Land of the long-lifers

November 6, 2015

A briefer version of this piece appeared in Taste magazine's November 2015 issue.

Fifty kilometres from the Turkish coast, a craggy rock rises out of the Aegean. Of the Greek islands, Icaria is the one spoken of with the sense of knowing a secret. It is one of five UNESCO-designated Blue Zones; a place where the elderly live to be 100.

Defiantly self sufficient, having won their independence from the Turks, Icaria is an island of exiles and healing, with less than 10,000 residents, and community at its heart.

Next to where the breakwater tumbles into the sea at Therma, the rocks are furry with sulphur.

There, a clutch of people sits in the water under centuries of sediment, folded by history, carved by waves and topped with a twisted olive tree.

A moustache is talking politics. Where the hot springs emerge into the sea, words float.

“A crisis predicted by a latter-day prophet.”

Underfoot there are urchins, tucked amidst the purple lichen and magenta fuzz.

“There will be blood on the streets of Athens.”

The cave exhales: warm, salty breath.

Next door, the rock recedes into a hammam of raw stone with ravioli cutter edges, hemmed in by whitewash and tiled pools of opaque turquoise. Inside the earth, people sit on benches in the steam, flavoured with fresh eucaplytus.

Stern-faced Lemonia is keeping time: 20 minutes. Then a spray with a garden hose. Then 20 more in milky water: 60 degrees Celsius from the earth, mixed with cold tap.

Yiorgos is in black speedos, under the opaque swirl. He’s here five times a week when home for the summer.

I feel like a newborn, he grins.

Who needs fruit when you can have carbs? →

August 27, 2015

For Roads and Kingdoms' Breakfast series

Masala Chai and Tubers in Nairobi

I want a piglet, so we go to market.

It’s a sort of unsettled morning. Gray, with a dull buzz. Burundi is on the radio again, BBC World Service drifting through the traffic, everything suspended in the early morning oblivion.

Nairobi City County market has acquired a new sign since I’ve last passed: OPEN 24 HOURS. Yet 7 am is clearly rush hour for cleavering; white coats, gumboots, and hospital horror splatter.

Mwangi degloves to make some calls. Promises me he’ll find me a good specimen for Saturday’s roasting experiment scheduled for our Serbian neighbors’ self-built wood-fired backyard oven.

Nivi steers us around the corner, onto Bishiara Street, and to a doorway behind the newspaper seller. It’s been over a year since I’ve seen her, and the city. Life messiness has gotten in the way: coverage of a never-ending Paralympian murder trial, a love affair with an artist, the end of a love affair with an artist. It’s an adopted homecoming of sorts; time for tea.

The G&R restaurant, announced by red letters painted on whitewash, is dark inside with wall-mounted fluorescent tubes. The G&R annex next door is wood-carved and happier looking. We opt for the former.

Inside, two wan goldfish swim listlessly in their dim tank by the lattice partition in place of a door. A paper sign in highlighter yellow and BOLD ARIAL CAPS declares opening hours between 4.30-2.00am daily above a vegetable decal from the 1970s. I imagine taxi drivers and tired dancing girls slumped over rattan table legs. Right now, it is the domain of men in suits with white melamine mugs.

Felix has fixed his cracked conference-hand-me-down name badge with sellotape. He runs over, earnest, black waistcoated, and flashes an enormous smile.

The menu offers Egg, Ommelets & Sand Witches. Let me give you a Spanish, Felix says to me. The Spanish, it is really, really, very, very good. The suited businessman to my left is absently coaxing his strips of pancake into neat rolls before spearing them, lost in the Daily Nation. I order from the Roots & Snacks section.

Lime for beginnings, lemon for warmth

June 16, 2015

There’s a wall in the sea in the Somosomo Straits.

60 metres long, 45 deep, it glows an UV white-blue in the filtered sunlight; fish disco amid the luminescent coral.

The plantation gardener sits in the croaking dinghy, line between his thumb and index finger. When we clamber up with empty air tanks, there are two fish in the boat: an enormous barramundi for the village, a short fat albacore for us.

At the plantation, the water around the dock is oily with salty and sweet meetings. The rocks are black. The coconut trees grow of out of buffalo grass.

Jon shimmies down the trunk with bounty in hand, chucks it against a rock so the wood hairs sprout from sides.

The rich white is scraped with raspy metal, squeezed by big hands. Clear tuna eyes stare as red flesh is sliced into cubes. Chilli turns into juicy red dust under the blade of an enormous cleaver. Everything ends in a wooden bowl, with the juice of two hard, green limes.

Two fat ladies hold me down and comb knots of out of my hair with coconut oil. By the time they’re finished, the kokoda is on the table: tuna cubes seared grey with sharp citric acid, now swirled with the fresh coconut milk. Fiji in a bowl, accompanied with whispering kerosene lamps and Jon’s ballads on acoustic guitar.

Lime is beginnings and tropical trysts: holidays, the tang of sea wind and street food sweat. Squeezed over halved baby papayas in bare-legged garden breakfasts. Red Chinese New Year packets dangling from potted kalamansis. Condensation rolling down glasses where the sugar syrup sits at the bottom, and the limau kasturi pulp swims.

Take the slow train

August 8, 2014

For Business Day's monthly lifestyle supplement, Wanted

In a metallic bikini, Neyma curves her back, catlike, kicks her bare feet in the air and breaks into a frenetic dance, muscles taut and glistening, her voice rising to match the men on electric guitar.

A clutch of gyrating dancers topped with chiffon rosettes and impossibly high foot arches shimmies in front of a capulana kaleidoscope cyclorama - flowers and hearts and spinning discs of stars emerging from the smoke.

The crowd is entranced, the rhythm contagious, hips picking it out on wooden benches.

But it is the sweet old man in crimson Hawaiian print and low-slung dress trousers that brings them to their feet.

Dilon Djindji, a father of the genre, mic in hand, hopping from foot to foot in deliberate slow motion, in a matching marathon of hypnotic drum beats, the spotlight picking out the enormous whites of his eyes as he croons, eyebrows raised, raspy, soulful, seductive.

The melody picks up speed, intensity building to a climax. As bodies swing to the floor, a frantic saxophone solo cuts through the rumble. Then three deft bass drum thumps, and silence.

An intake of breath and the air is filled with the singing of the crowd, a song as if they’d agreed it prior. They sing of marrabenta, the music of their struggle, Portuguese fado given African heart and turned against their colonial oppressors.

Summer epilogue

December 6, 2013

A version of this feature appeared in Business Day's Wanted supplement, published December 2013.

Beyond tourist season, after the summer hordes leave, Patmos is reclaimed by those who love it best.

The terracotta floor of the tiny Ekklisaki tou Stavrou is indented with the waves of the bay, a wriggle echoed again and again and again on the baked tiles. Tonight, the ripples are interspersed with sprigs of white mersinya and lemon leaves, footstep-crushed and fragrant, sweet and citrusy acidic.

The air is warm with yeast, freshly baked bread, enormous rounds stacked in a tower encrusted with sesame, mingling with the ylang-ylang perfume of holy oil and wax.

Within the one-roomed church with its flat roof and single bell, the faithful light their slender saffron candles and kiss renewed frescoes of Jesus and Mary.

At Stavros Bay, the church of the cross has stood for 500 years; and for 500 years, on this, the eve of the rediscovery of the crucifix, they file in, one by one, to crown faded wooden relics of their Saviour with jasmine and marigold, laying their lips to glass.

They speak of pirates and adventure and sacrifice, of the maidens who took refuge here, saved by a young musician who gave his life for the rescue.

The colours of pennant bunting, flags, old, new and Byzantine, fade with the approaching dusk.

******

The villagers have gathered where the smoke is rising.

An enormous man in a green Nike shirt is turning the souvla, floodlight backlit.

The taverna has run out of tables, so they have constructed more out of beer crates and tissue tablecloths. The feast spreads beyond the corrugated iron awning, across the dry grass, into the intoxicating waft of roasting meat and smoky coals.

Everyone is here for the music, to hear the band of local young men who have been practicing a 15-minute-long adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans.

They have already struck up: violin, bouzouki and two guitars. A barefoot drunk in blue checks and rolled trouser cuffs swings around the makeshift dance floor to rousing nisiotika, island music. A waiter scatters paper napkins from above, ridiculous confetti on the concrete, as another diner swings a leg over his head.

A whisper passes my ear. “When a man is dancing, the floor is his.”

The throaty young violinist with tattoed pinyin on his bicep smokes determinedly between sets.

As the music crescendoes, a balding punter in leather Mary Janes joins him in song, their voices meeting the sea breeze in unison.

The night ferry horn echoes across the bay.

****

Across the hills in Chora, on the flagstones outside the Pantheon taverna, a gingerbread coloured mutt with two names leaps to his feet and howls.

A guest of Mozambique →

July 11, 2012

This piece appeared on Roads and Kingdoms

The Prime Minister comes to dinner, in the Polana’s newly refurbished ballroom. We eat tiny, sweet, local oysters and posh chicken zambezi under 22 chandeliers, and stare at the evening-wear of Maputo’s mayor, an ensemble seemingly made of fuschia upholstery. In front of the backlit palm trees, widescreen television screens depict scantily-clad blonde women frolicking on beaches and sipping cocktails, while swordfish made out of beads hang surprised over fat lily centrepieces.

Few seem to notice the acoustic guitar player, eyes closed, running his fingers over his strings, creating his own passionate personal blend of Mozambican marrabenta, fused with a dozen other provincial musical influences.

They should notice him. His name is Jose Mucavele, and the last time I heard him play, it was dark, we were on the sidelines of a trainline going nowhere fast, drinking a locally brewed love potion out of a gourd. This time, it’s a little less atmospheric.

There isn’t enough time in Maputo.

Not enough time to drink tepid gin and tonics during the witching hour at the little roadside shipping containers-turned-barracas in Museo. Nor time to watch the fishermen slop in with their catch at dusk at the barra de pescadores on the little dirt road north of town. Nor time to wander through dusty streets perusing the delapidation of some of the world’s finest Pancho Guedes Art Deco masterpieces.

Instead, we retreat to a deserted Club Naval, next to a dimly-lit lap pool on the Indian Ocean, and sit, drinking dark, sweet and malty Laurentina Preta beer on a night with no moon.

It’s an unusual Maputo. The town feels moody, full of Wednesday evening ghosts—a gregarious gogo dancer turned in early.

Sitting next to a rickety stage, the reggae night band is on a break. They make their evening comeback with an acoustic version of “Blue Suede Shoes”. I have a brief flashback to my father’s amateur karaoke competition glory. A friendly Mozambican in bermudas and bling belt buckle insists he wants to help me feel at home. He raises his eyebrows suggestively.

The night is chilly. The air has lost some of its salt on its way up from the harbour.

FOOD, TRAVEL