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I couldn’t be a vegetarian. I know this, because if Crawford Market on a Sunday afternoon (when the offal, carcasses, and assorted bones have just been swept up), great bowls of tripe in Meknes, and roast goat’s rectum (my first experience of Mali) don’t put you off meat, then nothing will. Not that I wouldn’t like to be a veggie: I can’t think of a decent argument to justify killing animals for food, except the lame assertion that they’re just not as important as humans. Besides the basic fact of being slaughtered for supper, animals in the countries we’ve visited so far have a pretty hard time of it; they’re toted around by their feet like plastic bags, herded among the remains of their recently butchered fellows, by great rows of hooks designed for their carcasses, stuck with the luggage on the roofs of buses (actually, that looks like fun, though a bit precarious). And that’s just the ones that get eaten; the working animals are often overloaded, and we frequently see them being severely beaten. One time, near Chinguetti, some kids were bashing a donkey up plainly for their own amusement, clubbing its neck with a big stick while playing ‘bucking bronco’. Little gits. I ran out of our tent—we were passing the heat of the day in an oasis—and stopped them, but I’m sure as soon as we left they probably clocked the poor thing again. If scientific research later demonstrates that animals have some of the same distinctive features that we think give humans moral importance—I don’t know, rationality, consciousness, a sense of one’s life as a complete whole that one wants to do something with—then god knows what our vegan grandchildren will think of us.

On the other hand, supposing animals aren’t as morally important as humans, and can be used for certain purposes, at least in the countries we’ve visited so far nothing gets wasted—and I don’t mean grinding up the offal to make animal feed and create crazy new diseases either. Everything gets eaten. Even the really, really, disgusting bits. Like rectum for instance. It’s not often that there’s something on my plate so gross that I don’t even want a picture of it.. Tripe was big in Morocco as well, not to mention all the organs, and of course the balls. Lu and I are a bit precious about our meat, as are most people we know I guess. I even turned down a taste of sheep’s head—which, to be fair, did smell delicious, though it looked pretty horrifying. But I suppose it’s a good thing that everything gets used—if you’re going to kill something to satisfy your self-interest, you should at least not let anything go to waste.

While I’m not too keen on eating tripe, heart, and hoof, I love taking pictures of butchers’ shops. Red meat especially is immediately inviting—for one thing, you don’t generally see a lot of red in the world, so it always stands out. Then there’s the texture of viscera—glossy and greasy organs, or weirdly shimmering stomach lining. I even like the geometry of a carcass, the parallel ribs, perpendicular to the chestbone (don’t expect Gray’s anatomy from me; despite my dad being a doctor, my anatomical knowledge doesn’t stretch much beyond Funnybones). And cut meat or organs in piles invariably forms attractive tessellations. Butchers also tend to be decent chaps (I’ve not met a female butcher yet, in all our travels—this might be to do with the rules governing Halal slaughtering of animals, but then in most cases, with red meat at least, the butchers don’t do the slaughtering, so that’s probably not it). Armed with their knives, they aren’t often intimidated by the camera, and will usually indulge a portrait or two. In Dakar, one even went so far as to leave his shop and more or less rescue us from a local thief who had designs on our wallets (shame the butcher, and his knives, weren’t around when we got pick-pocketed later that day).

Although there have been butchers’ shops in every town we’ve been through (in some towns, more butchers’ than anything else—Laayoune in Western Sahara, I remember, had one every three buildings), the meat market in Meknes is the standout venue so far. Every organ you can imagine, neatly cut and elegantly laid out, and as friendly folks as we’ve met on the trip. There’s quite a few pictures in this slideshow from Meknes; in most other cases the butchers’ I photograph are one-off shops, but you can see from the captions where each is.

Neither Lu nor I are big fish-eaters—though we make an exception for sushi, mmmm. In fact my biggest ever travel strop (unfortunately, there are a few competitors) came when a seafood (I use the word ‘food’ loosely) platter was placed in front of us in South Korea, and it smelt like… Oh I can’t explain what it smelt like. Toilets at the bottom of the ocean. Or maybe just like the sea—like going to Felixstowe, wandering out into the murky water, preferably right near the exhaust of an old outboard motor and grabbing a big oily handful of sand, seaweed and pebbles, and gobbling it down. And it looked revolting—deformed fists of meat, slimy gunk, my stomach turns just thinking of it. I’d probably rather have had the rectum.

So when it comes to eating fish, we tend to stick to cod, haddock, and their various cousins around the globe. The whiter the better. Barracuda’s quite nice, and I had a great fish called ‘Lotte’, in French, in Senegal. My little dictionary (which I’ve since chucked anyway) couldn’t translate it, but it was yummy. Anyway, with fish I’m definitely more interested in the visuals than the victuals, in particular with markets, and the return of the catch. Preparation is also awesome to watch—nothing will ever match Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, on this front, but there have been some lively alternatives on our way down the Atlantic coast of west Africa. We visited ports in Agadir (Mor), Nouadhibou (Mau), Nouakchott (Mau), Mbour (Sen), and Gunjur (Gam). Agadir was a modern industrial port, a slick operation where one warehouse (which we didn’t enter) saw the transfer from boat to lorry effected in the space of twenty or so metres. Some fish were sold on site, but not many. The boats were comparatively large and comparatively modern. They were mostly coloured blue, and seemed all to be in harbour when we visited (I think it was a Sunday, which might explain it—despite being almost wholly Islamic, each of the countries we’ve visited has radically slowed down on Sundays). This made for pleasing geometrical patterns.

Nouadhibou was also quite industrial—unsurprisingly, since (as Louie reports in her latest blog) this corner of Mauritania is renowned as one of the best fishing sites in the world, where sea-creatures from both north and west of Africa hang around in great shoals waiting to be hauled up by the numerous itinerant fishermen, who come to Nouadhibou from all around Africa (we met Malians, Gambians, Senegalese, and Nigerians in our two days there). Unfortunately, the local police are a little suspicious of photography, though they’re not entirely sure why—I fell foul of them when I started snapping, mistakenly thinking I’d left the port. As Lu reports I was marched into the chief’s office, where he explained to me that Mauritania didn’t want the secrets of their fishing industry being revealed to the world. I’m not sure what industrial secrets he thought might lay in pictures of men lugging squids around by their gills, or descaling fish, but anyway I deleted them in front of him, mentally thanking Sandisk for their excellent file recovery software. One of his arguments particularly struck a chord—he said, it’s the same in your country, yes? And I thought to myself: in a public place like a port, I bloody hope it isn’t. But it wasn’t the time to get into a discussion of the meaning of freedom, and I don’t have the French vocab for it anyway. The police, since Western Sahara, have all been utterly proper, many even kind and welcoming. But however good the individuals that make them up, for the most part the institutions they constitute really stink. It’s fine for me and Lu, of course—we’re just passing through—but the level of control that is exerted over ordinary citizens’ lives is distressing (in particular, the perpetual, inexplicable police checks outside towns and on highways, where passengers are asked for their ID, and often have their bags searched). And the countries we’ve visited are probably among Africa’s most liberal.

Anyway I keep straying off-topic. Nouakchott was an awesome fishing-beach, and set the mould for the two to come. Brightly-coloured pirogues are lined up on the beach—they’re long, thin, shallow boats, made from wood, with outboard motors. They tend to be patterned with stripes, often green red and blue, and have a name painted on their prow. Drogba and Adidas are my favourites so far. Sometimes there is a motif as well, like the lion on the side of one pirogue in Gunjur. The basic pattern of the day is that the pirogues leave in the early morning, and early evening, returning about 10 hours later to the beach. In Nouakchott, they beached the boats, then unloaded on shore; in Mbour and Gunjur, men and women strode out through the waves to bring the cargo to land. Some pretty serious waves, in Gunjur—though the boats in deeper water in Mbour. There’s a general excitement in the air, as a lot of waiting finally comes to fruition, and I guess there’s an air of the lottery about it too—you can’t know, I assume, how much your mate with the pirogue will have caught that day. In Nouakchott the boat was knee-deep in fish, which were shovelled out with a rigid net; the catch in Mbour was bigger, but less numerous. Gunjur was pretty small fry by comparison. In Nouakchott there was a market right by the beach, and most of the catch was clearly designated for specific vendors. There was some bargaining with ad hoc salespeople there in the surf, but it was all pretty organised. Gunjur was very smooth too, but not so high-octane. From what I could make out, it seems like the fish was basically being bought from the boat—both by consumers and by vendors. Mbour was a mix of the two—lots of impromptu fish-stalls on the sand, but a full-scale commercial operation in the warehouse above. In each case, people were mostly too focused on making the most of this brief, intense period of activity, to be bothered about a whitey with a camera, wandering around taking pictures. Since this hasn’t been the easiest trip for street- and market-photography, the fishing-beaches have provided welcome respite.