First pressed olive oil – Tuscany to Mozambique

Invited for a weekend in Italy olive picking – Chris sent an email which meandered towards me while in Moz.  (I only pick up email when back in Pemba and only then when the local network provider Mcel feels like it and the fishermen have not repurposed the fibre optics into fishing line.)

I read the email and my mind spun into a Tuscan valley bathed in gentle light and chequered with olives and vine yards, crested by Cyprus and turreted villages.  The kind of image where all the dots, dashes and shade create a picture to bathe the soul.  The stresses I experience in Moz are hard to explain and comprehend, even while experiencing them.  The air is full of challenge – mosquitoes with their drilling mouth parts, the Toyota with its now concrete suspension...and the bumps and the heat waiting to embrace you in a suffocating squeeze if you leave the shade.  All sorts of challenges – some obvious, some hidden but all quite different to Tuscany.  It does also affords moment of complete peace, they creep up on you... when you lie on the veranda safe in the knowledge that a sea of forest lies about you and the blue sky is vast above – or at night it hangs full of the brightest of stars.

Anyway I did it – went olive picking and I was right it was soul food, sandwiched with food food, the best ever provided by Chris’ mum Heidi.

The views were just as expected and shades of green, dark green to orange with flashes of red.  The house was a wonderful domestic scene with geese, ducks, chickens and kittens.  And as I arrived people popped out from under olive trees, a fantastic mix of Chris’s friends.  And to top it all we chatted and laughed lots against this Tuscan valley.  Then after we had filled crates full of olives we took them to the press.  Here we met Italian farmers with old tractors and sun-ripened faces all dressed in olive green colours with felt hats that made you look at their bright eyes.  Of course the press was set against another deep valley and next to a castellated large house.  I loved watching the many stages and compartments in the pressing processes - a conveyor belt, washing, de-leafing, pulverising, spinning, and some other hidden process in a large metal drum, then finally this bright almost florescent green oil appeared.  No doubt the preferred tipple of the gods.  Heidi gave us 3 whole litres each.

Then can you believe it, I packed one whole tin and have it here now in Mareja.  What a fantastic treat – the bread we buy that has to last for weeks is now dosed in fresh green oil straight from that valley, a wonder - a wonder of nature and air travel (and friendship)!