Travelling Hopefully - Mosquitos and Banana Beer

On our second day of safari we had an uplifting cultural experience.  Which is to say we wandered down to a nearby village and stared at the locals going about their business, or at least as much of their business as they were prepared to conduct in front of strangers.

I must admit I've always felt a little uneasy about this sort of "cultural tourism".  I can't help thinking of my likely reaction if a bunch of foreigners (or for that matter, neighbours) started wandering around my place taking pictures and goggling about how uplifting and cultural the whole thing was.  As a rule culture is something only noticed by outsiders.  For the locals its just the way things get done.

Having said that it was informative and helped correct an impression I had gained from travelling down the main road.  This village (and no doubt the others) presented a face to the highway of wretched, cobbled together shopfronts that seemed to exist in the vain hope that a tourist bus would stop and people would buy bottles of coke.  Behind this the village stretched for quite a way with houses, small businesses and farms all mixed in together and with people generally getting on with their lives despite the propensity of western tourists to come clumping through.

The village we visited was called Mto Wa Mbo which translates as "place of mosquitos" which doesn't sound like a recommendation until you realise that it also implies a permanent water supply.  Compared with the arid territory we had come through to get here the area was quite lush and at least part of the two main crops (rice and bananas) were grown in sufficient quantities to support a modest export trade after subsistence needs were catered to.  I actually thought this might be quite an affluent area but according to Elysha our tour leader I was reading too much into some readily available water and a few excess grains of rice.

If you have been on any sort of cultural tour you will know that there are two ingredients which never vary.  You will get to see the local whatever it is that the locals make (with of course the opportunity to buy some) and you will get to sample the local delicacy.  In this case the local craftwork was breathtaking wooden carvings (although the locals had come all the way from Mozambique) and the local delicacy was banana beer.  We were told how banana beer is made and despite that were offered the opportunity to try some.  We all tried it and nobody seemed to like it that much.  I didn't mind it myself, it tasted a little like rice wine and was no whit worse than any other beer I have tried.

After our uplifting cultural experience we rolled on to our next camp site.  It had a swimming pool!