Hatched on Lamu*

Things got pretty wholesome back there on Lamu. I rose very early, jumped on a boat and watched a hundred just hatched baby turtles the size of kiwifruits flap themselves out of their nest and into the Indian Ocean.
Sandy innocents, they contended not only with the shock of the hatch and the prospect of learning to walk and to swim within five minutes, they were forced to clamber through and over the footprints of a boatload of turtle enthusiasts keen to track their every manoeuvre.

* He just got married so I'll acknowledge the title as Sharath's work.

Hitched on Lamu

Although you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise, I didn’t go to Lamu to eat and lounge, I went to Lamu to witness Sharath and Sorcha get hitched and hitched they did get. The lady wore a scarlet dress, the groom didn’t wear a tie, it was a disgrace! No! It was a triumph!

There was a boat feature from which a billowing sailful of bright petals exploded,
a man in an obscure uniform and a rooftop disco ball! Of course it was a triumph!

I didn’t get married but I did my best to add bright and shiny to the occasion.

Even though children were present at the ceremony and runty donkeys were braying in the streets, the bride and groom were not upstaged. Few eyes blinked mist-free during the ceremony, bougainvillea was hurled instead of confetti, and the dance floor remained operative until the larger end of the small hours. Yes, the wedding was a spectacular success and the celebrations continued unabated and unabashed for several days.

This photo was taken just before the post-wedding dhow race. The wedding guests were separated into teams and herded onto boats captained by Shella’s finest. Here’s the view down the nose of Team Bustani’s fourth placing vessel.

On noses, and a turn of events a little on the nose, somehow the groom’s boat won and the bride’s came in second. Rigged or what? It is a sign of collective good humour rather than a lack of competitive spirit that this slightly suspicious result was borne with minimal complaint.

Suffering for my art

I’m not often enough offered the choice between crab and lobster, let alone fresh crab and lobster. On Lamu, the island which in retrospect is taking on the characteristics of an opium dream, crabs and lobsters were abundant and many of them scurried their way into fisherman’s pots and from thence onto the menu. For some reason, crabs and spiders are over-represented in the literature of hallucination. Gerard de Nerval might have conducted a lobster around Paris on a leash in the name of Surrealism but lobsters don’t seem otherwise to feature in literary trip-outs. Dicing with my future nightmares it might have been, I nevertheless chose the crab.

Seven other wedding guests and I stayed in a sprawling and magnificent pile of a house called Bustani Square: white stucco walls, pink leopardskin cushions and bougainvillea everywhere. Three wonderful men called Justin, Anderson and Alfred looked after most of our needs. When fishermen knocked at the door with buckets full of flamboyant, irascible, delicious crabs, they were kind enough to cook them for us. A photo of buttery picked crab meat with lime and garlic isn’t going to look like anything but it tasted fantastic.

I’ve spent a great deal of time attempting to throw off the Protestant superstition that easy living must be followed by a period of long suffering. Just in case, I remind myself of the vast sufferings and deprivations I have already endured in my short life. I deserved to eat all the crab I ate on Lamu, down to the last last claw and cracker. Perhaps there is such a thing as earthly justice.

Furthermore, Mark and Warren and I broke the cycle of being waited upon by buying big fresh crabs from a local and cooking them up ourselves with lime and salt. This chap tasted sweeter than any promise of redemption.

Shuck and Awe

In the Paradise of my imaginings, oysters are eaten everyday.

After a wedding on Lamu, leftover wedding guests drink leftover Prosseco and eat oysters on rooftop terraces at sunset. Locally grown macadamia nuts hover in the background for the uninitiated.

Small, creamy, sharp oysters are prised off the mangroves at low tide and carried in wet hemp sacks to your door for a ridiculously small sum. It's not all easy: these aren’t cultivated oysters and, tenacious delicacies that they are, it requires some effort to coax them out of the shell. The upside to this unrefined oyster business? For the first time in my life I experienced a quadruple headed oyster, – count the glistening beds of flesh amongst the rocks below – better than a double yolker any day of the week.Although I am generally at my most parochial on the topic of oysters (Sydney Rock Oysters are the Best Oysters in the World), the Lamu oyster experience was exceptionally good.

Experimental

If you’re drinking beer in Kenya, you’re drinking Tusker beer. One of my comrades at Bustani Square had been apprised of a method to rid Tusker beer of undesirable matter. The precise nature of that undesirable matter was not specified but speculation placed it somewhere between additives, sediment and glycerine. To purify Tusker, one places the thumb firmly over the mouth of the bottle and then upends the bottle thus sealed in a bowl full of water. One then wriggles the thumb gently in order to make a miniscule opening so that the undesirable matter flows out into the water. Once this has been achieved, the very drinkable Tusker beer is allegedly even more drinkable and, miraculously, will not induce hangovers.

This task was performed over the dinner table and small bubbles did emerge from the upended bottle. Once settled, they allegedly formed a discernible puddle at the bottle of the bowl. Unfortunately, moments after this observation was made, the bowl toppled off the tabletop. The results of the experiment were not able to be verified. In the absence of a control, the Tusker experiment had to be deemed utterly inconclusive.

I add in closing that I have consumed a respectable quantity of Tusker over the last few weeks. The consequences of this consumption have been no sterner than those induced by other lagers of national repute.

Onwards

Desperately trying to remain unsullied by Conrad’s imagination of central Africa, I’m heading inland to trawl the Masai Mara for impressive beasts with Sharath and Sorcha and a few other O’Callavasan 2007 stragglers. It’s quite something being able to accompany the bride and groom on the beginning of their honeymoon. I’ll be back and battling Nairobi later next week, back and online and battling the airwaves.
In the meantime, here’s a glimpse of Shella, a place where miniature donkeys act as lorries and taxis. The fruit is marvellous, so marvellous that the most successful local businessman is called Banana and Watermelon passes as a legitimate name for an electoral candidate. A polyglot charlatan savant answering to the appellation Dude holds frequent and tyrannical court and Gastro-Rasta performance pieces, fusing dance and cooking, are not unknown.

Turkish hangovers

My mind might have been utterly thrown from its castings by the goings on in Shella but I haven’t been able to forget the gastro-spectacular that was Istanbul. Before I reflect on a megadose of sun and coast and boat, on nuptials and guests and donkeys, I think I need to post a final and non-conclusive set of abridged highlights of Istanbul.

1. Variations on the theme of eggplant and lamb
Not one day passed during which either Andy, Rebekah, myself or indeed all three of us did not order a meal whose key components were eggplant and lamb. Speared eggplant and lamb shishkebabs, spicy lamb meatballs on eggplant puree, lamb and veggies wrapped in eggplant, sizzling lamb with eggplant…the trajectory of these dishes was from superlative to superlative along a course plotted by lemon, tomato, garlic, yoghurt, parsley, olive oil and chilli. If I were to put forward a candidate for best savoury dish in Istanbul, it would be the sizzling meatballs chez Rumeli served on a very hot cast iron plate with eggplant, tomato and yoghurt. Unfortunately, no photo exists of this extraordinary plate: the steam bursting forth fogged up the lens of my camera and I was not able to wait.

2. Baklava
Many eastern Mediterranean cultures claim baklava as their own, the regional furore over the genesis of a sweet dish being comparable to the ongoing trans-Tasman hostilities regarding cultural ownership of the pavlova. Such parochialism, I spurn, indeed I find that myths of origins can be overlooked with the assistance of sufficient syrup and crushed nuts and honey. During our glittering ascent into the sublime, baklava will be served as an inflight snack.

3. POMEGRANATE JUICE
If you’d asked me last week, last month, last year, I would have told you that I was too old and jaded and weary and worldly and boozy to be genuinely moved by fruit juice. Then I came to Istanbul and started drinking pomegranate juice, tart blood and gold pleasure.
The glorious juices of this fruit - this fruit that moonlights as a jewel - are pressed in the streets and do splendid things for a hangover. I’ve noticed that most of the jewellery that I seem to be wearing these days is pomegranate influenced. This can only be a good thing. After ten days in bright white Lamu sun, I am fancying myself a little on the pomegranate side too, complexion wise.

And yet, and yet, of Istanbul there’s so much more: domed ceilings and ceremonial columns and mosaics and the skyline at night and meze and the fishermen and Iznik ceramics and running into old friends on the street and apple tea and bazaar life and hammam hammam hammamdullahlah…

On the Lam(u)

Poli poli is Swahili for 'slowly slowly.'

It's a phrase that I've heard many times since my arrival last week in the fleshpot of bliss that is Lamu Island. It well describes the following:

a) the pace of things generally.
b) the operation of my cognitive and reflective mechanisms.
c) the progress of sailboats through mangrove channels.
d) lunch service response times.
e) the speed of any internet connections.

Notwithstanding the possibility that this might all be a strange hallucation of sedate equatorial magnificence, once some of these conditions are accelerated, mebbe on the weekend, mebbe post-safari next week, I will comprehensively account for my Lost Days on Lamu. Key words will include: beach, lobster, terrace, hammock, wedding, ridiculous, co-conspirators, boating, turtles, crab.

Three strikes

Well, surprise surprise, the airport is looking neither as rosy nor as fascinating as it did seven hours ago.
I took a nap on the floor. I ate dahl for breakfast. I didn't find any Malacca gin. Why it is that one can purchase fifteen different varieties of cognac, countless blends of scotch and forty five gazillion flavours and grades of vodka in duty-free shops but only EVER five types of gin (Beefeater, Gordons, Bombay, Tanq Normale and 10) I do not know. Plymouth? Millers? All the rest?

I'm existing in the land of global blah and purchased a glossy magazine to keep my eyes open. I've obviously been on the nod as far as flashy advertising is concerned: Mikhail Gorbachev is a posterboy for Louis Vuitton! (And Green Cross, it must be said.) What next? I can sort of envisage Clinton doing a sportchic number for Ralph Lauren or Armani. Bush as the avuncular figure in a Hilfiger ad? Blair twitching around with a posse of disaffected, well-groomed types in a Burberry ad? John Howard as the face of Ferragamo?

One of the slogans of Dubai Airport: Step into our caring world. If I turn my head slightly to the left, I spy a large banner which expands upon the promise of a caring world as follows: 'We are always there to hear you out. Allow us to make you feel special.'

Right now, I do feel quite special. Hang on, is that a boarding call?

TTT: 15:00

Figgery pokery

Let me tell you what was wrong with this dish.
1. The blackcurrant sorbet accelerated the hardening of the figgy caramel in which the caramelised figs were wallowing, resulting in a large amount of inaccessible caramel.
2. It wasn’t served on pistachio coloured plates.
3. The plate upon which it was served wasn’t edible.
4. The menu proclaimed that the dish would be served with cream and it was not.

Apart from these quibbles, these figs were the best sweet things I’ve eaten in a mighty long time. I say this having just left Turkish delight heartland, having recently scoffed all manner of nutty, syrupy pastries. Hot caramelised obscenely figgy figs with a caramel made from honey, fig syrup and butter is the stuff of culinary fantasy. The dollop of sharp and acidic sorbet, surprisingly, made the whole dish even better, cutting through the sweetness of the figs and meddling with the texture of the caramel. And the nuts! Perfectly placed walnuts, delightfully crushed pistachios!

If it were possible to eat these figs in the bath, it would also be dangerous to so do, so intensely and deliriously pleasurable were they for the eating. Negotiating traffic afterwards was difficult. In fact, having eaten these figs and thus eliminated the prospect of rational discourse, the only realistic follow-up option was to go to a Turkish bath. Andy sauntered off to the men’s baths, I to the women’s. I lay on a hot marble platform and try to gaze at the sky through the star-shaped perforations in the dome above me. I was thwarted by recollections of the figs. I bathed and steamed, a woman scrubbed many months of grime from my body; I steamed and bathed a little more and all of a sudden it was time for dinner. This blog is testimony that I have survived to tell the tale.