So far our experience of Africa has been...well lets just say...varied. There have been some good times. Actually I'm selling the trip short, there have been loads of good times. And sometimes things have been, well, not so good. But to keep things in perspective whenever things have been bad I've still enjoyed them, simply because they've been, for lack of a better word, unique. After all how many people can say that they've been stuck in the middle of an Angolan dirt road, drinking stagnant puddle water, while waiting for a bulldozer to come and pull them out? See these things can still be fun.But there has been one aspect of the trip that has almost never failed to delight and that has been the food. OK I will admit that there have been some bad meals on this trip but they've been few and far between. Probably the most infamous (among the Af-Trailers anyway) has been 'Pastagate', a meal so unbelievably horrendous that the memory of it is still firmly etched into the consciousness of the entire group several months later. Another of the most awful meals we were forced to stomach was in Angola when we were trapped in the sink-hole. Since our fresh food had run out our meal for that night pretty much consisted of rice rations, coupled with tinned tomatoes and nothing else. Not good. But I don't mean to be negative because most of the food we've eaten has been quite fantastic, as long as you don't mention cabbage (lets just say we've got several people on the truck who would rather chew their own arm off than consume cabbage).
Yet most of the food has been great. And extremely varied. Usually the highlights have been when our two Chilean travellers, German and Carolina, have been cooking but most of the time every single cook group has managed to deliver a satisfying meal on a regular basis. And usually the only reasons for bad meals have been due to lack of good ingredients, i.e. not our fault. Possibly my favourite truck meal of all time was when the lads came back from a fishing trip and 'PS2' Gav had caught an absolutely gargantuan Samson Fish that was big enough to feed every single person on the truck and still leave seconds.
But truck meals are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the food in Africa. Let us not forget the variable but often wonderful 'meat-on-a-stick, vendors who would wander the streets in West Africa selling meat of questionable origin that could either be absolutely delicious or could be nothing but fat and gristle that was probably extracted from a diseased rodent. However it would always cost a pittance. These vendors, we later found out, were sadly nowhere to be seen after reaching Namibia and beyond. Most of the best food in West Africa came from street vendors or from grubby little shacks with plastic chairs where locals prepared rough and ready food over burning oil drums. Some of the best seafood I ate wasn't from expensive restaurants but from those roadside shacks at coastal towns and it was much cheaper too. More often than not you didn't even know what you were getting but that didn't matter as long as it tasted good. I'm still quite certain that I've eaten rat at least once during my time here.
I also mentioned fan-milk of course, a substance that I crave like a desperate junkie but probably won't ever see again outside central West Africa. Then there are the bakeries or patisseries as they were called in the French African countries. The local bakery was usually the first thing that most of us would seek out when entering a town, usually to evaluate the quality, size and meat content of their pies. Especially Greg. That man loves his pies! One of the highlights was the Select Patisserie in Yaounde, a place where most of us ate at least once a day during our entire week in town.And then there have been the restaurant meals. This was something that was slightly lacking in West Africa. Meals would range from acceptable to quite tasty around this area of the continent but few delivered any mind blowing culinary experiences. The feasts really began when we hit Swakopmund in Namibia, a town I would cross the entire world just to have dinner in. First off was Neapolitana, a restaurant that recently gained my appreciation when I designated it with my 'favourite food on planet' award. Though Italian in style this restaurant offered food that you wouldn't find anywhere else, it basically served game meat: Zebra, Oryx, Springbok, Kudu, the kind of animals most people wouldn't ever expected to eat. This was a place that I ate at every single day we were in Swakopmund, sometimes twice in a day! At any rate I tried all of the above meats and more and I can honestly say that Zebras taste absolutely delicious, beyond delicious. Sublime, delectable, incomparably tasty. Yes Zebras are beautiful animals and I like looking at them in the wild but my god they are so tasty! If you're ever in town I also recommend the game burger, a burger so obscenely monstrous that an adult hippopotamus wouldn't be able to open their mouth wide enough to take a bite, you simply have to open in up and attack in with your fork and steak-knife.
Swakopmund also housed a place where I found the best Pizza I've ever eaten, a Pizza so good I would pay any to have one airmailed to me right now no matter the cost. The other food that was widely abundant in Namibia was biltong, a kind of beef-jerky only not made from beef but from far more exotic animals. And if you think the idea of eating all these unusual animals that you probably haven't even seen before seems kinda wrong, trust me, there are LOADS of them around. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands. By the time we made it through Etosha National Park most of us were thoroughly fed up with seeing zebras, implas and springbok. So we went to Swakopmund and ate them.
And they tasted real GOOOOOD!
Phil vs Burger
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