Escaping to Portugal, chewing khat in Kenya

This week on R&K we sample Porto's superlative sandwich, go "guerilla" foraging in California, and chew on some mild stimulants with Kenyan designer and food sage Joshua Obaga. View this email in your browser Abalone, foraged on the Mendocino County coast. Photo by: Rian Dundon Friends— We hope you've been enjoying the last days of summer/cowering in bed, in this week of Too Much News. Here's ours. Earlier this month, team R&K spent some time in Portugal—in Matoshinos, a port town north of Porto—for the Festival de Cinema de Aventura, where R&K co-founder Nathan Thornburgh held a travel journalism class and a Q&A with photojournalist Eduardo Leal, who started his career (this makes us feel old) with a Roads & Kingdoms assignment from Venezuela. Eduardo is a Porto native, an old friend, and one of our OG photographers. For R&K, he has done pieces on bull-wrestlers in Portugal, die-hard Chavistas in Venezuela, and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and has gone on to cover Latin America, Southeast Asia, and more recently, the Hong Kong protests, for publications such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME. Apart from keeping us supplied with beer and vinho verde, Eduardo made sure we sampled multiple versions of the formidable Porto delicacy, the francesinha, a brick-like frankenstein "sandwich" (Eduardo swears it's not a sandwich) featuring several layers of bread and three kinds of meat (that can include roast beef, smoked-pork sausage, pork loin, or ham), blanketed with cheese and finished off with a special sauce based on beer or even whisky and meat-broth. It comes with fries. There is nothing delicate about it. Check out the Festival's Instagram account to get a look at perhaps the best cinema space we've ever seen: The Matosinhos municipal market—chickens and rabbits and fish and all—transformed into a movie theater.    Man vs Franceshina. Photo by: Matt Goulding On R&K, we ran a special dispatch in collaboration with the excellent High Country News, a non-profit media organization based in Colorado that covers the American West and environmental and tribal issues. For "California's Forage Wars," Debra Utacia Krol went foraging for food in Mendocino County with members of the Indigenous Pomo tribe, a group of self-described "guerilla gatherers" who risk huge fines and jail time for doing what they've always done in their ancestral lands—collect traditional foods such as abalone and mollusk that are central to their lifestyle and diet. Only now, they duck around fences and No Trespassing signs in defiance of laws put in place partly to curb the commercial poachers who take far more, and care far less about the land. It's an insight into how state laws obstruct Indigenous culture, how little recourse they have—and California's often abysmal history of upholding Indigenous rights. Over on The Trip podcast, we're deep in Nairobi, Kenya. We chat with filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, whose film "Rafiki" was the first Kenyan film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival but was banned by in Kenya for depicting a love story between two young women that had "too hopeful" an ending. We drink Johnny Walker Black with Shravan Vidyarthi, whose grandfather founded the first anti-British newspaper in Kenya and who has compiled a long-anticipated visual biography of his uncle, Priya Ramakha, the legendary Indo-Kenyan photojournalist who was fatally shot covering the Nigerian civil war. (Read Paul Theroux's tribute to Priya in the New Yorker, excerpted from the book.) This week, we're chewing khat—the leafy stimulant that provides a steady buzz to aficionados throughout Arabia and East Africa—with designer and food obsessive Joshua Obaga, who has done some very intriguing things to Scotch bonnet peppers and watermelons.  We have more exciting trips coming up, so help us do what we do by subscribing to The Trip at Luminary Media. You'll get a one-month free trial and you'll be able to listen to all our drinking adventures around the world with exceptional people, plus get access to other excellent podcasts in Luminary's roster, including ones from Trevor Noah, Roxane Gay, and Hannibal Buress. —Alexa Copyright © 2019 Roads & Kingdoms, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 68 Jay St. #422 Brooklyn, NY 10013 Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.