YAKITTY YAK YAK YAK (Zhong Dian)

SITTING IN the Tibet Cafe (www.tibetcafeinn.com) I was still feeling culturally adventurous. I ordered gelatinous pancakes, yak milk cheese and sweet yak milk butter tea. Kathryn has a much longer period over which to stretch her culture endurance and wisely ordered American pancakes with icecream and coffee.

The tea was a shock to the system and so I left it till last. Gelatinous pancakes? More like battered, deep-fried pieces of goo. The cheese was sour - not the raw taste you get with fetta, but genuinely bitter. I was initially ravenous and so the food went down quite easily, but as I filled up - I realised the food tasted awful. (And I'll eat anything). Jo left her plate of honey-covered yak-cheese nodules almost untouched.

(It is rumoured that the benefit of yak-milk is that it tastes the same fresh or gone off.)