Food and expeditions go together like cheese and pickle. Here are some particularly memorable meals from my travels:
- Smash and tinned mackerel eaten in silence in a torch-lit tent in Betws-y-Coed after a seemingly endless downhill bicycle free-wheel (9 miles!) in the dark looking for somewhere to pitch.
- Finally tucking into the Spotted Dick & Custard ration pack that we’d promised ourselves as a treat once we made it safely off the the Inylchek Glacier.
- The muesli that I ate with my compass and Laura ate with her hands on the Musandam Peninsula of Oman because we’d forgotten the spoons.
- Lying on my back in a Kyrgyz hotel after a food-deprived month in the mountains, in pain from stomach bloating through excessive eating but still stuffing more biscuits into my mouth as my body made up for weeks of malnourishment.
- A moonlit Christmas dinner of barbecued king prawns on a deserted beach on Masirah Island. My girlfriend (now wife) and I had just cycled the 90-mile circumference and nearly died from a lack of water (N.B. minor exaggeration).
- Discovering a hidden stash of chocolate at base camp in Russia and spending hours melting it all down only to pour it over a cake that turned out to be rancid.
- A “taste of the war treat” of tinned pilchards with cous cous eaten in drizzle outside a pub where my friends were eating because I was trying to save money.
- Fried egg baps at our Bolivian base camp made with fresh bread “baked” using a camping stove and the outside of an MSR pan.
- The big, fat, delicious, juicy Argentine steak we’d been dreaming of but never thought we’d get at the Fitzroy Adventure Camp (FRAC)
- Stopping for a quick pee in the bushes whilst pedalling my rickshaw through the north west only to find myself 1,500 calories heavier after a ‘Just taking a look’ in my snack bag.
Got any good travelling meal memories? Add them below in the comments section.
