March 15, 2007  - Reflections of a Travel Writer

Where I live, in Sydney, the seasons are on the turn at last.

February’s humidity forced us to endure daily saunas. At least that’s what it felt like as I walked around with my clothes clinging damply to me, and my hair wet enough to wring out. 

This year my husband, Gordon, and I have gone on a bit of a health kick. Not too strenuous, mind you. No point in getting carried away at our age – especially on a stretcher.

It’s usually just an evening walk to a nearby jetty and back, but the downside of that for me in summer was coming home and preparing dinner dodging the blinding shafts of the setting sun through the kitchen window and trying to prepare the meal in time for us to sit outside and eat before dark.

But now there is a cooler tang to the air. We can move quickly without creating a lather of perspiration and at last the gusty uneasy air of stormy summer has been replaced by fluffy little breezes. Even the birds that come to our deck seem less hassled. We kid ourselves they like to hang out with us but the water dish and feed bowl in which we put sunflower seeds and pieces of bread and fruit for them is the real lure.

All this got me thinking about what tempts me to travel – apart from an incessant curiosity about how the rest of the world lives.

Possibly my interest in food has something to do with it, but many of my fondest travel memories – and this I found interesting when I realised it – have to do with seasonal discoveries.

This makes sense as the Slow Food movement (which, no, has nothing to do with waiting a long time for your meal) recognises the importance of eating produce close to its source and in season. It’s a no-brainer, really. Grow something, harvest it, eat it as soon as possible, don’t cart it around the world or the country, or process it or store it for months – of course it’s going to taste better.

There’s the whole intangible of terroir, too, which the French understand best. The indefinable seasoning that the air and soil and rain adds as produce grows is subliminal, as is the perfect fit it all provides when a dish is consumed still in that environment.

A few years ago I visited Korea for the first time, in October. I arrived on a misty day and the images of stone-grey temples and teahouses, made even more drab by the autumn drizzle, bare tree branches, etched charcoal against a silvery sky, and slate-grey streets shining silver in the rain, remain painted grey on grey in my memory.

While my photographs fortunately also remind me of exuberantly coloured designs painted under the eaves of so many buildings, children in bright nylon jackets, and the kaleidoscope of those myriad small dishes which appear immediately at each meal on the necessarily wide tables, it is the persimmons I remember most vividly.

I had never appreciated this fruit before. Listening to tales of other people’s bad experiences with unripe ones, had warned me off I guess. The fear of taking an inadvertent astringent bite which would leave me dry-mouthed and disappointed was enough to steer me away from them any time I found them in the markets at home.

In Korea though, they captivated me, beckoned me. Here their orange globes sparkled on trees in dim courtyards like so many lamps. The flavour too – part apricot I discovered when I overcame my prejudices – and a seductive jelly texture, making them better eaten with a spoon, won me as a fan forever.

I am glad I waited for Korea, because the thing is, by falling for something in its place of origin (and it’s happened too for me with other things: chevre in France, and Irish coffee in Ireland for example) forever the scent, the flavour, of each discovery immediately transports me to the place where I first encountered it – a farmhouse near Cork in Ireland and a smiling cherry-cheeked cheese-maker sloshing a typically generous tot of whisky into my coffee cup; a village roadside market in the Loire one drowsy autumn afternoon, and later a dairy, scrubbed to glaring antiseptic whiteness; and a Seoul teahouse as we sheltered from the elements. 

Other times I have renewed acquaintance with favourite foods by happening across them on a journey planned around more mundane motives: reduced air fare prices or available time, for instance. After all, a rendezvous with seasonal food would have to be a flippant reason set a date for a long journey wouldn’t it? Maybe not.

Some of my happiest memories include picking figs from a roadside tree in southern Italy, or scouting for them in markets, mostly unsuccessfully (we’d arrived late in the season), or best of all having them presented to me on arrival by the host of a bed and breakfast host south of Rome where we were to stay the night (see Just a Little Italian).

One trip we arrived at the storybook medieval town of Salers, high in the Auvergne in France, in time for me to meet and fall for cantal a unique mountain cheese, best in summer. I dubbed truffade, the dish I ate at a local restaurant, as ‘heart attack on a plate’ (well, I ask you – potatoes fried with cantal cheese?) but it was so good and the serving so immense, that  I nearly cried when I ultimately admitted defeat. It was possibly best for my health (and certainly my hips) but I simply couldn’t eat another mouthful

Seasonality shows itself perhaps best in fruit.  I can still taste the sweetness of fire engine red cherries we helped ourselves to from tree growing wild beside a country road in Alsace, France. In Helsinki, the footpaths are littered with strawberry hulls. Locals buy punnets from street-side stalls and snack on them as they walk along, which is no wonder, as they are perhaps the best strawberries in the world, ripened to intense redness by a sunny yet  long and cool ripening period.

Similar conditions make Tasmania a tempting destination in summer when what I believe are Australia’s best raspberries and big dark crunchy cherries are in season. Visitors to Queensland and New South Wales should time their arrival for mango season though. Choose an outdoor spot like the beach to savour a North Queensland Kensington Pride mango, allowing its fragrant sticky sweet amber juice to coat your fingers and chin. Until you have done that you have not experienced either mangos or Australia. Or the perfect summer. Trust me!

Once on a trip to far western China we came across a boy in the Sunday market of the old city of Kashgar, pressing the ruby juice from pomegranates using a chrome-plated press which resembled a medieval torture tool. Beside him blood-red bottles were lined up for sale on the footpath. 

There is no question, either, that I would plan any trip to Malaysia around the peak season for durian, that love-it hate-it fruit of south east Asia. I’d make any excuse to return to Bali, too, when my favourite passionfruit – the fragrant, yellow-skinned makesa or sweet grenadilla passiflora ligularis – is at its peak. There the fruit is so commonplace it makes me wonder why it is not more often cultivated elsewhere. It has to be the best passionfruit in the world.

Seasonal food tourism. It’s a whole new angle when you think about it. One that tourism bodies, airlines and ad-agencies have up until now largely overlooked. It might be the new hook to tempt visitors. 

How about: ‘Visit Australia in summer. The mangoes are waiting for you!’ After all, a similar thing worked once for shrimps and barbies!