This afternoon, our boat guy, a rastafarian came over to take us to his restaurant. This was down a path we’d never been down, through small tree-covered valleys, in a village about 10 minutes away, down small criss-crossing trails that would not boggle Google Maps quite thoroughly. The place itself was up the side of a valley, reached by steps made out of tires painted in the rastafarian colours, to a small canopy with some wooden benches, painted slogans about peace and unity, some decorations made of salvaged goods, a hammock. It was like and unlike places I’ve been to around the world, but here it was run out of his little cottage with orange mud walls and a tin roof. He brought out our lunch, a bowl of githeri, said he’d forgotten to make chapati with it.
The food itself was well enough, though I did like the maize in it which he said had come from his parents who farm in the bush. It was a large kernal type, very similar to the kind you get in pozole.
We had a pleasant chat with him over lunch, learning about what marriage is like, his ideas of what makes for good education, and that he was one of the only rastafarians in the village, having inherited the religion from his grandfather. It’s the first time I’d met someone speak of it as a religion, one inherited from the family, rather than philosophy and way of life they were drawn to – though again there was certainly an element of choice, as his own mother was Christian, and generally religion seems fluid in this little corner of the world. I usppose the juice king of Puerto Viejo probably also came from a family line, or at least a society in which it wasn’t something out of the ordinary, or a statement of being different, but for the reggae singers of Flores (from the days before I started this blog) it was clearly a planting of a flag, a lifestyle to adopt that marked them out from the violence and intolerance around them.
Lunch was rather small, so we went on to Distant Relatives, the local backpacker lodge, where we had a brownie with tea. Both very nice, and made me rather regretful we hadn’t tried them before.
In the evening was our walk through the village, of which more separately.