotho; gangs of now-unemployed child soldiers in Angola, Congo, and Mozambique; and, since I'd be camping out for half the trip, the expected issues with lions, hyenas, crocs, hippos, and elephants (the last of which, on a previous Kenya campout, disported a disconcerting proclivity for taking nightmare-inducing nocturnal dumps on my tent).