Local Tibetan Bread
No one would believe it but I am actually a food fiend. I would eat anything that looks interesting enough and borderline gross. I do not eat anything raw though, I would rather eat straight out of a can.
I am torn between taking tours when traveling. On one hand you get to meet a whole new bunch of people (even if they are not guaranteed to be friendly), on another you do not get to experience the place like a local. On one trip, I decided to take my chances on a group tour.
It was an overnight stay in a boat right in the middle of Halong Bay. For 45 usd, inclusive of breakfast, lunch and dinner of local Vietnamese cuisine, you get what you paid for. If I did not take that tour, I would not have heard an incredible traveller story told by a Mexican dude.
I shared a table with a biracial couple: the guy was an awkwardly tall German and his girlfriend was a petite Japanese. They work in film production and had some time off to take the Indochina Trail. At the table parallel to ours, two Mexican guys sat in front of their oily plates. One grunted that all the quasi sauteed food that were more like boiled in oil might make him ill. The other one muttered that it was better than nothing since they would be stuck out there in the middle of watery nowhere. In an attempt to salvage the night, he chatted us up.
They turned out to be tight childhood friends from Mexico. They were in Tibet for months before they decided to embark on a journey of the Indochina Trail. They were telling us about how they spent one season with nomads who turned to yaks for everything. It was the ultimate Man Vs Wild experience, as one of them put it. They use everything from their hide to their excrements. He said, yaks gave an entire new meaning to ‘taking a dump’ because they literally leave dumps of their fecal matter all over the place. Since it was cold, the pile would turn solid almost instantly. They take the clump and break it in shreds, eventually into coarse powder with which they make bread.
He tried to convince us that the final product is more appealing than the entire baking process.