There are certain foods that just taste better after dark. Not because they’re particularly sophisticated. Usually the opposite. I’m talking about the food eaten standing under fluorescent lights at one in the morning. Food handed through windows by men whose names you never learn. Food eaten drunk, exhausted, lost, sunburnt, heartbroken or some combination of the above. I’ve eaten in good restaurants while travelling. I’ve deliberately sought out famous dishes and places peo

“Something spicy.” I was still fairly early into my trip, in Ubud on one of those tourist day tours, when I realised Indonesia hadn't really delivered on one of my expectations. I'd come expecting chilli. Proper chilli. Yet somehow, despite being in Indonesia, I hadn't eaten anything particularly spicy. So when the guy asked what I wanted, I told him exactly that. Something spicy. He gave me tangkleng kambing. It was a rocket. My lips were burning, sweat was pouring off me an

“Dude, we gotta go. It’s not safe here.” A guide had come back to find me in a bar underneath a coach station in Bratislava. I’d started the evening on a Halloween pub crawl, but somewhere along the way I’d stopped doing the crawl part and stayed behind drinking shots of something vaguely like gin with a group of Slovak men. They spoke no English, I spoke no Slovak, and neither side seemed particularly bothered by this arrangement. I was enjoying myself enough that I hadn't e