Pondering Our Lazy Ideas About Others, While Eating Camel Stew
One of the many wonderful things about adventuring in wild and remote places is you often bring home a refreshed outlook - which is a good thing because most of us get stuck in all too many ruts.
That’s what I thought this week as I lay on fly-covered cushions in a roadside shack in a desert eating camel meat.
Someone had just emailed me the news that some Dartmoor folk - who I know to be passionate about the welfare of the national park’s ponies - were considering eating the meat of their favourite animal as a way of ensuring the creature’s future.
The Camel Stew Restaurant
I won’t go into detail here because I wrote a news story on the matter as soon as I got home - but as I chewed on my camel stew in that hot, fly-ridden, shack it did strike me just how different we humans can be from one nation to another.
The Arab people love their camels - indeed, I’d venture that they are more passionate about them than we equine-loving Brits are about horses - yet they quite happily eat the camel’s excellent low-fat meat without a sentimental thought.
Mention horse-steak here, though, and you are guaranteed to open the gates of animal-loving hell - even if it is a rather logical way of giving those Dartmoor ponies monetary value, thereby ensuring their future on the moors.
As I lay there eating the rice-and-camel-combo with my fingers in a bow to local custom, I looked about me and thought just how different our guide’s idea of a good restaurant was to mine.
A fellow journalist tucks into the beautifully served ‘camel special’ for lunch
Mussallam said he’d take us to his favourite eatery for lunch - but his concept of a restaurant was just a little bit at odds with the European ideal. There was a shack in which Bangladeshi workers were throwing entire goat carcasses (including heads) onto a fire on the floor. Outside, the Arab owner was sitting behind a desk in the shade collecting money and allocating sections of an ‘L’-shaped open shed where diners could lie around on cushions and be served.
There was no view to admire - just smoke, dust and flies. I got the distinct impression that this particular restaurant design would never catch-on back at home - and yet I hugely enjoyed the whole no-nonsense experience. The food scored ten-out-of-ten.
Part of the pleasure came from the fact that everyone was so kind and courteous to me - a stranger in a place where locals see few foreigners. Indeed the entire time I spent in the Salalah area of Oman, close to the Yemeni border, was an absolute joy - partly because of the stunning scenery and partly because of the friendliness we encountered.
I travelled there a. few years ago in the immediate aftermath of some dreadful beheadings in Syria - a fact which caused several of my friends to suggest I was mad to be going to a place so close to a country where fundamentalist terrorism is occasionally rife. They meant the Yemen, but their anxiety was spurred by events that were taking place in Syria at the time. A country which is as close to Southern Oman as the West Country is to the Ukraine.
When I told our guide about these fears regarding the Yemen, he laughed: “It is a wonderful place!” he protested. “I was there last weekend. I go regularly with my mates because we have such a laugh with our Yemeni friends. I’ll take you there if you visit again - you’ll love it!”
A day or two later I was walking towards a famous blow-hole on the remote and empty Omani coast when two men in robes came hurrying toward me. For a moment I thought I might be in some kind of trouble, but one of them said: “Good morning sir. We saw that you have no water with you - it is so hot we’ve run across to offer you to share ours.”
News events and the media can give us all sorts of lazy ideas about other people - which is why travel and adventure is so good for the soul.
