4 minute read
PADKOS OVERINDULGENCE
There’s a definitive moment in every road trip where the front seat passenger whips out a Tupperware container full of padkos and feeds the family on a feast of chicken drumsticks, meatballs and boiled eggs. It’s a different kind of aromatherapy - the aroma cures you from ever enjoying said food items ever again. And when your time comes to pack padkos, perhaps you’ll try to be more creative. But there are certain road trip staples that you cannot possibly grow weary of: biltong and droëwors.
Ask any Namibian and they’ll tell you we have the best of both.
We were on another road trip, heading north from Windhoek. Our final destination being Victoria Falls. Just the year before, my sister was on an exchange to Germany where her host family embarked on a trip to Europe’s biggest waterfall: the Rheinfall at Schaffhausen in Switzerland. This socalled waterfall is a mere 23 metre drop. A rapid, basically. So when our German ‘sister’ was on her exchange to Namibia, we were determined to show her what a real waterfall looks like - the 108 metre drop of The Smoke that Thunders.
It’s one hell of a drive to Vic Falls. We made plenty of overnight stops, spending extra time in Etosha National Park and packed a hell of a lot of biltong and droëwors, as one does.
Now, there’s a fine line with padkos. You have to keep in mind that you’re seated for the majority of the day and that most road trip meals aren’t rich in fiber or whatever it is that makes digestion optimal. If you’re not an avid reader or backseat nap master, you might resort to compulsive snacking. The result is rarely a food coma. It’s almost always constipation.
On her application form, our beloved German guest used the words “wenig Fleisch” (minimal meat) when outlining her dietary requirement. That’s a tall order in a household where game steaks make the weeknight menu, but we catered for her vegetarian preferences nonetheless and assumed that on our road trip we’d have no competition on the dried and cured meat front.
We were wrong.
It comes as no surprise that - even for someone claiming to eat “wenig Fleisch” - the savoury snap of Namibian droëwors is irresistible. And overindulgence is inevitable. You may get mild heartburn and a coriander seed stuck in your saliva gland, but the risks are almost always worth the reward.
Halfway through Etosha, and only a day into our long road trip, my sister’s exchange student discovered our droëwors stash and made her way through almost half a kilogram of it. She’s not a big reader and stayed awake for what I believe was the beautiful scenery, or perhaps just the droëwors.
Bless her wenig-Fleisch-eating intestines. The overindulgence got the better of her, and us, and the aroma in the car as our dear German broke wind wilder than the spray of the Vic Falls. I commend her subtlety, or perhaps her nose was stuffy as she didn’t seem at all phased by our terrified glances as the air in my dad’s bakkie became saturated with what can only be described as the scent of death. Being in the middle of a national park we couldn’t stop and escape the smell that was getting progressively stale and seeping into the seat covers. So we cracked the windows, sacrificed the air conditioning for some good old Etosha dust, confiscated the dried, cured sausage, and never complained about meatballs and boiled eggs again.
Do you have any funny travel stories to share? Send them to fly@venture.com.na
Charene Labuschagne
