A Moveable Feast (17 page)

The Swiss were unimpressed with Smiley’s agonies, in spite of the villainous stench. It is common knowledge that Americans are gustatory sissies. Even our cheeses are bland and innocuous. It was no surprise that Roland and Katarina, after a brief interlude of confident laughter, stepped up to demonstrate the rugged superiority of the European palate.

They each sampled a reeking morsel, and tried, briefly, like a team of talented, perfectly synchronised thespians, to affect
insouciance. But the King does not suffer such displays of informality. Roland shuddered, grimaced, and hung his head. He parted his jaws like a yawning mutt and let his mouthful of durian drop to the deck – a pale, half-masticated blob that lay in its slimy envelope of saliva like some ghastly mutant foetal horror. Katarina smiled bravely, but you could tell Roland’s swift defeat had shaken her; her eyes looked anxious and uneasy, and they began to water profusely. She tilted her head to the side with a vapid grin frozen on her face, and hovered there for a few seconds, in that delicate moment of breathless equilibrium before the descent of inevitable catastrophe.

She started gagging. Not just gagging – she was suffering the violent wrenching convulsions of a poisoned rat. Her body jerked in syncopated spasms, like the victim of powerful, random jolts of electricity. She staggered to the rail, spat her mouthful of durian into the sea, and fled below deck without another word, searching, I suspect, for something to gargle with – a bottle of mouthwash, or maybe a cup of diesel fuel drained from the engine.

Roland sighed, took the remaining fruit to the rail and was about to consign it to the sea when four of the Indonesian crew besieged him, chattering and waving their arms in protest. With some spirited sign language they got Roland to understand the scope of the tragedy his disposing of this stinking produce represented, and he was happy to hand it over to them. They retreated to the far end of the dive deck, squatted on a locker and divided the thing up. Their rapturous slurping, appreciative nods and grunts of satisfaction seemed to indicate it was a particularly magnificent regent. The King is dead. Long live the King.

I went below to look for some mangosteens. The King demands respect. He is nothing to be trifled with by rank amateurs; but the Queen, I knew, would welcome me in wanton, intemperate gratification.

Amanda Jones is a travel writer and photographer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work appears in books, magazines and newspapers worldwide, including the
Los Angeles Times,
the
San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, Travel & Leisure, Town & Country, Islands, Brides, Food & Wine, Condé Nast Traveler
and the
Sunday Times
. She has been published in several travel anthologies, including
Salon.com
’s
Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance,
and Lonely Planet’s literary anthologies
The Kindness of Strangers
and
By the Seat of My Pants
. Amanda has done story development for National Geographic’s
Explorer
television series and her black-and-white photographs of African tribes were exhibited at the United Nations film festival. Amanda is also an activist for the empowerment of women in the developing world. Prior to becoming an independent writer, she worked for Condé Nast’s
Vogue
in Sydney. Her website is
amandajonestravel.com
.

I suspect every traveller faces an ethical dilemma occasionally. Mine happened to come in the form of a mango.

I was in my third week in southern Ethiopia, during a time when no-one travelled to Ethiopia for pleasure. I was with five other hardened travellers, all of whom were there, like me, to visit the tribes of the Omo Valley, the notoriously inhospitable Mursi being our ultimate goal.

Living as they had for millennia, the Omo tribes were flamboyant, wearing little clothing but for elaborate body paint and the odd skin loincloth. But in place of their former spears the men now sported cast-off Russian AK47s, which the Mursi tribe was reputed to use with disconcerting frequency.

Mursi women were particularly exotic. They wore a lip-plate, slicing their lower lip in their teens and stretching it to carry a spherical disk the size of a skeet-shooting clay; the bigger the disk, the more desirable the woman. They painted their bodies painstakingly and wove items like spent AK47 shells and cow horns into their hair.

Given that we were determined to photograph the Mursi women, we were not going to be dissuaded by the ornery reputation of their men. We’d developed a strategy and were prepared to meet them with a show of insouciance and strength. Despite this bravado, we were all silently apprehensive about an encounter with the Mursi, unsure how they would react to our plan to camp nearby for three nights.

To get to their territory, we had driven for weeks along rutted dirt tracks, slept in tents, peed behind bushes and showered under a bag that was slung over a tree. It was dry and hellishly hot country, and the few skeletal animals that had survived a recent drought stood about stupefied, staring at the stricken foliage.

While camping, we ate whatever we were served by our Amharic cooks, who had come with us from Addis Ababa. Omo Valley tribes subsisted on milk mixed with cow’s blood, and maize meal smothered in a ground-up leaf, revoltingly devoid of
any flavour and with the texture of sand. In the valley there would be no fresh supplies. We had to make do with what we had brought.

At breakfast, we ate bitter
injera
bread with a rationed layer of that ubiquitous peace offering to American travellers: peanut butter. Later in the day, the cooks would whip up some peculiar combination of spicy Ethiopian sauce, dried sausage, pasta and canned tomatoes. After four days, we had completely exhausted our supply of fresh fruit and vegetables.

By the time a week had passed, I became preoccupied by the thought of salad. Normally, I don’t like salad much, and eat it merely to appease the health gods, but the image of a large bowl of lettuce with avocado began to obsess me in the same way I’d been obsessed with an unattainable boy named Steve when I was an ugly girl in middle school.

After two weeks, the thought of a salad and a piece of fruit, such pedestrian expectations in my regular life, became the Holy Grail. I tried to convince myself that this was a meaningful lesson in empathy with the millions of humans who experienced hunger and craving daily. On the other hand, I understood the message that hungry people often lob back at us: thanks for caring, but you can’t eat empathy.

One hot afternoon in our third week, we finally entered Mursi country, although we had not yet seen any tribesmen. We set up camp and the rest of the group drove off to look for a Mursi encampment. I stayed back to take a shower.

As previously mentioned, a shower meant stripping off and standing under a polyurethane bag slung over a tree branch, which, for technical and safety reasons, needed to happen during daylight hours. While my fellow travellers had the good sense to make themselves scarce at such times, not so with the men of the Omo. Whatever tribe we had camped near, the males would inevitably hear that a white person was doing
something very strange and a crowd would gather out of nowhere to watch me gyrate under a thin spray of tepid water.

I had begun by attempting to shoo them off, but seeing it was hopeless and realising that I was the interloper, I had abandoned all modesty. I would leisurely remove my traveller’s garb – boots, safari shirt and trousers – and chuckle as the men inevitably expressed shock at the fact that I was, as perhaps one of them had wagered, a woman.

Given that Omo women did not wear anything other than an animal skin loincloth, sexual ambiguity was rare. When a flat-chested white person with long blonde hair rocked up wearing trousers and a shirt, there were questions that needed answers.

That afternoon as I performed my shower routine I was startled as a group of men, undeniably Mursi, gathered around me. They seemed more severe and taciturn than the other tribes we had visited, but they were magnificent warriors, muscular and gleaming, their hair shaved into a yarmulke-shaped circle, a leather headband with feathers in front and distended earlobes punched through with metal. They were totally naked but for their guns, their bodies painted with mineral dots and stripes. Absurdly, they had festooned their AK47s with fur, feathers and paint, making them look almost jolly.

I nodded an awkward greeting, to which they did not reply, finished my shower and dressed quickly, feeling a menace I had not felt before. I was alone in camp but for the cooks, who were even more terrified of the southern tribes than we were.

Trying to appear casual, I sat in the shade of a tree to read my book. The men did not disperse, but merely stood at a distance watching. Eventually one of them broke off and walked over, standing in front of me. Now that he had discovered I was a curious member of the opposite sex, his approach made me tense. So much for insouciance and strength.

I squinted up at him, doggedly trying to avoid staring at his penis, which was at eye level and extravagantly decorated with white waves and ochre dots. There was something in the man’s hand but I could not make it out. He held it out to me and it took me a moment to recognise it as a mango. A
mango
!

It was a beautiful specimen of its kind: perfectly formed, ripe and resplendent in Rajneeshian yellows, oranges and reds. Even the omnipresent dust of the Omo had not sullied its luscious shine. I could smell it. I could smell all its hot sweetness and I wanted it perhaps more desperately than I had wanted anything in my life.

Perhaps the reader will now mistake my earlier foreshadowing of an ethical dilemma for an admission that I traded sexual favours for a mango. Naturally, I did wonder what the tribesman expected in return for this small miracle, but I was willing to chance it. I held out my hand and took the mango, and waited. Without a single sound, he turned and walked away. The mango was a gift. I smiled after him and called out, ‘Thank you,’ but he did not turn.

Now my ethical dilemma arose: not how to compensate for the fruit, but what to do with it once it was in my hands. In my own defence, I sat weighing my options for many minutes, the mango warm and pungent in my lap. I could wait until my five fellow travellers returned and then we could share this mango six ways. But there was our translator and the driver; they also deserved a slice, which would mean sharing it eight ways. And ought not we offer some to the cooks, who must also be missing fresh produce? Yes, I decided, sharing this mango ten ways was the noble thing to do. It was the
only
thing to do, given the circumstance of privation. Think of the happiness I would bestow. How grateful for my benevolence they would all be. We would remember this shared delicacy forever.

And then I ate it.

There was a small explosion in my mouth. I felt like I had taken a fast-acting, mind-bending drug, the pleasure was so intense, so otherworldly. Mangoes have a perfume, not just a fragrance, and embedded in every fleshy bite was that musky, floral scent. I peeled the skin off in strips with my teeth, allowing the juice to run in rivulets down my chin, down my forearms and onto my safari shirt. My taste buds did the rumba; they danced, hooted and wolf-whistled. I sucked at the seed until it was white and stringy, and gnawed on the skin until it became transparent and bitter. And then I buried the remains, washed my shirt and never mentioned it to my vitamin-C-deficient companions.

For all these years I have secretly harboured the memory of biting into that mango. And whenever I am asked about the best meal of my travelling life, I’ll hesitate for a moment while I scan the many along the way, but it always comes back to the simple fruit gifted to me by a stark-naked man.

Mark Kurlansky spent fifteen years as a newspaper correspondent and since then has published twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction, including
Cod: The Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Salt: A World History, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World
and
Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
He has won awards for food writing and science writing, and has also been awarded a peace prize. His newest books are
The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís
and
Edible Stories
, a collection of short stories. His story ‘Vertical Administration’, which appeared in a short fiction collection called
The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories
, is his only other published piece on the Guianas.

Guiana is not a word that is associated with success. I was sent on assignment to French Guiana – legally a
département
of France but lost on the northern coast of South America, squeezed between Brazil and Suriname – twice in the 1980s. The first was for the
New York Times Magazine
to cover the civil war, but the
editor kept shouting at the assigning editor, ‘Where is this place?’ and finally killed the story. The second was for
National Geographic
magazine and they didn’t run the story either because the photographer failed to produce pictures. In four centuries of history, almost all projects by outsiders here have failed.

But when I think of food adventures, French Guiana immediately comes to mind.

The restaurant scene in French Guiana was hard to understand. First, you had to consider who the customers might be. There weren’t going to be tourists, since instead of beaches, the coastline had marshes inhabited by ferocious mosquitoes, caimans and vampire bats, and the rest of the country was a dense rainforest penetrable only in dugout canoes along the shallow, treacherous, rocky rivers. There was a lot of French administration, including, at that time, a
préfet,
who embarrassingly insisted on wearing the old-fashioned colonial white uniform of his office. And there were rocket scientists, literally, because Europe had set up its satellite-launching operation there.

The rockets had to be guarded, of course, so there was also the third division of the French Foreign Legion, a fit, skin-headed bunch, who marched through the forest every 14 September singing regimental songs to celebrate that day in 1918 when the regiment broke through the Hindenburg Line. That may have been their last victory; they went on to famous defeats in Algeria and Indochina, including the disaster at Dien Bien Phu. But this new generation was defeated only by nature, by the Guyanese forest that is literally known in French as ‘the green hell’ –
l’enfer vert.
While I was there they had a survival training exercise in which they went up the Maroni River and chopped down trees to float back to the coast. But all the trees were dense tropical hardwood and sank, and the troops had to be rescued by boat.

The locals didn’t eat very much in the restaurants. They were mostly what was called Bush Negroes, descendants of slaves who
escaped centuries ago into the rainforest and reinvented Africa with their own languages and religions. Then there were a variety of indigenous people, small in stature, steeped in traditions. They seldom left their territory, and the French government, which has tried to assimilate everyone in France and half of the rest of the world, protected them from assimilation. No restaurant customers there.

My favourite restaurant was in the wonderful, crumbling wooden capital of Cayenne. It specialised in the game of the forest: gamey little agoutis, succulent tapir stews, an occasional python or an iguana, foods you can’t get in many places. The restaurant was dark and quiet and I couldn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t eating there too. In fact, I hardly ever saw anyone except for a rare adventurer from the Air France crews.

Why didn’t anybody else like my restaurant? Instead, they crowded into French restaurants to eat northern foods ill-suited to the tropics, sweaty pâtés and gloppy sauces that languished in the heat – and later in your stomach. Well, I concluded, that is what the French are like – as with most cultures with good cuisines, completely hung up on their own.

But that didn’t explain why the most popular restaurant in French Guiana was the Chinese restaurant in St Laurent du Maroni. St Laurent has always been an interesting outpost. Until the 1950s it was the centre of the infamous French penal colony, and until the last of them died off, the wasted survivors populated the town.

St Laurent is a jumping-off spot. Since it is at the mouth of the Maroni River, it is the last sight of civilisation – rustic but with electricity and even Chinese cuisine – before you slide into one of the most undeveloped rainforests in the world. Also it is a border. One riverbank is technically France and the other is Suriname, the politically unpredictable former Dutch Guiana. So it is Europe’s most unstable border.

The first time I went to St Laurent, the Chinese restaurant was filled with dangerous, hard-looking men who spoke French with every accent in Europe. Some were arms merchants and others were mercenaries. A civil war had broken out in Suriname and the rebels were getting their weapons, ammunition, trainers and fighters. Deals were made under the ceiling fans over noodles, vegetables, shrimp and pork. Inexplicably, the mercenaries always ordered the duck, probably because it was the most expensive item. I would have rather had game, but I ordered the duck too, which came with a heavy sauce and some well-cut vegetables.

This was where I arranged to be taken up the Maroni to meet with the guerrillas. The guerrillas, however, soon tired of me and abandoned me on a rock mid-river. There I picked up a ride from an armed white man in a small dugout, who took me to a shirtless man with blue eyes and long hair who looked, as the British used to say, like he had been ‘out too long’. He handed me an engraved card that indicated he was the local French official and said, ‘Relax,
vous êtes en France.
’ And then he arranged to have me dropped off at the Chinese restaurant.

The second time I was in St Laurent I had a bigger budget, but the war had ended and the diners were from the space centre, feasting on the only Chinese food available. The duck was still the big seller, though there were numerous noodlers as well. This trip lacked the clandestine intrigue of the first but made up for it with a freedom to travel. I even had permission from the French government to enter the Indian areas deep in the interior where the Maroni disappears near the Brazilian border. There is a continental divide where the jungle streams on one side run to the coast of the Guianas and on the other into the Amazon.

Travelling up the Maroni was the reverse of modern travel – and even more of a culinary adventure. Instead of removing your shoes, buckling the safety belt and surrendering all vestiges of both free will and responsibility, on the Maroni your survival depended on your own decisions. The trick was to make it back to the coast, to electricity and air-conditioning and beds and walls and Chinese food. It was said that an outsider could survive on his own for no more than 24 hours in the rainforest. So the first thing to do was to hire a good guide, two good boatmen and a solid pirogue.

I hired a French guide who seemed to speak every known language accept English, including about a dozen languages of the Maroni. The two tall, muscular and graceful boatmen were Ndjuka, a tribe of Bush Negroes known for their boating skills and well-made dugouts.

Into the twenty-foot-long, narrow pirogue, a single hollowed log from an angelique tree with sides built up with ebony boards, we loaded barrels of gasoline to keep the Yamaha 40 outboard on the back operating, and, to keep me operating, a case of white
agricole
rum made directly from fermented cane juice, a few bottles of cane syrup and a basket of fresh limes. These are the essential ingredients for the true Caribbean rum punch affectionately known in Creole as
ti punch.
This drink wards off tropical heat, fear and anxiety with a pleasant cloud of indifference. We also loaded a case of large Cuban Montecristo cigars, which would prove helpful – and a magazine photographer, a dubious luxury I hadn’t had the first time around.

As the days went by, clothing seemed increasingly irrelevant. Shoes were the first thing to go. I was stepping into either the river or the riverbank, where I would sink a foot into mud and have to retrieve the shoe. We could never penetrate more than a dozen yards from the bank anyway. The shirt also seemed unnecessary.

The Bush Negro villages where we stayed were small communities of fewer than thirty people in wooden huts. The
different carvings marked different tribal groups, each with slightly different languages. They lived on the river, or
libi,
which in their languages came from the word
liba,
which means life: they fished in it, travelled in it, washed in it, and the children played in it. The adults were reserved but the children were open and full of fun. They seemed very free and played in yard-long dugout canoes, developing boating skills that I could only dream of. They liked to find coves in the river with piranhas so they could plunge sticks into the water and watch the fish snap them in two.

As in Africa, whose societies they had imitated, it was important in the Bush Negro lands to act out very large displays of friendship to anyone encountered. Without this demonstration, you would arouse tremendous suspicion.

‘
Fa weki!’
I would shout, my arms wide open, my face smiling.

The smile and gesture would be returned, larger than I could ever manage.
‘Yu de?’

‘Me de,’
I answered.

This conversation was repeated ten times in every village. How are you? – And you? – I’m fine.

At the centre of every Bush Negro village was a steel skillet more than a yard in diameter over a wooden fire. This was for making
couac.
It was made from bitter cassava root, the kind laced with a natural poison that indigenous people had used on arrow tips to shoot at intruders such as Christopher Columbus further up the island chain. The cassava root was soaked for a few days. Then it was grated and hung in a hemp press to squeeze out the poison. Dried into a flour, it was put in the skillet and gently stirred for a full day until it was reduced to little dry beige grains.
Couac
travelled well on the river and would keep for months. We ate it with every meal, absorbing the juices of whatever fish or game we cooked. I tried not to think how similar their use of
couac
was to the role of rice in Chinese food.

After dinner I would choose two trees to hang my hammock. Between snakes, lizards and mouse-size insects large enough to be spotted crossing a trail from twenty feet away, suspended from a tree was the only place I wanted to spend the night. Being on the equator, the Guianas have almost equal hours of daylight and darkness, meaning nights were very long – and very dark. The forest roared at night with birds, mammals and insects making so much noise that it seemed like one continuous scream. Since we camped by the riverbank, there was a break in the canopy and I could see up to a night sky so bejewelled with stars that it looked like mica schist in the sunlight. In bed with a bottle of rum and a cigar, I would gaze up at this wonder and feel content.

Next morning there would be
couac
for breakfast, sometimes with fish if anyone had caught one, then we would shove off in the first light of day. The river was the colour of satin-finished pewter, and trees on the opposite bank showed as black hulks above the thick white river mist. We left so early that by ten o’clock, when the sun had turned white hot, we had already been travelling for four hours and the guide would smile and announce,
‘Uh, c’est l’heure du premier punch,’
and I would concur and fix everyone their first punch of the day. Sometimes we would drag lines and pick up a fish for lunch or we would trade with villagers. We had rum, which was of great value because it was used as an offering to the spirits at little stone and wood altars called
obiasanis
in every village.

Once a Bush Negro of the Boni tribe supplied a skinned iguana. Like most exotic animals, it had that predictable resemblance to chicken. And of course we ate it with
couac.

The Ndjukas went fishing and hunting at night and I asked to go with them, which they politely agreed to, though it was easy to see that they weren’t happy. They loaded a tiny two-man pirogue with fishing tackle and ammunition. These little dugouts shifted with every movement of your body. I knew I could not handle the large wooden-stocked antique rifle that fired with a kick like the right
hook of a heavyweight champion. How, I wondered, could the rifle-bearer absorb that recoil and not capsize our unstable craft? It seemed hard enough to swing a lantern to find the reflection of eyes in the bush. I tried simply to land a small fish on a hand line and nearly capsized the three of us. After that they silently rowed back to camp and dropped me off – the rejected hunter.