wonderful food!

I sometimes wonder why we take so much pleasure in eating, an activity which comes back so regularly and often that one could legitimately assume it would get boring. But no, we actually get excited (well mike and I do at least) everytime we get to sit down for a meal!

Malaysia does not disappoint here either - food is everywhere, plentiful, and with multiple colours, smells and flavours; here again an inheritage from all the cultural influences found in Malaysia. Our staple diet is fairly simple: our carbos come from either rice or roti, and something to go with it. But each of one of those food stalls we stop at has a different way of preparing those.

Rice can be steamed, fried, with saffron, with tomato and chilli, etc... Roti is the malaysian bread and the term is basically used for anything that involves dough - from pancake to flat bread to biscuits and cakes. Our favorite is Roti Canai, which is a flat bread baked over the fire with palm oil, and that you then dunk into an accompanying curry. Delicious! We have also tried numerous sweet rotis, most of them delicious (a mistake was made once, but hey, you've got to try to know what it tastes like).

With this, we seem to have no end to our fruit appetite - pineapple, mangoes, bananas (for Mike only), oranges, fresh coconut... And the fresh fruit juice we get on the side of the road, in particular sugar cane and coconut, are like little heavens on the way, when the heat becomes almost unbearable.

And finally, a food and drink retrospective would not be complete without the daily espresso: no more regrets, after all the debating over whether we should take our little alessi espresso maker or not, it is SO nice to be able to make ourselves an espresso every morning as we get up (so Kate, I owe you one, we think of you every morning!). In fact, our MSR cooker had a manufacturing default so we cannot use it (we will get the spare part in poste restante in Bangkok) so Yvoine gets out of the tent first thing every morning, to light a wood fire, to make sure both of us get our espresso! As I said, no regrets... ;o)