My second night in a valley town, I sat on the edge of a bed eating dry crackers out of the packet and feeling ridiculous. I had walked the length of the settlement twice, once at six and once at half past seven, looking for something with a door, a sign, and people eating inside it. There was no such building. There had been no such building the night before either, which is why I had crackers in my bag in the first place. It took me until the following morning to work out that I had walked past dinner about four times without recognising it.
No restaurants is not the same as no food
I had been looking for a category that did not exist there. In a lot of places I have been since, prepared food gets sold, but not out of anything I would have called a restaurant. It comes from a hatch in the front of a house. From a stall that is set up for two hours and then dismantled. From a shop that mostly sells detergent and phone credit but has a pot going at the back for whoever turns up.
The giveaway is never a sign. It is people. A cluster of three or four adults standing rather than sitting, holding something, near a doorway that is otherwise unremarkable. That is the thing I was walking past. I was scanning at eye level for lettering and the information was at the level of what people were doing with their hands.
Once I started reading the street that way, the food problem mostly dissolved. Not entirely, and not on a schedule I controlled, which is the next part.
You eat when the place eats
The hardest adjustment for me was not the food itself, it was the hours. I had a body clock set by a life in which food is continuously available and I decide when I want it. In a small place, cooking happens once or twice, at the times that suit the household or the work day, and if you turn up after that, you have missed it. Nobody is going to fire up a stove for one traveller at nine in the evening, and it would be a strange thing to ask.
What this meant concretely: I ate my main meal much earlier than I would at home, often at a time I would have called mid-afternoon. If I had walked all day and rolled in at dusk, I was frequently too late, no matter how hungry I was. That is the mechanism behind both of my cracker nights, and once I understood it I stopped treating it as bad luck.
My fix was boring. I now ask about food in the morning, not in the evening. On arrival I try to establish, with gestures if needed, when things happen. Even a rough answer, held up on fingers, changes the whole day.
Not knowing what it is
You will regularly be handed something you cannot identify and cannot ask about. I want to be plain that I do not have a clever system for this. I look at it, I eat it, and most of the time it is good and I never find out what it was.
What I do have is a personal line, and I think everyone has to draw their own rather than take mine. Mine is heat and turnover. I lean toward things that come out of a pot that is actively going, in a spot where other people are eating the same thing, rather than something that has been sitting out since morning waiting for a customer. That is not a rule about any particular place, it is just how I decide, and it is the same instinct I would use at a stall in my own city.
On water I am boring and consistent. I treat or boil it, everywhere, including places where it is probably fine, because deciding case by case is exactly the kind of judgement call I make badly when I am tired. Carrying the means to do that is a small weight and it removes a recurring decision.
Refusing is harder than eating
The situation I was least prepared for was being fed by a household. Not sold food, fed. Somebody notices you have nowhere to eat and a plate appears, and it is often more food than the people giving it eat themselves.
This is where I have made my genuine mistakes. Early on I tried to refuse, out of what I thought was politeness about their resources, and I could see it land badly. I have since decided that accepting well is the better move: eat it, eat visibly enough that it is clear you mean it, and find a way to return something that is not cash handed over like a bill. I buy things from the household’s shop if there is one. I hand over a share of what I am carrying. I have paid for a round of tea for everyone present, which seems to translate almost anywhere.
What I no longer do is turn the whole thing into a negotiation. The instinct to insist on paying is mine, not theirs, and pushing it hard can be its own kind of rudeness.
What is actually in my bag now
I carry two days of food I can eat without cooking. Not emergency rations, actual food I like, because the point is to be able to say no to a bad option rather than to survive a siege. Nuts, dry fruit, hard biscuits, a little salt.
I carry a spoon and a small cloth. The cloth turns any surface into a plate and gets used constantly for other things. I carry a wide mouthed bottle, since a narrow one is useless when the water source is a tap at ankle height or a bucket.
What I stopped carrying is anything that requires me to cook. I brought a small stove on two trips and used it once, resentfully, in the rain. In a place where somebody is already cooking, cooking for myself is antisocial and slower.
The part I got wrong for longest
For about a year I treated eating as a logistics problem to be solved with preparation. Carry enough, plan ahead, do not be dependent on anyone. It made me self sufficient and it made me invisible.
The trips where I have actually understood something about a place have almost all involved eating badly organised meals with people I could barely talk to. Standing at a hatch, being handed a thing, eating it next to somebody who is also eating it, is about as much contact as I am going to get in a place where I do not have the language. Skipping that in favour of crackers on a bed, which is what I did for two nights, is not roughing it. It is just staying out of the way.