A Moveable Feast (27 page)

Andrew McCarthy has written for the
Atlantic, Slate, Men’s Journal, Travel + Leisure
and
Bon Appétit,
among others. He is a contributing editor at
National Geographic Traveler.
He has also eaten his way around the world as an actor.

‘What do the stars next to the numbers on the badges mean?’

‘Those are the ones who give you a bath first.’

‘Ah.’

‘You want that.’

‘Sure,’ I said, my head nodding up and down.

We were looking through a large picture window at twenty or so women sitting on tiered benches. They were dressed in evening gowns. It was three thirty in the afternoon.

‘This is where the politicians come, so you can relax,’ David said. I must have looked puzzled. ‘So they’re clean,’ he went on. I nodded some more – it was my first time in a bordello and
I guess it showed. ‘Maybe we ought to have a beer first,’ he suggested, and crossed into the empty bar.

David was an American photographer who had escaped to Southeast Asia years earlier. We had met in Saigon and agreed to hook up for a couple of nights of good clean fun in Thailand. But I hadn’t had a drink in years and a whorehouse in Bangkok on a wet Tuesday afternoon didn’t seem like the place to start.

‘You know what, David, I think I’m gonna get that train up to Vientiane after all.’ I had been considering a trip north, to Laos.

The northern Thai border with Laos had only recently been opened and there was a train from Bangkok every evening. It arrived in Nong Khai, on the bank of the Mekong River on the Laotian border, before dawn, where, I was to discover, entrepreneurs stormed the train, woke you from a sound sleep, grabbed your bag, and threw it on the back of their túk-túk as you gave chase through the pre-dawn mist. They then demanded a dollar, deposited you on a waiting bus that drove a few hundred yards and unloaded you on the Thai side of ‘Freedom Bridge’, which you walked across under the watchful eye of armed guards, after which you went through a version of customs and were released to fend for yourself among the eager capitalists of Laos at daybreak. But before I was to learn any of that, I first had to get out of the whorehouse in Bangkok.

I left David at the bar to mull over his options, hurriedly checked out of my hotel, crawled through the Thai traffic, and was at the train station with nearly an hour to spare. The short time spent in the brothel had depressed me. The more ladies the host had offered, the more lonely I felt. So as I sat back on a hard wooden bench in Hualamphong Station, watching the crowds mill anonymously by and listening to the tracks called out in a language that was indecipherable to me, I was glad to be getting out of town, glad to be on my own again. I began to take wilful pride in the fact that no-one I knew in the world could find me. I
was a stranger in a foreign land. Alone. The relief of solitude masqueraded as contentment.

I was suddenly starving. An exhausted-looking conductor confirmed there would be no dinner on the train and a quick search of the terminal revealed one forlorn restaurant. I opened the door. The place was deserted except for a group of what seemed to be staff members sitting around a large bowl in the centre of a table. I took a seat on the other side of the room. A stout woman got up from the table, came over and conveyed to me in Thai that the place was closed. My head sunk. She touched my shoulder, said something I couldn’t understand, and went back to her bowl with the others.

I gathered up my bags. As I shuffled towards the door, the woman waved me over to their table and an older man with thin white hair got up and dragged over a chair. The two younger ones slid their seats closer together to make room. I demurred. They insisted. One of the younger men handed the woman a bowl; she filled it and placed its steaming contents in front of me and they returned to the business at hand. The silence of a good meal being well eaten ensued and I realised I was sitting among three generations of a family at dinner.

Conversation eventually filled the table – words I could not understand followed by laughter I could. The large bowl in the centre of the table emptied. The last drops went to me. I finished my fish soup and looked at the faces around me, strangers no more.

Ten minutes later, walking down the platform, I found myself sad to be leaving Bangkok. I stepped onto the train and said aloud, to no-one in particular, ‘That may have been the best meal I ever had.’

Tim Cahill is the award-winning author of nine books, including
Jaguars Ripped My Flesh
and
Hold the Enlightenment
. He is the co-writer of three IMAX movies, two of which were nominated for Academy Awards. Cahill has also written for
National Geographic, Outside
and the
New York Times Book Review,
among other publications. He lives in Montana.

Do you eat the thing or what? It’s a rooster’s head and it’s floating in the soup. You are in a dirt-floored hut, a two-room adobe family home up in what is called the Eyebrow of the Jungle, the Ceja de Selva, in the cloud forests of Peru. The Peruvian family has allowed you to camp on their little farm and now they’ve invited you to dinner. Out comes the first dish. It’s a yellow soup. And there’s a rooster’s head floating in it. Skeletal thing: no skin or eyeballs. Nothing inside the cranial cavity at all.

That was the first time I asked myself the Question most avid travellers are presented with at one time or another. Are they
making fun of me, or is the rooster’s head really given to the honoured guest? Back then, I spent some moments wrestling with the implications. Ruminating, so to speak. Assumption #1: they are, in fact, making fun of me. Okay. What’s the worst that can happen? I chomp down on the fragile bones of the skull and everyone bursts out laughing. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I was the object of hilarity. I can generally salvage that situation by simply laughing right along with everyone else. They might think I’m an imbecile, but no-one is going to be insulted.

Now assume that the rooster’s head is, in fact, a local delicacy. If you treat it as a joke, there is a good chance you will alienate your hosts. You absolutely do not want to alienate your hosts. Not up here in the Eyebrow of the Jungle where the trails are steep and sometimes lead to a crumbling precipice over a 5000-foot drop. You don’t want to alienate your hosts if you need them to tell you where the pre-Columbian ruins are. You don’t want to alienate your hosts if you are going to camp in their vicinity for several days because you are, in fact, genuinely interested in the local culture. Finally, you don’t want to alienate them because refusing a delicacy might be a mortal insult, to be avenged with machetes. Probably not, but why take the chance? Let them laugh instead.

So the Answer to the Question is simple enough: you eat what’s put in front of you. It’s a no-brainer. Just like that white avian skull, floating in the soup.

The fowl tale I’ve recounted happened in Peru over three decades ago, but I’ve spent a lot of the intervening time travelling in the hinterlands of various countries, and something similar has happened to me on every continent, save Antarctica. Out in the back country, in those remote places where folks do not have much contact with the outside world, people tend to be generous with
their food. Some kind family is always offering me something that, at first glance, does not seem to be 100 per cent palatable. Baked turtle lung. Sheep’s eyeballs.

Smile and choke it down. That’s my policy. If they have something vaguely alcoholic to drink – palm wine, corn beer – all the better. In central Africa, under the Virunga volcanoes, people make a kind of banana beer they call
pombe
that is served in one-litre brown glass bottles that once contained beer.
Pombe
simply means beer in Swahili, but I was cautioned about this banana variety: don’t pour it into a glass, said the brewer himself; you don’t want to actually see it. The
pombe
is best drunk with a wooden straw. This is because the fermenting bananas leave a thick layer of black sludge on the glass. I’ve since learned that, in the final brewing process, the beer can be filtered through a fine cloth. I’m thinking that my brewer may have found that process superfluous.

Banana
pombe
was the after-work libation for a couple of African guides who were taking me out to see a group of mountain gorillas. The animals lived low on the volcanoes, in the visually limited world of the bamboo forests, and care had to be taken not to blunder onto the gorillas and startle them. They could run away. Or charge. Neither situation was ideal.

So it was thirsty work, crawling through the bamboo along a gorilla path, trying not to make any noise. When we walked home in the evening, the guides always checked a certain home built of sturdy wooden slats. If there were flowers in a vase on the porch, it meant that the brewer who lived there had
pombe.
We were obliged to stop and help this gentleman dispose of the beer, which has about a 48-hour shelf life. It was our duty. Should the brewer have unsold bottles on his shelf he could, the guides informed me solemnly, simply stop making
pombe.

The stuff was a titch sweet and seemed to contain as much alcohol, drop for drop, as anything brewed by Anheuser-Busch.
It was fine to sip beer through a straw after a sweaty day of crawling after primates. The way I saw it, I was helping the brewer and the community’s beer drinkers, and learning all kinds of things about gorillas I might never have found out entirely sober.

While my policy is to eat what is put in front of me, I have tried, over the years, to reciprocate when I can. Usually I just have camp food, and if I have learned one thing, it is this: no-one on earth likes freeze-dried scrambled eggs.

I do recall a memorable meal I once cooked in Indonesia. I was visiting the Karowai, a clan of Papuans who live in tree houses. Some Karowai groups, especially those who live away from the river, are unaware of the outside world. The group I trekked through the swamp to meet had been contacted only the previous year. My travelling companions and I came upon this group in their tree house and we negotiated with them, standing in clouds of mosquitoes and shouting fifty feet up through the branches.

Eventually we were welcomed. The house was a large wooden platform, shaded by the tree itself. There were few mosquitoes and the wind was fresh. We met three men, two older, one younger. There were three women. The men, one couldn’t help but notice, wrapped their penises with leaves. The women wore straw skirts.

There was a wooden wall and on it was the skeleton of a fish about the size of a trout. The remains of a fine meal? Just offset from the one wall were dozens of hardball-sized rocks arranged as a fire pit and the women placed something white and doughy-looking on the coals. It was, I was told, a staple starchy food made from powdered sago palm. After a short time, the women broke off a piece of the bread-like substance and handed it to me. It felt like a lighter version of Silly Putty and was so bland as to be almost tasteless. But, no, there was an unpleasant sour aftertaste.

I smiled brightly and nodded vigorously, a suggestion that this was a delicious treat. The Karowai stared at me in glum suspicion. They knew perfectly what it was. They ate it every day. Why did I climb fifty feet up a rickety ladder just to lie to them?

We stayed with the Karowai for several days and one night we asked if we might make the dinner. Rice was what we had. We doctored it with oil and bottled lemon juice and garlic salt. As the younger man ate, moisture formed in the corners of his eyes. He took another mouthful, eating with his fingers while tears coursed down his cheeks. Now what had I done?

Translating took a while, but in the fullness of time I learned that the man was crying because this rice was the best thing he’d ever eaten in his life. The other Karowai nodded in agreement. Never, I believe, has a chef been so complimented.

The next morning, overcome with an unwarranted confidence, I fixed freeze-dried scrambled eggs for everyone. The Karowai ate sparingly and stared at me, wan smiles on their faces. I recognised the expression. It was one I’d felt on my own face many times over the years. They were smiling the smile you smile when you’ve just eaten the rooster’s head.