This is a story about falafel but not just about falafel but might turn out to be about falafel.
“Err, falafel, please“, I answered before walking into the back of the white van.
“Falafel?” Fafa questioned me the second I plopped on the seat beside him. “Yeah, seems like a safer choice“, I told him. He nodded, now understanding why I chose falafel when the tour guide quizzed us with “chicken, fish, burger or falafel” for lunch when we entered the tour van.
We just got picked up from our hotel in Cairns for a day excursion to Daintree, the oldest rainforest in the world.
The thing is, If you know me IRL, or if you have read some of my posts here, you would know that I despised guided-tour food almost as much as I hate theme park food.
Only a couple of days earlier, we had buffet-style guided food. The spread included Indian-styled tofu kurma, slabs of watery meat and mushy rice. I ate it aided by ten packets of pepper and five packets of salt to add some taste to my plate while kicking myself for forgetting to bring my chilli sauce (the number 1 rule of travelling while Indonesian).
That experience cemented my belief that non-Asian tour providers work hard to remove the joy from the eating food part of the guided tours.
So yes, when the friendly tour guide greeted us and asked us to choose a set meal when we boarded, my brain did a quick calculation and decided falafel seemed like the lesser of two evils.
My thought process was: fried balls couldn’t be screwed up so much. Even tasteless, I could easily dump salt and pepper on it. Also, worse come to worst, if I didn’t finish it during lunch, I could keep it in my backpack, and it wouldn’t stink up. Lastly, I learned that tours only give plastic utensils these days, post-Covid; after failing to cut unsurprisingly chewy meat the other day, I preferred popping falafel balls directly into my mouth.
I don’t want to claim my brain thought these reasonings and come up with “falafel” within seconds of being asked by the guide, so let’s call it gut feeling. I did, however, question my gut feeling when more and more people who entered the van chose either burger, fish or chicken. Finally, it was only me and the Swedish mother-daughter combo who chose falafel.
“Do I even like falafel?” I started to ponder. “What is even falafel??“.
Falafel is a fried fritter made of chickpeas or beans, well-loved street food of the Middle East.
Did I want falafel? Should I ask him to change my order?
All my life, I thought, I had only eaten it twice. But then, I had it for the first time accompanying Fafa breaking his Ramadan fast in Haji Lane, Arab Street in Singapore years ago. Then one more time with Jik, but that could be arancini balls.
The point is that I hadn’t ordered falafel for myself ever before.
I then decided to stick with it. He didn’t mention anything hot when he gave us the food choice. But, coming in the box, there was a chance the food would be cold, and I preferred to eat cold-hard falafel over any meat.
The lunch was served somewhere in the middle of Daintree. In Turtle Rock Cafe, some of the staff were the hippies living in the abandoned mansion nearby.
Right before he stopped, the tour guide said, “If you think you will be eating the typical tour food, you are in for a treat“, or something along that line. But I didn’t think much about how my heavily spiced tastebud would clash with the quintessential Australian’s.
We sat at a long table in the cafe and talked with an aged African couple who shared stories about their latest trip to India. Eventually, our food came, served in a cardboard bowl, accompanied by wooden cutleries.
I took a deep breath and peeked inside. There were six brown balls placed on a bed of salad. They looked okay, so I took a pic to send to Jik, my slowly-turning-into-a-vegetarian BFF, who was concurrently eating falafel in Israel.
Then I took the first bite ━ JHC! It was so delicious. Warm and crunchy on the outside and bursting with flavour from the inside. When I ate together with the cold, well-seasoned salad, it created harmony in my tastebuds and filled my soul. They were a perfect meal on that rainy afternoon. So good that I still regret sharing half falafel ball with Fafa until now.
After lunch, I raved about it to everyone ━ Fafa, the couple who sat beside us, the Swedes (who agreed with me), the staff and everyone else who listened. Finally, I thanked the tour guide, swallowing my unsaid, judgy words about guided-tour food.
But, let me be clear this is not a story about me changing my perspective of bad guided-tour or, God forbid, hatred towards theme park food. Instead, this is a story about me unable to stop thinking about those perfect falafel balls I had in the middle of Daintree.
Ever since, I have been torn between opening doors to falafel into my life ━ , discovering a new love for a type of food that had never intrigued me before and still is not a necessary part of my life or keeping the door shut and preserving the memory of the mystical hippie falafel I had in the middle of the oldest rainforest in the world.
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