Today's road trip was south along the east coast, destination São João dos Angolares. Roça de São João has an 11-course tasting menu that gets great reviews. I had made a reservation on Facebook yesterday. We had read up on other spots to stop at long the way there, but nothing really piqued our interest. Plus it was raining.
Google maps took us through the heart of São Tomé to get to the road south. Just through the centro, someone knocked on Heather's window and pointed to the passenger side rear tire. It was mostly flat. It was the same tire that the rental people had tested when handing over the keys so I'm suspecting it had a slow leak. Anyways we pulled over and before we could open up the back to get at our tools, some helpful locals stopped and offered to change it for us (a tip would be expected). It saved us the trouble of getting clean, plus I'm sure if we continued to try to change it on our own we would be asked every two seconds by someone else if we needed help.
The car rental guys had showed me where all the tools were to change the tire (which makes it more likely it had a slow leak), including the little safety triangle. I set that up so I felt like I was contributing to the tire change. About 15 minutes later the spare was on, the flat tire secured on the back and the tools put away. The tire changing guys suggested that we shouldn't drive too far as they didn't trust the spare, but based on the condition of the car I figured the spare was not the weakest link so we continued on our way to lunch, checking every few minutes on the condition of the spare tire which held up great.
We stopped in at a gas station to add air to the old tire (so that we'd have a functioning spare if another tire went flat) but their air machine wasn't working. Oh well. We were only driving an hour out of town, and had the phone number of the car rental, so if things went really bad we could just have someone make a call for us.
The road south was in great condition, it must have been repaved in the last month or so. The terrain was more hilly so our overall speed was slower than yesterday as we geared up and down inclines. Our little Jimny does off-roading really well, but doesn't have a whole lot of oomph. Yesterday I think I reached a top speed of 50km/h due to the potholes. On the way south today I topped out at 40km, mostly in 2nd or 3rd gear. (On the way back it had stopped raining so on a couple flat stretches I got all the way up to 60km/h and got to shift into 4th!)
Anyways we reached Roça de São João after about 90 minutes, including the tire change (about 40km from São Tomé).
The Roça is beautiful, with local art on display. The owner's son walked us around, said that their place was sometimes called the Tate of São Tomé. It certainly seemed like it.
We had an hour to wait (lunch started at 1pm) so checked out the art, took pics of the kitchen prepping, and looked around the little shop. Unfortunately the art for sale was not the same level as the art on display :(
More people arrived, some with guides and some on their own, just like yesterday. Once again we recognized a good number of them. At 1pm we were all invited to take our seats, and the degustation menu began!
There were more than 11 courses. They called some of them palette cleansers but could have easily been called courses. Each was carefully plated with fresh ingredients in interesting combinations. The owner / chef came by our table and described his creations as food art, from the heart. So we were getting just about full, when we were served a main (!) course of traditional fish stew, rice, bananas and vegetables. This course on its own would have been sufficient for lunch, never mind the ten that preceded it. This was followed by a couple dessert courses, and a coffee. It was all amazing, for a grand total of 25 EUR each. The entire meal took over two hours.
We drove back to town, way too full. We reached São Tomé around rush hour (let's just call it 'busy hour'), so had an interesting drive for the last few minutes through heavy pedestrians / motorcyclists / traffic.
There was no way we could eat dinner tonight, so went down to a café near the guesthouse. We had passed by it a few times and it looked interesting. It was also the café that was mentioned in the poster for the art exhibition. Sure enough, there were paintings by one artist on the walls and wooden sculptures by another on display. Unfortunately the style wasn't to our liking. Had a couple drinks (Heather tried a cocktail again, but they've all been disappointing so far on this trip, unlike the great cocktails last trip), and some small bites - ceviched octopus and clams - which were excellent and hit the spot.
No comments:
Post a Comment