Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [5]
Brazil ranked as a priority from the beginning, or at least Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia. The historic city boasts a vibrant Creole culture and cuisine, a fascination of ours for many years, as well as a lively music scene and beautiful beaches. Of all the tempting destinations in South America, it’s long been at the top of our wish list. Flights to Salvador go through Rio de Janeiro, so it became a bonus stop.
South Africa fell into place quickly, too. The country’s got game, literally and figuratively, plus the alluring Winelands, one of the world’s emerging hot spots for creative cooking and winemaking. Cape Town—lovely by all reports—seemed to warrant some time and so did a safari, eventually planned in the Eastern Cape near Port Elizabeth rather than the more popular and expensive area around Kruger National Park. If the safari had been an overriding interest, our chief focus, we would have gone to Kruger, but traveling to the park from the distant Cape Town–Winelands region took too much time and money for our purposes.
Thailand excited us on our honeymoon more than our other destinations combined, and it produces lustfully flavored food, so it easily rated a return. Our last visit was too short and limited in scope, making it important in this case to stay longer and move around. ONEworld airlines go only to Bangkok, putting it on our map for sure, and we also decided to see Chiang Mai and Phuket, the former for its remarkable highlands culture and the latter because of its spectacular rise in the late twentieth century into international tourism renown.
A friend of Bill’s from college lives most of the year in Chaozhou, China, where he and his wife own and run a ceramics factory that exports its products to the United States. They have urged us to visit for years and this could be our only opportunity before they retire. It became definite when Bill found an article saying the residents love food so much the children used to memorize and sing a ten-thousand-word ballad just about the local snacks, skipping completely over all the goose and crab main dishes. Hong Kong provides the best gateway to Chaozhou, so we add it to our stops.
Everywhere else involved compromises and trade-offs. At first we wanted to linger for a month or more in the South Pacific, New Zealand, and Australia. That proved impractical for a number of reasons, primarily because the ONEworld airlines generally serve the South Pacific through cooperative arrangements with other carriers, putting the flights off-limits for frequent-flier rewards. The only appealing island chain we could reach without a lot of hassles was New Caledonia, a Qantas port of call relatively close to Australia. It finally made the cut as a destination due to its French background and relatively unspoiled setting. New Zealand fell out of the competition around the same time, as we preferred to focus on Australia, specifically the wine regions near Adelaide and the capital of “Mod Oz” cuisine, Sydney.
In India, the whole enormous country enticed us. Cheryl made a strong pitch for Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal—“How can we miss, on a twentieth-anniversary trip, the world’s most famous monument to love?”—and Bill pushed Khajuraho, where Hindu art reached its apex in the erotic sculpture of the numerous temples—“Talk about love, this place is like a three-dimensional version of the Kama Sutra.” Both of us wanted to visit Rajasthan, especially the legendary cities of Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Udaipur, and hoped as well to time our arrival for the annual camel fair in Pushkar. Given the unpredictable and sluggish state of internal transportation in India, however, we realized it would take weeks to see these places, and we simply didn’t have the time