Exotic food

You can buy all sorts of local products along any main road in Angola. Mostly it's just fruit, vegetables and palm wine, but once in a while you come across bushmeat. Anything from rodents to deers and monkeys are for sale and hang freshly killed along the road. They locals don't mind if you want to have a look, but ask before you take any photos.

A traditional snack in Cambodia is fried insects. Anything goes, but big hairy spiders seem extraordinarily popular. The small village of Skun on the highway 6A, between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, is renowned for its deep-fried tarantulas, along with grasshoppers, crickets and beetles. The place has become so popular that even tour buses stop here now. So what does a tarantula taste like? The hairy legs are just crispy, but the big abdomen is full of gooey, yummy guts. Just squeeze and enjoy.

The silk worm is mostly known for its capability to produce silk. Well, actually it is the silk caterpillar that produces the silk thread when it spins a cocoon around itself. After completion, the silk caterpillar then transforms into a silk worm at which state the cocoon can be harvested for silk production. The cocoons, with silk worms inside, are then boiled so the silk threads can be unwrapped. The finished products are silk and silk worms which locals consider a delicacy. Of all the different insects that can be eaten in Cambodia, silk worms are definitely among the most yummy ones. Try it fried with a bit of salt.

Donkey meat is considered a delicacy by the Chinese. It is sold in dedicated donkey restaurants, which are easily recognisable by the donkey on their signs. The most popular dish is probably the "donkey burger", a bread with chopped donkey stuffing that is sold for a few kuais. Chinese men though tend to go for a bit more delicate part of the donkey, namely the penis. The monster will be sliced into mouth fitting pieces and served on a plate. The slices are sometimes referred to as "donkey coin money" and can be a bit pricy, but luckily you don't have to buy the whole willy.

We have of course tried it and can only... eh, recommend it. Bon appetit!

Small food stalls fill the narrow so-called "snack alley" that springs from the shopping street of Wangfujing. Here you find the usual snacks that Chinese just love, like BBQ sticks, pig stomach and candied fruit, but the main attraction are the exotic sticks. We are talking insects, worms and, even weirder, seahorses and starfish. The big black scorpions go down well, but we did not try the dry-looking starfish!!!

Yak butter tea is available all over Tibet. If you visit a local Tibetan family, you can be sure that they will offer you this drink. The tea is very very rich, since based on butter, and is definitely not to everyone’s taste. Tibetans drink yak butter tea regularly and because it’s very rich in calories, it’s a good drink for high altitudes. Since based on butter, the tea is obviously also very greasy, which actually makes it a good cure for chapped lips, which is why Tibetans never need to use lip balm.

Many places in Tibet you see yaks grassing along the roads and on mountain sides. They are everywhere, also on the menu. You can get yak soup, yak stew, yak dumplings, etc.
Yak meat is sold in market places and at butchers, where every part of the animal is for sale; head, intestines, organs, you name it. When you see the meat lying or hanging around the streets, you kind of try to supplant that that’s probably also where restaurants get their meat from.

In the Andean region of South America (Colombia, Ecuador and Peru), guinea pigs are not only considered cute, but also tasty. They are called cuy and can be bought roasted and ready for feasting from street vendors and road stalls. Let it be said that there is not an awful lot of meat on a guinea pig, but in return any part is eatable. As they are a delicacy, they are fairly expensive by local standards.

The ever escaping animal so shy it's quite hard to snap a good picture of might be fleeing for a good reason: for fear of ending up at the dinner table. The iguana meat is incredibly tasty and makes a great stew. But let's just say this creature is more bone than flesh and having a whole meal of iguana is a task that requires patience, time and a certain dexterity.
The most famous place on the island to have iguana is at Jaanchies, in Westpunt.

Traditional cuisine on the Faroe Islands consists almost entirely of fish and mutton, combines potatoes and – controversially – whale meat and puffins. In the rough climate and rocky shores that are the Faroe Islands, it was tough to store one's provisions, so families resorted to salt, pickle, and dry their meat and fish. Most celebrated today is the dried fish and two types of mutton; dried skerpikjøt and fermented ræstkjøt (literary "leftover meat"). There's a distinct difference between fermented and rotten – or so say the Faroese. Fermenting is basically controlled rotting where only specific bacteria is allowed to break down certain parts of the meat – most often turning sugar into alcohol. Thus, making the meat long-lasting, as well as uneatable for a lot of outsiders. Better wash it down with some locally distilled snaps.