Vegetarian gold

For those who love adventures, the Kigoma market is a necessary destination. It is designed something like a pyramid inside, or perhaps as illogically nonlinear as a hieroglyphic: a network of tight, tortuous passageways flanked by stalls where people sell wares. They try to get your attention and you pause briefly to smile and make eye contact before returning to the task at hand: survival.

Wooden boards give way, roaches scurry and men dash toward you with weighty bags on their necks. Laundry dries over tomatoes, holes are notched into a pile of rice for a board game, and water drips from the edge of a tin roof which stops just over the walkway.

The placement of each foot requires the analysis of where a foot currently isn’t, the general direction you are trying to head and which dangers (nails, gaps in the platform, a stream of unidentifiable fluids) pose the highest threats.

Sometimes you choose wisely. And on other occasions, you hope for the best.

As with any labyrinth, each twist seems to take you further from your intended destination. But once you figure out the sequence of lefts and rights, you can find the heart of the market: replete with monstrous avocados, piles of passion fruits, pineapples dangling on strings and circular mounds of peas, which are sold by the handful, like abstract stipple art.

Sometimes, buried within this assortment a treasure can be found. The vegetarian’s equivalent of gold: massive carrots. Or rather, the assemblage of many carrots into one awe-inspiring mass.

24-karat gold? Try 24-carrot goldmine!

The transaction is quick. You slip the carrot into your bag and begin the odyssey out. Right then left then left then right… or was it right then left then right then right?

And what if a giant boulder seals-off the market’s exit before you escape? Of course that never happens, but it never seems totally out of the realm of possibilities, either - because in the Kigoma market, you are never quite sure what will happen next.

As for the other rule of adventure stories (falling in love with an eastern European or Soviet adversary), well, for now the carrots will do.