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Phew! Thanks to an internet malfunction, we spent a good two hours sorting out that last post, so we need a bit of a change of pace. So here’s a few examples of the food and drink(s) we’ve sampled as part of our travels thus far…

1. Matoke (green bananas) – To us, these taste a lot like sweet potato, which is all fine and well when it’s mashed up and served on the side…but when it’s grilled over open coals, looks like a banana and tastes like a sweet potato, it might make your brain squirm a little!

2. Tilapia (Nile perch) – Tasty fish from Lake Victoria, grilled, deep-fried or served with a sauce (and always with chips), these have been yummy every time we’ve tried it.

3. Goat’s meat – Both the stew and nyama choma (sosaties in Swahili) sold by the side of the road were very tasty, once you forget how cute the live ones are. These sosaties, along with the aforementioned grilled matoke and corn cobs, are the food stuffs most commonly sold by the side of the road. It took us a while to test the sosaties, just because the rest of the goat it comes from is usually hung near the barbecue.

In Benako, Tanzania, in fact, the (half a) goat still had it’s ‘socks’ on – a little bit of its pelt was still attached to the hooves dangling over our sosaties on the grill.

4. Miscellaneous fish (red snapper, blue marlin, shark, barracuda) – You can blame the Forodhani food market in Zanzibar for making us try shark meat. Your choice of meat is arranged on a sosatie and grilled in front of you at this evening market, situated near the harbour in Stone Town.

 Window shopping is almost impossible, since each stall has a bunch of touts that will take you by the hand to a stall that pays them commission (these touts are called papasi on the island, meaning ‘ticks’ in Swahili, since they are especially ferocious here).

5. Sugarcane juice with lime and ginger – Fan-friggin’-tastic drink, also sold at the Forodhani market in Zanzibar. The cane is mashed in front of you by running it through a kind of grinder, then it’s folded double and slices of lime and ginger are placed in the fold, it’s put through the grinder again and you get a sweet, frothy glass of awesomeness coming out the other side. We drank so much of it, we felt a bit naar (but in a good way)

6. Beer (pretty much every kind) – Part of The Big Plan for The Big Trip has always been that we’d sample local beers along the way. So far it’s only been commercial beers, not the lukewarm DIY brews like the one we tried in Lesotho (once was enough for me, I think).

Tusker, White Cap, Bell Lager, Club, Nile Special, Primus, Serengeti, Kilimanjaro, Safari…the list is getting pretty impressive, as are our bellies. Is it sad to admit that we’ve kept at least one label of each brand? Mmm…

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