Despite the fact that I could have been hung out to dry by the smallest of these guys, the camaraderie of it all was very familiar. I’ve spent a lot of time with friends and family duck hunting in New York and Minnesota, and the easygoing vibe of sitting quietly with the people you love in the great outdoors, with a gun on your shoulder or just a camera, is a contentment-inducing experience in the extreme.
The puddle jumper we’d chartered was leaving the airport in a few hours, and we knew that if we didn’t get off the island fast, we’d miss the flight. We said our good-byes, scampered down the path we’d arrived on, climbed down the ropes, and dropped ourselves into the Zodiac, falling into the wet bottom of the dinghy. We ferried the crew out to the big boat and took our equipment off the zip line as Pall’s brother and his kids sent it hurtling down from the house platform. Before heading back to the cruiser to drop me off, Pall took the Zodiac around to some of the caves where we had spotted some seals. He held the boat steady while huge waves broke on the rocks just in front of us, and I got a chance to stand a foot or so away from the wild seals before he took me back to the crew on the cabin cruiser, where we continued back to the main island.
Pall orchestrated a nice send-off for us, popping wheelies with his Zodiac against these giant rolling waves as his whole family gave us the Alsey cheer from the deck. They shouted, “Alsey, Alsey, Ah-Ah-Ah!” as we puttered off into the sunset, killer whales trailing us, cresting the surface of the water around our boat. It was probably the most exhilarating day of travel that I’d ever had in my life up to that point, the charm of the simplicity of another way of life quickly squashed by the immediacy of the modern-day fact that we had to race to catch a plane. We arrived at the harbor in the darkness and had to hijack several locals, begging them for a lift to the airstrip to catch our plane, almost leaving our guide, Svein, behind in the chaos.
The sense of accomplishment I felt after that day was incredible. The food was singularly fantastic; I have never had any eating experience like that. It’s the type of eating that, as a collector of these moments in life, I find so unique, it’s hard to measure it against anything else. I have yet to bump into any other group of people in my world that have hunted wild puffins and eaten them. I know there are some out there, non-Icelanders, but we are a rather small bunch.
There is a postscript to all this. The little boat that took us home, the cabin cruiser—well, the morning after he drove us home, it hit a rock and sank. Because of all the volcanic activity in the area, and the shaley nature of the rock in that part of Iceland, the rocky bottom of the ocean is always in flux. Say you are 100 yards offshore—you could be in 100 feet of water one day and in five feet of water the next. A rock can come up from the bottom of the sea or rocks can fall off the sides of the mountains into the water, which makes depth charts in that part of the world about as useless as the Random House Dictionary is at Harpo Marx’s house. We were very upset the next day to find out that the boat sank, but looking back, I realized that at the point and time that I felt the most safe and secure was, ironically, the time that we were actually the least. Funny world.
The Most Dangerous Game
How I Almost Lost My Life Tracking
Down Samoa’s Elusive Giant Fruit Bat
raveling from American Samoa to Samoa is a shot in the arm. It’s like driving from Newark, New Jersey, to East Hampton, Long Island. Yes, it’s the same part of the world, and to many observers there may not seem to be any difference between the two, but nothing could be further from the case. American Samoa is an overgrown military installation of an island with a modicum of beach tourism: a gorgeous island once, now wiped clean and free of accessible native culture. Land in American Samoa and you come face-to-face with the least appealing aspects of America’s greatest contribution to world culture, the miles-long strip of Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, McDonald’s, and Hampton Inns. The local culture has been bulldozed underneath the tidal wave of mud that the modern-day developing world has sent their way.
Just a white-knuckled puddle jump away lies the stunningly beautiful, relatively unvisited islands of Samoa. A multi-island chain of inhabited and empty atolls of unmatched beauty, this just might be the last great unspoiled deep-Pacific country in which to find your own Robinson Crusoe experience. Just keep your hat low and your expectations lower, since you’ll probably be spending one night in American Samoa anyway. After shooting for a week in Hawaii, I flew to American Samoa, landed, and spent the night in the glorious Quality Inn: Two hundred rooms of unmatched luxury, with a twelve-inch television chain bolted to the ceiling. Mold and mildew spewing from the ancient wobbly and rattling window air-conditioning unit. Bedding stained from the endless procession of local call girls, short-haul truckers, military contractors, and traveling salesmen who call these types of hotels home away from home. I couldn’t sleep. Food, save the five-dollar minibar offering of Pringles, was nonexistent, so the crew and I headed out into the night in search of dinner. We commandeered a local cab and interrogated the driver mercilessly as to where to find the best eats in town. Cabdriver interrogation (sans waterboarding!) is an advanced research technique that field operatives like myself have long since mastered. Growing up in New York City helped put me at ease while sitting in the back of a beaten-down old Chrysler with a shameless grafter slouched behind the wheel. A lifetime of getting lost in cities all around the world has made me an expert at extracting information from willing and less-than-willing locals, and cabbies are a great resource for food tips. The driver in the pimped-out 1987 Pontiac Coupe de Ville who shuttled us from the airport to our hotel seemed like an okay sort of chap, so I gave him ten bucks to park outside and wait for me in case I needed to pull the plug on the hellhole we had been scheduled to sleep in that night. I grabbed the team and off we went, piling in with Farid, ducking the fourteen air fresheners he had dangling all over the interior of his jalopy. A short while later, we emerged from the cramped confines of his velour-encrusted love-mobile into the parking lot of some dive serving some of the worst Chinese food I have ever eaten. If Howard Johnson decided to make chicken chow mein, it would taste better than the swill that passed for food at the Quality Inn.
I was crushed, and on several levels. I hate wasting a meal, but frankly it filled me with a dread that I fear more than any other. Could the misery of AmSam be an accurate predictor of what the next week’s shoot would look like? I dread the Lost Week. That’s when you have your expectations for excellence dashed by a sixth-sense premonition that the country you’re about to step into simply won’t measure up. Don’t give in! Negative future fantasizing is a game I play all too regularly, but ignore everything you see in American Samoa and remember, as little Orphan Annie says, tomorrow is only a day away. So I headed back to the hotel, crawled inside my silk sleep sack to avoid the humiliation and degradation of the not-so-Quality Inn, and set the alarm for 5 A.M.
Six of us were on the twin-prop heading into Samoa that next morning, and the plane was full. It takes only a half hour or so to head into Upolu, the most populated of the Samoan Island chain. We hopped into our van after a gentle landing and headed to the Aggie Grey’s Hotel in the heart of Appia, the capital city of Samoa. You’ve probably seen this Samoa in your dreams: quaint city streets speckled with old colonial-style bungalows surrounded by brilliant tropical gardens, interspersed with marine shops and small local banks. Welcome to Samoa. We rounded the main harbor, snug with luxury sailcraft, industrial rust buckets, and professionally outfitted fishing boats with loud Charter Me! signs all bobbing in the early-morning sun. We pulled into the turnaround of Aggie’s and fled the van for the friendly confines of the elegant lobby replete with a cozy coffee and tea lounge, a kitschy, open-air dining room with a few ukulele players, a guitarist and piano player pounding out Polynesian-style music at all three meal periods for the guests willing to endure the agony. Aggie Grey’s is the Samoa of Somerset Maugham and Robert Louis Stevenson, an ancient hotel with luxurious gardens and a p
edigree that most hotels would kill for. Ignore the fact that most services (like Internet or phones) are offered but don’t function, and focus on the fact that hotels like Aggie Grey’s simply don’t exist anymore, holdovers from an era when traveling to Samoa meant staying for several months until the next tramp steamer left the harbor. Of course, traveling is different now, so Hotel Management has undertaken the massive (and, for the most part, completely unnecessary) task of creating a hotel that they believe appeals to international travelers.
Rather than cooking local fish (with an occasional grilled pork shoulder thrown into the mix), Aggie Grey’s feels it necessary to do a themed dinner seven days a week, 365 days a year. When we arrived, the billboard in the lobby proudly hailed Chef Jaime’s bold proclamations that tonight was “Mexican Night!” O-fucking-le. If you think the worst Mexican food in the world is served exclusively on domestic airline flights, you’re wrong. Try going halfway around the world to the South Pacific to find a Samoan chef who thinks throwing salsa and a pinch of cumin into a dish equals Mexican food. Steamer trays filled with gallons of ground taco meat, piles of overly ripe avocados, platters of sickingly overcooked adobo chicken … my God, it was horrible. And in an effort to fill out the buffet we were subjected to the same sort of island-style poke salad (basically, a raw tuna salad with coconut milk and lime juice that was superb in its basic form), gussied up with whatever single ingredient they felt was most emblematic of the culture they were mimicking. Just horrendous.
We unpacked and headed out to shoot the little village of Tafagamanu, where the local government, in partnership with several nature conservancies, had established an underwater protection site for the study and propagation of the giant Pacific clam, a behemoth of a mollusk that can grow to the size of a Volkwagen Beetle if it has the time. Before we crept into the water to shoot our story, we met with the local villagers and their mattai, or chieftain. He greeted us at the large open fale that the tribe gathers in for important meetings and served us some homemade cocoa, and we made small talk for a few hours, much to the upset of my field producer, who was anxious to start shooting. In Samoa, every shoot each day begins with a business deal. Every story is shot in a different location, and each location is controlled in every sense of the word by the local tribes who received the islands back from the New Zealand government several decades ago. The Kiwis know how to leave a country, and after their colonial experiment tanked they ceded the country back to the tribes themselves, hundreds of them, so while there is a government in Samoa, the tribes and extended families own the land and the waterfront, another reason why there is so little development here. But to shoot each day means sitting and getting the blessing of the local people who control your every move. Want to shoot a sunset shot from the beach? Ask the tribe. Want to tape a stand-up walking down the road next to a banana farm? Ask the tribe. And they better like you, so sucking up and kissing ass is important. That being said, bringing each mattai a five-pound can of Hormel corned beef hash is de rigueur and goes a long way toward getting permission to shoot anything. The Samoans are addicted to the cheapest processed meats in the world. Canned hash, canned Dinty Moore stew, SPAM, they can’t get enough of it, so doing business in Samoa required a constant shuttle back and forth to the local supermarket with Fitu, our fixer, piling can after can of the vile stuff into the back of the minivan. Irony of ironies—as we perambulated around the island, dosing out canned meat products with all the insouciance of a riverboat gambler, we ate very well. Oranges, grapefruits, dozens of banana varietals, and every other tropical fruit you can imagine grows extremely well here and can be had for pennies. Tuna is sold on the side of the roads for about a dollar a kilo, and that’s the rip-off tourist rate. Every day, hundreds of local fishermen head out into the surf in teeny little canoes fitted with an outrigger to pull in the local yellowfin and blackfin tuna on hand lines. You heard me right. Sometimes as small as a few kilos, oftentimes as big as a man, the local tuna is traded around the island like a commodity, and with it you can pay bills, sell it from the side of the road, deliver it to the back door of a restaurant kitchen by foot, or bring it to the local market. It’s a tuna economy here unlike anything I have ever seen before or since.
So we ate and drank with the mattai, shot our giant clam piece, and headed back to Aggie’s for Mexican Night, swearing to never eat there again, and with justifiable cause. We awoke the next day and headed out to sea, traveling four hours into the South Pacific Ocean, where the big tuna run fast and thick. Deep-sea fishing is a passion of mine, and buckled into the fighting chair with several monsters hooked on the multiple lines we were running was thrilling in the extreme. Reeling a huge tuna into the boat is a challenge, but the motivation provided by the groan of the outriggers and the movement of the crew, sweeping fish out of the water with their gaffs, lashing the outrigger lines to my rod, and starting the whole process over and over until the coolers were full and we headed back to shore made for an easy day of work. Of course, eating the catch is what it’s all about, and while clichéd in the extreme, slicing and scarfing huge chunks of fresh tuna, raw, in the high hot Pacific sun is about as good a food day as one can have. The captain came down from the uppermost deck to show me the joys of true poke, mixing tuna with lime and coconut, cracking open the eyes of the fish and filling them with lime and soy sauce, and arguing over who would eat the still-beating hearts of the fish. Truly wonderful. We even got to try palolo, a rarity even in this part of the world, where these teeny tiny little coral worms are eaten, seasonally, when they swim out of the coral to propagate twice a year. Sautéed in butter, they look like blue cream cheese and taste like rotten eggs mixed with anchovies, but spread on toast they are an addictive snack.
We skipped Italian night in the dining room that evening, headed out to the Appia Yacht Club, a generous description for a small Quonset hut on the beach with a postage stamp of a bar and restaurant with six tables on a twenty-square-foot deck built on the beach about five miles out of town. Drunken expats who long ago chucked in their cards in England, heading south with romantic notions of remaking their lives, these are the characters we found at the yacht club. Rumpled cashmere sweaters tossed around their shoulders, pathetically in their cups, arguing about the weekend’s sailboat races and drinking cheap beer and rum, burning through the stipend provided by grandpa’s trust, the people-watching was almost as superb as the food. Simply turned on a wood grill, the platters of true raw-fish salads and slabs of perfectly grilled local fin fish made the AYC our regular dinner stop every night for the rest of our trip. And as the Southern Cross revealed itself in the night sky turning from blue to black, I thought to myself, Well, tomorrow should be another easy day in Paradise. How tough could a bat hunt really be?
We woke at dawn and traveled to the Southeastern Coast, to the little town of Aleipat. Off in the distance on the horizon, as gazed at from the town’s public dock, lies a small cluster of uninhabited volcanic islands, the largest one being Nu’utele, which is known for its pristine flora and fauna and is home to a rare and delicious breed of giant fruit bats. Ten-pound giant fruit bats, often referred to as flying foxes. Furry, large brown and black bats. Yumm-o!
It was on the beaches of Aleipat that I met the man who would eventually save my life. Afele Faiilagi, an environmental scientist with the Samoan Forestry Department, is inarguably the closest thing I have ever met to Lenny Kravits’s doppelgänger, sans jewelry and a guitar. Buff in the extreme, he has a huge toothy infectious smile and sports baggy basketball shorts, a tank top, and flip-flops. He is that good-looking islander who is schtupping every hot South African and Swedish botanist coming through town doing research for their PhD. I was buoyed by his confident swagger and the easy way he carried himself. He was nervous about the TV part of the equation, but this guy spends his life prowling the jungles of Nu’utele and I wanted what he had, so off we went.
Afele commissioned a boat to take us out to Nu’utele. I use the term “boat” loosely; it
was more like a tiny tin can, an ancient pontoon boat with an ailing 1960s Evinrude outboard on the back end, strapped to the transom with picture-hanging wire. We piled on the crew, our guests, and 500 pounds of gear, and pulled off from the dock in a warm and light morning rain. As soon as our voyage was under way, I got the feeling that the humble amount of money we had offered up for our five-mile voyage was probably more money than our anxious captain and mate had seen in months. It occurred to me that they probably said yes to the job not thinking of whether or not they could get us there safely with all our gear, or whether their boat was up to the task based on the day’s weather forecast, but instead had seen the visions of sugarplums that our currency represented. Oftentimes on the road, the small sum of money we see only as a token payment is in reality a gargantuan sum to the person staring down at the stipend—so they take risks, stupid unfathomable risks.
The Bizarre Truth Page 3