Hike NEW 'PHOTOS
Wildfox
Anthony Swanston
Mon 4 Apr 2016 07:56
Like my bike
ride I am the only customer. I have a
guide and a porter for the three days.
Clean water is not guaranteed so that has to be carried. We stop at a traditional market to buy
food. Most of it looks lovely but some
needs to be given a wide berth – mostly you can smell it before you see it.
We stay in
wooden village huts with a local family.
These are on stilts with hens and pigs underneath. Dinner is communal with everyone diving into
the same bowls. A daughter arrives from
next door bringing her contribution.
Minced squirrel with garlic.
About 14 dishes are produced. The
leftovers are combined into maybe five dishes; that’s breakfast taken care of.
After dinner
someone goes outside and shakes a tree and arrives back with a basket of
tamarinds. That’s pudding taken care of.
The open
wood fire is built in a sandpit in the floor of the house and this contains the
heat from the tinder dry house (it has not rained here for five months). There
is a gap at one end of the fire and scraps are thrown through it. That’s the chicken’s breakfast taken care of.
I ask my
guide why they boil the mange tout before stir frying. “Must kill all bacteria for westerners”…
