First find a local sugarcane juice stall, spend 10 minutes in obligatory banter with your sugarcane juice man, then ask for your juice of choice. A half pint glass usually does the job. Sugarcane juice comes straight from the cane. No preservatives. No additives. You ring it out like water from a wet towel.  It’s hard work squeezing juice from cane wood all day so your sugarcane juice man will first wipe the sweat from his brow onto the seat of his pants. This must be a regular action as the seat of his pants are a rich, thick oily black in comparison to the rest of his pants, which are just filthy rotten. Sugarcane man then picks up a cane of sugar, trims it with a rusty machete and pulls it through a couple of handmade rollers to squeeze out the juice into a plastic bucket. It’s astounding how much juice comes out of the thing. He repeats this a couple of times. Next, and this distinguishes a quality sugarcane juice man from your shoddy variety, usually found in the tourist areas, he takes a couple halves of lime and a few pieces of fresh ginger, blows them clean, shows you a nice toothy, spit flecked grin and then folds them into the sugarcane before putting it through the rollers again. The sugar cane is then discarded onto a black foaming pile of other sugarcane discards at the back of the hut (which on closer inspection is black and foaming thanks to the clouds of flies swarming and crawling all over it). Sugarcane man wipes his hand on his arse again and then selects a half pint glass. This he dips into a dirty bucket of water and then into a second less dirty bucket of water. He then takes a black oily rag and diligently smears the glass to what I assume counts as a state of gleaming cleanliness around here.

Sugarcane man then asks if you want cold or warm juice. Naturally, I want cold on a hot sticky day. So, Sugarcane man wipes both hands on his arse before carefully selecting and delicately picking out with dirt caked fingernails a few cubes of ice from another bucket of water filled with straw (to slow down the melting) and chucks them into the glasses before filling them with the juice he’s just squeezed.

If you hold a glass of the finest Zanzibar sugarcane juice up to sunlight it resembles an opaque light snot green with a thin, sickly head of light snot green foam and other slightly darker snot green things floating in it, which is why it took us three months to build up the courage to try the stuff. And tasting it . . .  is amazing. It’s honey sweet and has a fantastic spicy tanginess from the lime and ginger. However, it’s best drunk facing away from the sugarcane man’s hut to stop reminding you how it’s made.

Makes hair grow in places you don’t want hair to grow.