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Food Around the
World (the Best and Worst)
We take food very seriously. The food of a
country determines a large part of our opinion of it. And at sea, the high point
of any day is dinner (of course, by the 20th day out, dinner isn't so special).
What we eat on the boat changes completely from place to place. We have come
across lots of new stuff as well. For example, in a market in Galle we asked an
old man what two types of vegetable were that we hadn't seen before; he replied
'Sri Lanka's best vegetable.' In Australasia and the Mediterranean we had all
the fresh food we could want, but in the Pacific and the Red Sea, little fresh
produce was available. At sea, of course, we have nowhere to get fresh food, so
we stock-up in port.
The Provision
Before heading out on a long passage we buy huge
amounts of food, here is a list of the perishables we bought before crossing the
Atlantic:
Produce
: Meat and
Cheese:
Apples: 6 kilos 6 Dried
Salami
Avocado: 7 15 kilos Meat
Green Beans: 4 kilos 22kilos Cheese
(Edam Gouda, Spanish Sheep)
Broccoli: 2 (small)
Cabbage: 4
Carrots: 4 kilos
Cauliflower: 2
Cucumber: 5
Eggplant: 4
Kiwis: 3 kilos
Lettuce: 1 kilo
Limes: 1 kilo
Mandarins: 4 kilos
Onions: 5-6 kilos
Oranges: 4 kilos
Pears: 2 kilos
Potatoes: 10 kilos
Tomatoes: 7 kilos
Zucchini: 4
You should see the 3 1/2 foot long receipt from
our New Zealand provision!
The Best
I could leave this section with just one
word: Thailand. Thailand is known for its food, and for an excellent reason. The
street or restaurant food is extremely cheap, in fact we found frequently that
it was cheaper to eat ashore than on the boat! The red, green and pinang curries
were incredibly good, as were the fish soups. We found restaurants that were
better for one special thing or another, for example, there was one restaurant
we went to for penang curries, one for fish soup, etc. Many places either had no
menu, or at lest none in English, so we either described what we wanted, or
asked them what was good, or just pointed at what somebody else was eating.
(It is only fair to add that some of us, namely
Bronwen and Emma, are torn between Thai and the food in Italy, pizza and pasta.)
The Worst
Once again, an easy choice—Tonga. In the
book Dove, the author says that the best food in the world is in Polynesia, but
he was just plain wrong. Picture a plate of dry, starchy taro, with bland, bony
boiled fish, rice if you're lucky. That is Tongan cuisine. There is a big thing
in Tonga about going to a traditional feast, where they roast a pig, and do all
that stuff that Dove talks about. We never actually attended a feast, but we
talked to plenty of people who did, many of which didn't eat more than a
mouthful. Throughout the tropical Pacific, the only good food was from abroad.
Fiji had excellent Indian curries, French Polynesia had French food, and Vanuatu
had one French restaurant.
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