Day 26 cont: Amazing Mzoli's

For lunch, we're taken to an amazing 'butchery' in Gugulethu called Mzoli's. It's before midday and there's already a long queue, and I soon understand why. The system is you choose vast quantities of meat, and there is absolutley nothing else available. You then hand over the meat in a big steel bowl for your entire table, and they cook it over wood-fired barbeques where the smoke fumes are overwhelming, without an extractor fan in sight. It produces great flavour, but people would not be allowed to work in such conditions in Australia.

The meat for a table of eight is enough to feed a family of lions for a year. There's not a piece of broccoli or leaf of lettuce ever seen in the place, and we do the only thing possible: we eat until we are fit to burst, and it's tender and tasty. The lamb has been marinaded in something sweet and hot, and it goes all over fingers and hands. It almost feels barbaric consuming so much meat: it must be what the Roman Empire was like when they gorged to excess, until physically unable to eat more. Knowing I have assaulted my body, I eat a small pasta for dinner.

Our guide packs the left over meat into plastic bags, and on our way back to Cape Town, hands it out to poor kids by the side of the road.

But the loo is terrible, with a massive hole in the ground just near where you stand. It's filled with some fetid-looking dark liquid, and I come within a few inches of falling in before I see it. Heaven knows what disease a little white guy would come out with.