“You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.”

Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

At the end of our Gastronomy program, a few of us participated in an interdisciplinary course with the School of Hospitality that took us to Tanzania to study gastrotourism. Most of the tourists in Tanzania are there for safari, which is certainly an extraordinary experience: animals you had only seen in books and movies are suddenly everywhere, including zebras, giraffes, elephants, lions, monkeys, the list goes on. In fact, the animals are so plentiful, particularly during the Great Migration, that after a few days you think, “OK, I can’t see another zebra.” It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. But Tanzania has an incredible food culture, too: you can visit coffee farms, eat 80 different banana varieties, munch on fried lakefish from street vendors, suck on sour baobab at the markets, eat the best Indian food of your life on the roof of a hotel, enjoy fresh fruit steps from your tent in the chilly early hours of the morning and drink refreshing lagers around the fire under a sky with so many stars that it looks fake when it cools again at night.