A COUPLE OF YEARS ago, a friend and I spent three months backpacking across South America. We hiked to the famous Inca ruins at Machu Picchu, played football on the beach at Copacabana and even danced the tango in Buenos Aires. (Okay, that last bit is a lie. In Buenos Aires we took a guided tour of Boca Juniors' football stadium, during which the only two words I understood were "Diego" and "Maradona".) The point is that we ate out quite a bit on our travels, writes Eoin Butler.
Considering that we had breakfast, lunch and dinner at a café or restaurant each day, I estimate that we must have clocked up about 270 meals in those three months. Allow an average of 15 minutes waiting for each meal to arrive, factor-in also the paucity of English-language newspapers in the region, and that adds up to a 67½-hour period during which I had nothing better to do than ruminate upon the rituals of eating out.
A couple of questions occurred to me in that time. For example, why do waitresses invariably whisk the menu away from you the moment you've ordered a meal? Is it so that if the food you're served bears no resemblance to what was advertised, there is no evidence upon which to base a complaint? When I ordered chicken in La Paz, and was instead served two bananas coated in breadcrumbs, I did briefly suspect that this might be the case.
But what really got my goat (and, again, this isn't unique to South America by any means) were those annoying plastic sachets that restaurants use to serve condiments in. My dislike of these sachets started out as a sort of pet peeve, the type of thing a guest might casually toss into Paul Merton's Room 101. But after three months of constantly eating out, my feelings toward these vile pouches became increasingly darker and more pathological.
Sachets are infuriatingly messy, first of all. When the ketchup or mayonnaise comes squirting out, some portion thereof is practically guaranteed to end up somewhere that it shouldn't: on your shirt sleeve, in your coffee cup or all over that copy of Los Tiemposyou've been struggling to decipher. ("Morales to EEUU: My Hovercraft is Full of Eels"?) More odious again are those tinfoil-butter sachets you get at breakfast, whose very existence would seem to rule out the possibility of the existence of a benevolent God.
What are you supposed to do with these disgusting items once they've been used? Leave them on your plate, to be accidentally scooped up by your fork? Deposit it on the enamel table top, for your elbows to become smeared in its greasy entrails? Then there's is the underlying message behind them. What the proprietor is essentially saying is: "I don't trust you not to steal my ketchup bottle (or mustard jar or butter tub or even UHT milk jug)." By the end of my trip I was ready to plead: "There are no guarantees in this life. But just this once . . . take a chance on me!"
Before leaving South America, we visited the Iguazu Falls on the Brazil-Argentina border. There, the Lonely Planet suggested we splash out on a meal in the Sheraton Hotel. It would cost us a hefty $70, the book said. But the Argentinean economy was in dire straits and this was the cheapest place in the world to eat food of that calibre. I was initially reluctant. Seventy dollars on a single dinner? It was the backpacking equivalent of buying a private jet and flying to Vegas for a weekend.
But it was a once in a lifetime chance. So we dug out our best shirts and trousers from the bottom of our rucksacks and headed along. While we sat enjoying the spectacular view of the falls, my friend Neil drew my attention to the white porcelain jar at the centre of the table. I did a shocked double take. It couldn't be . . . it was! He later said that my horrified facial expression reminded him of Charlton Heston, in the Planet of the Apes, when he stumbled upon the ruined Statue of Liberty sunken in the sands.