Bangkok Glutton

There are two theories on why civilization on Easter Island nearly disappeared, all those years ago. One is that the first Polynesian inhabitants — descendants of the original explorers who had found their way to Tahiti — were used to inhabiting islands, making use of all of the island’s resources until they were cashed, and then moving on to the next one in the chain. The problem for them was that, well, Easter Island was the last of that chain, 2290 miles from the nearest land.

The second is that the original Rapa Nui’ans — inhabitants of Rapa Nui, since nobody “in the know” really calls it Easter Island — had devoted so many of their resources to making statues of their ancestors that they had neglected to spend any time doing anything else (like farming), under the mistaken belief that their ancestors would take care of everything else. What one only needed to do, they thought, was to have faith.

Of course, both theories could be simultaneously correct. There are maybe lessons to be learned in both of them. But what is very much not questioned is that when the Dutch “discovered” Rapa Nui hundreds of years after its civilization died out in 1650, they saw with their own eyes the concrete aftermath of that civilization’s beliefs, scattered throughout the island. What I’m referring to, of course, are Easter Island’s 600 stone statues.

It took a long time to figure out, but scholars eventually deduced that the statues were moai: recreations of major ancestors, writ large (indeed, no two are supposed to look alike). They had been transported to various places on the island deemed auspicious for their families by people who read the stars. However, transporting them was no easy task; these statues ranged from a couple of meters tall to 10 meters, weighing more than 80 tons. Even today, tour guides disagree on how these statues were moved, but all agree that they were transported via some combination of ropes, logs, and a whole lot of teamwork. Once they were raised to standing (some theorize by placing a stone under the statue’s forehead, bit by bit, until it could be hauled upright), the final touches were added: the red “topknot” representing the ancestor’s hair, dyed red by the local soil, and most importantly, the white coral “eyes” through which the ancestor’s power could be transported. So strong was their faith in the power of these eyes that, when surrendering to a rival family, they would topple their ancestor statues face-first into the ground so that the eyes would in effect be “deactivated”.

The original Rapa Nui’ans believed that the more ancestors erected on their behalf, the more blessings would come to their families. This belief was so strong that, by all accounts, even when the trees began to disappear and then the food, the statues were still being carved and hauled to wherever they could be manage to be taken. Even now, at the main quarry of Rano Raraku, there are statues on their backs, awaiting transport that never came, and figures carved into the mountain, waiting for the final cuts that would lift them from the surrounding stone.

I had no intention of finding something to eat on this island; I imagined a land of desolation, abandoned statues scattered throughout a barren landscape. The truth is that the land is fiercely protected by the people of Chile, of which Rapa Nui is a part; no fruit or vegetables are allowed on the island, and littering and touching the statues is strictly forbidden. People who violate these rules can be fined US$70,000. So my dreams of hugging a statue and getting transported back in time were totally dashed.

On the plus side, Rapa Nui today is a charming island, strangely full of life on an island famous for being the site of a society’s death. Small, charming houses abound in the main town of Hanga Roa, as do wild horses originally brought from Chile for work and set free by their owners. And yes, there is food everywhere: a mix of Chilean (empanadas) with Polynesian, like pil-pil.

I was not going to risk grabbing a hot snack, since our time at each site was strictly curtailed and our guide was eager to move us along. Instead, I came upon a fruit vendor (watermelons and pineapple are everywhere) who also sold “cubito helado”, which turned out to be shaved ice flavored with various syrups like pineapple, shoved into a plastic tube. The tidy and smart could simply open the top and slurp at their own leisure, but I am messy and dumb, and my attempts to eat this shaved ice ended up with me getting syrup all over my hands, shirt and face. I gave up at the middle and threw it away, but if I had had more faith, who knows what would have happened? That is the point of true faith, after all. 

In a bid to make myself as irritating as possible to my husband’s family, I have made it a personal mission to try at least one food item from every stop (except for Easter Island, which has nothing). Although a 3-day rest in Manta afforded a generous number of opportunities for dining on land, the 6-hour pit stop in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s biggest city, necessitated a sort of economy of ambition. I thought up what I could sample on the go as my tour group inevitably lumbered on ahead of me, and my thoughts alighted on one of Ecuador’s most famous street food snacks: empanadas. Originating in Portugal and Spain, these “hand pies” are filled with anything you like, from meat to cheese to a mix of both, a convenient mid-morning or mid-afternoon snack. Portable and presumably ubiquitous, I could simply pick up a few from a chain restaurant or neighborhood store, and that would be that, my local food ambitions quenched.

Our tour focused on wending its way through “Las Penas”, a colorful favela settled in the mid-17th century on the upper reaches of the city, overlooking the river. Making one’s way to the top, much like at Bangkok’s Golden Mount, affords a view of the entire city, as well as of the turquoise waters beyond. But first, one must pick their way up the 444 steps that make up the ascent through the neighborhood.

Sadly, empanadas were not as accessible as I had originally thought — at least when compared to McDonald’s, KFC, Doritos and Cheetos. Dismayed, I briefly considered picking up a popsicle instead, but knew that I would wimp out and end up with a flavor like blackberry instead of something that I had never tried before, like soursop. Soursop is something I’d seen (and hated) before in Brazil, but taxi (banana passionfruit) and lulo were fruits that I had never had the chance to try, even in Colombia.

So thanks to my cowardice, I held off, and around the 250th step or so, was promptly rewarded with a bewitchingly delicious scent — something like meat and onions — as well as this sign:

But when entering into the alleyway, the empanada vendor was nowhere to be seen. A woman sitting across from the doorway, next to a sign advertising “bollos”, advised me to knock on the door. I promptly did, and was met with a cacophony of barks from the dogs inside. I was surprised that this woman did not try to persuade me to try her bollos instead, because at that point, I was ready to.

Eventually someone did show up, if only to persuade the dogs to stop barking at me, and I asked if empanadas were available. She looked back inside to ask, and then said to me, “Queso only,” which was fine with me, if only because I thought I could just pick up a few of them and then hurry back up the steps to join my tour group. She asked me how many, and I showed her my handful of Ecuadorian coins: 3 Ecuadorian dollars and an American quarter in all. She nodded and said “7” and I, exhilarated with my upcoming haul, nodded back.

So when that same woman emerged from the back of the house with a bag of flour, I realized, oh, I’m going to have a wait a while. She gave us a couple of chairs and a table on which to rest our elbows, and then promptly disappeared. The same woman who had urged us to knock in the first place smiled a bit mournfully. “Everyone wants empanadas today, not bollos,” she told a passing neighbor. I made a mental note to Google “bollos” when I got back to the ship’s WiFi.

I could tell my daughter was starting to get antsy when, with her superior data provider, she googled “How to ask how much longer in Spanish?” (It’s “Quanto tiempo mas”, in case you were wondering). But it ended up not being necessary. Once we had risen to inquire, two paper bags full of empanadas individually wrapped in paper napkins emerged from the kitchen, and with a smile and a nod, my daughter and I set out to try to rejoin our party.

They were nowhere to be found, not even the very oldest members. If it hadn’t been for the neighborhood inhabitants, and for the fact that it was the only group foolhardy enough to climb all the steps to the top, Nicha and I might still be in Las Penas to this day, presumably setting up our own empanada shop closer to the bottom of the staircase. But friendly denizens directed us in the general direction, and, although my legs at times felt like they were giving out and I thought I might end my world cruise with a heart attack on the steps of Guayaquil, we did end up finding our group, at the very top of the steps, of course.

Nicha and I celebrated with an empanada each, overlooking the view of the city:

Ecuadorian cheese is special in that I really can’t pinpoint it, and I eat a lot of cheese. It’s stretchy like mozzarella, but tart like young goat cheese, and uniquely suited to filling up an empanada or livening up something stodgy like a fried green plantain ball. Of course, the rest of our empanada haul was devoured by my husband’s family.

It was only later, when I got back to the ship, that I Googled “bollo” and discovered that they were tamales made with green plantains and filled with fish or meat. They were probably the smell that had directed us to that alleyway in the first place. It’s become my new goal to return to Guayaquil, if only to revisit that old woman and her bollos.

During my three days in Manta, I counted a total of four (!) monuments to the tuna fish, and I am sure that there are even more. This is because Manta, home to the biggest fishing fleet in the world, is said to be the global center for yellowfin tuna, with an estimated 180 processing plants for the fish in this city alone.

One would think that this meant we would be dining on a literal avalanche of the stuff, maybe cooked a la plancha or seared and set atop a mountain of greens a la Nicoise-style. Maybe it would even be served like Japanese tataki, lightly cooked on the outside and cut in thick slices. Of course it would be cubed raw and plonked into a ceviche. But Ecuadorians don’t take to their famous fish that way. If they eat it, they eat it from cans. Instead, they prize other fish for their own tables — milder, white-fleshed, less of the feel of the “office” about them, I suppose.

It’s not just fish — and by extension, shrimp, squid and seasonal crab — that Manta restaurants specialize in, of course. There are tons and tons of plantains: fried into chips, but also smashed, baked or boiled. One of my favorite discoveries was the bolon de verde, named so for its ball shape, made of boiled and mashed green plantain and later baked or fried.

Eaten for breakfast, they are accompanied by a sauce: sometimes peanut, but in our case, a tart little tomato salsa that transformed this plate from stodgy to light and flavorful with just a couple of dabs:

As fresh and juicy as the tomatoes here are, you are far more likely to encounter peanuts; there are 40 varieties in the Manabi province, where Manta is located, alone. This extends to Ecuador’s most famous dish, ceviche, in which the seafood is cooked by curing in a mix of lemon/lemon and salt; the “Jipijapa” style combines peanut paste with avocado, a pairing that is considered the pinnacle of deliciousness.

Given the opportunity to mix my own ceviche, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try peanuts with avocado myself. Cubed fresh local “oyape” fish (and I know I am not spelling that right) was mixed with a combination of lemon juice and salt, then accompanied by decent helpings of squid, octopus and shrimp. They were then added to a bowl already layered with peanut paste, mixed with avocado, onion, slivered green mango and minced cilantro, and topped, if you wanted, with either plantain or sweet potato chips, or julienned, deep-fried white carrot. That was it. That was my ceviche. And it was delicious: the peanuts grounding the acidity of everything else with a little fattiness, actually perfect with seafood.

Besides peanut, there were also possible bases made of mango puree or tomato paste; naturally, I was greedy and asked for a second helping with tomato this time, studded with fresh little cherry tomatoes. They did not, however, let me garnish my ceviche with the powdered roasted peanuts, which was a bridge too far, even for them. That was meant for dessert.

As you may have guessed, the process is always the same — curing the seafood, mixing with the base, adding the accompaniments — and presumably any seafood and tart vegetable or fruit would work. I imagine even yellowfin tuna would be a good addition, if I could have ever found it.

Dessert was a corn custard, accompanied by a strawberry sauce and a single blueberry, another addition I was not allowed to make to my ceviche. It managed to be extremely corny yet extremely sweet, all at the same time.

Out in the wild, beyond the confines of the ship or tour operators, we set out to try Manta’s delicacies on our own. The city is as chock-a-block with cevicherias as it is with free-roaming iguanas, and they all bear signs much like this one:

But one of our guides, David, said that the best cevicherias in the city would not be found via an English-language Google search. Indeed, the one he favored, Costa Rica, was a chore even for him to find on the Internet. I was determined to try it. So when the tour bus dropped us off at the port, we did the 20-minute walk past the fish market, to a seemingly obscure part of town where the restaurant could be found at the top of a very steep flight of stairs.

Unlike the types of ceviche I had learned to make the day before, this ceviche is, I guess, “Costa Rica”-style, meaning the seafood is served in a pool of lime juice and salt. At this cevicheria, there are only three choices: fish, shrimp, or a mix of the two, all served with plantain chips and, if you dared, a splash of the hot chili sauce.

These chilies are not like the Thai kind, sneaky with a slow burn; they announce themselves immediately, forcing me to add a cowardly little dab to my bowl instead of the liberal sprinklings of my husband and father-in-law. Even now, two days later, I am amazed that they are not yet sick.

Now, it’s clear that ceviche is a big deal in a seafood-focused town like Manta. But it’s not the only game in town. The next day, we headed to the main beach (Playa Murcielago), where a strip of seafood spots lines the main walkway, Pattaya-style (Malencon Esenico). Figuring out where to eat was just a game of chance. We chose Alcatraz, the restaurant closest to the beach. When we sat at our table, we were greeted with a plate of fried bananas, accompanied by that self-same roasted peanut powder:

Here, we learned that swordfish is a big deal: grilled, breaded, served with peanut sauce, served with garlic sauce. Also a big deal, in-season crab, so we chose a plate of crab claws doused in garlic butter. Grilled clams, which arrived in a peanut sauce that was not satay-like at all, but light and acidic, refreshing even. Rice with grilled chicken and lentil soup for my seafood-phobic son. And a huge half-portion of grilled mixed seafood, a melange of fresh shrimp, squid, swordfish, white fish, clams (dressed simply in lime juice and diced red onion) and another Costa Rica-style ceviche, crowned with a single grilled prawn. Everything came with rice and mashed fried plantains, alongside dressed piles of lettuce, sliced cucumber, and fresh tomato.

After a few days spent on the ship, mourning my friends and family and my daily routine (and my pillows), it was nice to have a day out with just a few of us, no particular demands to meet, no special requests to accede to (besides my son’s, who always has something when it comes to food). Toddling back to the pier, I felt fortified, if only for the few hours it will take for us to get to Guyaquil.