All About Food, Almost

Because I am a food guru and because I am in love with the food of South Africa I decided a blog must be dedicated to explaining the deliciousness of it.

Over the past month and a half I have been lucky enough to try some traditional dishes of the afrikans (South African) culture and have to say the least fallen in love with them.

Two typical meals that you will find while having a large group of people are a braai and a poike. 

A braai is much like a BBQ in the states except instead of just having hamburgers and hotdogs each person invited to the braai brings a dish to share.  Typical dishes include browurst (similar to bratwurst except it is generally drier meat then we are used to), steak, lamb, chicken, sandwiches, ribs, etc. There is always a large variety of food that is brought which makes it so delicious!

Generally, instead of having a modern grill, like we would, they use a very old fashioned grill (almost like what you would see at parks and campgrounds). Logs of wood are then burned in order to provide coals to heat the grill. Generally one of the guys cooks as it is almost an honor to cook a good braai. So delicious!

A poike (poy kie) is a traditional stew here. It is also very traditional to have with a large group of people or for some sort of event. It is a stew that is made in layers and can range from 3 to 7 hours to make. It takes so long because you cook the layers at a variety of time intervals. For example, you start with the things that take the longest to cook, maybe carrots and some sort of meat (generally lamb, beef, or chicken (they eat a LOT of lamb here which is really exciting)) you just cook the meat enough so that it is seared on the outside. Then you can add your squash and carrots which take the second longest to cook. Later you add your mushrooms, onions, etc. And lastly you make a broth, which can be made out of a variety of things. Some use a packaged soup mix and gravy. I’ve also heard using Coca Cola, which I have yet to try yet, but that is a very big thing here. Apparently marinating chicken in coca cola is also supposed to give the chicken a very nice flavor, who woulda known.

I’m a big snacker, so snack items are always a must for me. My all time favorite snack food is called biltounge, which is a lot like our beef jerky, except Biltounge is like 10x better. I don’t know how I will survive without it when I go to the US! I probably go through at least one 200g bag a week! Biltounge is made out of any type of meat (I’ve had beef, buffalo, kudu, and ostrich (which is currently my favorite)). They hang up this meat to dry (which sounds quite disgusting) and then they go crazy with seasoning all over it. The flavors just melt together so well in your mouth it’s almost indescribable.

Then there are always chips, but the flavors here are so different from the US. They have sweet chili, chutney (which I will describe later), and some other strange ones I can’t remember. And then their candy and drinks and such comes in so many amazing flavors! Mango, peach, guava, papaya, pineapple, and squash (which is not actually squash its just a very sugary drink, kind of like soda (speaking of soda their cream soda here is green which I find very bizarre.))

Lastly, they have a bunch of different condiments they like to use on their foods. The big one is chutney (which I stated before). Chutney is almost the texture of a jam, and it often comes in different flavors such as peach and mango. They put it on everything, in sauces, on meat, mixed in with curry, but not generally on bread. It is sweet but savory enough to go on meat, its quite delicious!

Of course with every great thing you must have a not so great thing. Here it is mayonnaise. They put mayonnaise on everything and in such copious amounts! And its not like the mayonnaise in the US it is much more sweet and tangy so I find it quite atrocious. Just to put this in perspective I ordered a wrap at KFC the other day (yes they do have KFC), and it was like asking for chicken with your mayonnaise, I couldn’t even eat it all it was just too much mayonnaise. Also I went to have sushi about a week ago, and you wouldn’t believe it! They put mayonnaise on all the sushi pieces! Lucky enough I asked before hand for absolutely noo mayonnaise on any of my dishes. They of course looked at me like I was insane.

My life over the past couple of weeks hasn’t been filled with too many stories. I have been spending most of my time working on my project doing herbivore counts and behavioral surveys. I will have to go more in depth on these projects in a later post.

This last weekend I was able to venture with a coworker through some more of Mpumalanga (the county outside of the park). We went to stay at a friend’s vacation house that is situated in a nature reserve residential area. It is quite fascinating because there are all these gorgeous houses and then you’ll see some zebra and giraffe grazing in the yards. The animals are quite tame in this area as they are used to having humans around more then in the park. I had the opportunity to feed a Zebra an apple, which was quite extraordinary! It wouldn’t let me pet it but it took the apple right out of my hand which is quite cool. Some animals however cause lots of problems around the area. For example, that same night, one of their other friends in the neighborhood had a baboon attack. The baboons came in and ripped out all the plants in their garden and then took a luggage trailer and threw it at their car!

The next day we went to a resort in a town in the mountains called Badplaas. The mountains surrounding this area were amazing to say the least! They were lime green, almost unreal, I’ve never seen anything comparable to it.

This resort is where the only water park is situated in Mpumalanga. It was quite exciting; the park is located on a hot spring so there were 6 different hot pools (3 inside and 3 outside). There is 1 very hot pool, 1 warm pool, 2 luke warm pools, 1 cool pool, and 1 cold pool. The hottest pool was 43 degrees Celsius (about 107 F)! It is so hot you can only sit in the pool for 10 minutes maximum, according to the rules, I however could only stand about 4 minutes of it. When you jumped into the hot pool you had to be sure to move quickly to sit down and then not move until you got out otherwise you would get too hot. There was a cold pool just a couple of steps next to the hot pool so that you could go from one to the other. Apparently this is good for your circulation, I think it sounds more like a health hazard haha. There were also 2 luke warm pools, which I spent the majority of my time in.

In addition they had two body slides and a tube slide with waterfalls and what not. It is a lot smaller then our water parks but very nice for the price you pay. I was actually surprised at how cheap it was to get in. 

This is Africa

I’ve been told by multiple people that it’s about time I give an update on my African adventures. Sorry for such a long delay but here it is… this is Africa.

I’ve been gone for about a month now in South Africa, after a 22 hour flight I finally arrived to Johannesburg. I was astonished at how lush and green it is here! I guess after being in dry, brown Colorado for a while coming to a brilliant green atmosphere was astonishing. The next day I took one more 50 minute flight to my destination, Kruger National Park. The airport I flew into was a 4 hour drive from my camp in the park, Satara.

The closest village to Satara is about a 2 hour drive, meaning I have to think in advance and have enough groceries for about 2 weeks until we are able to get back into town. I was actually very surprised at the development here, I didn’t know at all what to expect. But you can find almost anything here that you would want to find in the US. The grocery stores here are generally found within a mall, which really intrigues me. Everything is very disorganized however and it can often take multiple trips through isles of food before you find what you need.

The villages here are also very interesting, their driving laws are much more lenient here, which could be a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. When there are two lanes on a road cars will often pull over and use the shoulder as a “slow” lane. Every one packs as many people as they can in one car, which doesn’t surprise me too much. Tons of people often line the roads waiting to be picked up for work in random cars and are always walking somewhere on foot. This is generally in the bigger villages, the smaller villages are a lot different and typical to what you would see on TV with random chicken, goats, and dogs running around, grumpy old women sitting outside of their brick houses, and children playing football (soccer) in their stadiums after school. Of course I had to be a typical tourist and get a picture of some African children who were more then thrilled to be in our photograph.

  

Where I live is amazing to say the least! Kruger National Park is the largest park in South Africa and would take an entire day to drive from the Southern point of the park to the North. I live right in the middle in a camp called Satara, it is equivalent to the eastern prairies of Colorado. Except filled with multiple large predators. To give an example, the other night I was out helping a PostDoc fill a generator at night. When we were driving to her sight a hyena erupted from the bushes. I started screaming, as I am still not used to giant wolverine looking predators coming out of the bush. I scarred everyone half to death and then created quite a big laughter. 

The research camp I live in is a lot nicer then what I was expecting. My living situation is a large army tent, with out air-conditioning. Luckily it hasn’t been too hot yet and has been pretty bearable during the day. Its funny because the permanent residents in the research camp have almost luxurious tents. One girl has a television in her tent connected to a satellite dish for movies and TV. When I got here I laughed and was like what is this, a television in the bush, I still can’t get over the ridiculousness of it. Yet I am there pretty regularly taking over her bed and TV after a long day of field work.

Last weekend we did some traveling around the park and went to the South Eastern part of the park. It was gorgeous, the landscape had very lush green mountains, it reminded me a lot of Colorado. Its probably my favorite part of the park. We stayed in a trails camp, called Bushmans, about an hour drive from the closest camp, Burg en Dal. These trails camps don’t have electricity and the lodging is in thatch roof huts, a very typical African style. Tourists pay a lot of money to stay at these camps but staff can rent them out on Saturday for only about 100 rand (approximately $12). Bushmans was situated high in the mountains in a valley next to a water hole. It was very remote, we could hear lions around us at night, another thing I have yet to get used to. The view was astonishing.

It still shocks and excites me when I am in the field working and see a giraffe curiously peaking its head over a bush looking at us while we collect plant samples. For the most part I have seen all the animals any tourist would want to see while in Africa. The only thing I have yet to see is a good sighting of an African Wild Dog and a Cheetah. I have seen tons of lions, some with cubs only about 5 feet away from my car as well as Leopard. Speaking of Leopards, one morning I was on a game drive and happened to come up to a jam of tourists, we stopped to ask what they saw. It was a gorgeous female leopard, the first one I had seen thus far. They also told us there were 3 other leopards hiding in the bushes behind. After sitting there for a while looking at the leopard we decided to be on our way and then all of the sudden got a flat tire. The only thing we could do of course was pull over to the side of the road and change this flat tire. Probably scariest thing of my life, considering there were 4 leopards less then 100 meters away from our car, we were literally directly across from where the leopards had been spotted. I, of course, was put on leopard watch. We luckily were not eaten, and I live to tell the classic story of how I was almost eaten by a leopard, except not really.

It is amazing at how many dangerous things South Africans live with, coming from a country where I don’t have to worry very often about my life being in danger I have still not come to the realization how many things can harm me out here. I often forget to look around me while I am doing fieldwork and an elephant is still just as intriguing to me as before, where as so many people here fear elephants. I have also come to fall in love with Warthogs! They are by far one of my favorite animals, I love seeing their little tails sticking straight up running through the tall grass.

I was hoping to get some images of Africa up here, but unfortunately the internet connections are so slow it would take ages to load even one file.

I of course have tons more to tell but am off to do herbivore counts. Until next time!