The Bizarre Truth

by Andrew Zimmern

  Anthropologists have documented that these ceremonies, and particularly this tribe, exhibit three levels of trance. Level one is achieved when the men reach a meditative state, where they access the spirit world and begin to experience visions.

  Once they hit level two, the shamans and healers have out-of-body experiences and astrally project themselves into other places. It’s been documented that when these men come out of the trances, they can describe things that have taken place many miles away, like a sick person in another camp or physical anomalies. Xao is one of the few men who anthropologists claim can actually achieve a level-three trance, whereby someone transforms him-or herself into an animal and experiences that life for a while.

  I sat near the fire, feeling the heartbeat of the desert. The men shuffled around me as the women continued to chant. Occasionally, a woman danced with the men to get them going a little more. As the men fell into trance they would get very hot. They’d scream and shout, experiencing real physical torture, with their muscles just about to burst from their chest. You could visibly watch their bodies tense up until they could no longer take it, throwing themselves into the sand to cool off. When they became too cold, they propelled themselves into the fire, often leaping over it. I witnessed Kao pick a golf-ball-size, white-hot coal out of the fire with his hand, roll it in his palms, and eat it to warm himself, with absolutely no ill effects once he came out of the trance the following day.

  I saw these men crying and screaming. I saw blood and phlegm dripping from their noses—the same physical manifestation depicted in 20,000-year-old cave paintings discovered in other parts of Botswana. This tradition has continued on, essentially unchanged, for tens of thousands of years.

  The healers lay hands on individual tribe members. They check a person’s physical health in almost the same way a Western doctor performs a rudimentary exploration, listening to your heart and lungs or looking into your eyes and ears. However, by laying their hands on you, the Juntwazee project a part of themselves into you and explore your spiritual health as well.

  Several of the men laid hands on me. I felt an incredible energy sitting around the fire that night—not necessarily electric, but you could feel the intense amount of energy coming from within them. It felt like they were connecting with something very powerful inside you. And they would lay hands on you for anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute and a half, sing over you, then hug you and move on to the next person. They’d focus on four or five people, then move on to twenty minutes of dancing, chanting, spasming, eating coals, and diving into the sand. At times, they were so exhausted that they collapsed for as long as a half hour, almost passing out. The women attended to them, cradling the men’s heads in their laps and holding their hands until they were able to stand again, still in trance, and continue to walk around the fire.

  This trance work was incredibly intense to experience as a spectator—and I can’t even imagine what actually entering the meditative state would be like. For the Bushmen, this ritual is necessary. The men are said to remember everything that happens during their trance experience. If they have an out-of-body experience, they can document it. If they discover someone is sick, they will relay the message, ensuring proper care is taken.

  Toward what I believed to be the end of the evening, Xaxe, a great hunter, healer, and shaman, laid hands on me. Things got very different very quickly. By that point, I’d had hands laid on me two or three times by each of five men. Each time, I tried to quiet my head, breathe, and shut my eyes so that any access they wanted to have would be as unfettered as possible. However, the last time Xaxe laid his hands on me, it felt as if a defibrillator got strapped on my chest and back. They grip you sideways, one hand palm inward on your chest, fingers spread, and one on your back. I felt the energy, his energy, surge through my body. He had his hands on me for about twenty-five or thirty seconds, but it felt like he had only touched me for a split second. Time stood still. I literally had a short out-of-body experience. I could see him touching me from just above my body, almost like I was floating six feet off the ground, watching myself. All of a sudden, I was back in my body observing an image of him thumbing through the book that contained all the pictures and moments in my life. I saw images of my childhood I hadn’t remembered in years, pictures of my mother and me walking on a beach and shelling, very strong images. At the time, both during his touch and immediately afterward, I described it as him flipping through the pages of my life. I felt he was curious and wanted to see what I was all about. In true Bushmen form, the only way to achieve that was to plumb my mind for images and stories, because our ability to communicate with each other was limited. (We did have translators with us, so holding conversation was possible but remained fairly simple.)

  Later the next morning, I spoke with Xaxe about the trance dance. He told me he wanted access to me in a way that was not possible through a translator. The other men attempted to do the same thing, but it took hours until I achieved a meditative state myself that allowed me to feel them rummaging around in my head. Apparently, they had been going into my head and my body the entire night, but I just hadn’t been able to feel it.

  Xaxe’s curiosity was such a caring, loving gesture. It didn’t feel intrusive or strange at all. He wasn’t treating me like a museum piece; he really wanted to understand me better. When he detached from me, I felt like someone was unplugging a lamp from a wall socket. As he let go of me and continued to dance around the fire, I spontaneously burst into uncontrollable tears. Not because of the beauty or his curiosity—simply put, I had been stripped to my emotional core, completely stunned by what I had just witnessed so up close and personal.

  At that point, it was about midnight and I’d been at the fire for more than four hours. Exhausted, I headed back to my tent and collapsed into bed. The sounds of them singing and dancing in the desert lulled me to sleep. They have rattles on their feet that make this incredibly rhythmic noise, and the clapping, the singing, the rattling, the stomping combine to make a perfect sound to sleep to. When I woke at six in the morning, as the sun started to break the dawn, they were still at it. Still dancing, still singing, still clapping, one or two of them still in trance. Eventually, the ceremony ended, and nearly everyone slept through most of the day and evening.

  The next afternoon, I sat down with Xaxe, Bom, and Xao and some of the other shamans to get their take on the Trance Dance. At the end of our conversation, Xaxe took my hand in his and, through our translator, told me to always respect people as I went out into the world. He explained that the most important thing a man can do is respect all people and love all people. He said it simply and very matter-of-factly. These are words that I’ve heard my whole life, but sitting there in the desert around the fire, they touched me in a unique way. I realized that I have a very unique set of circumstances working in my life, one that allows me to tell stories in written form and on television, and when I’m interviewed on radio or in a blog. I have an audience to which I can communicate the stories that make up the fabric of our global life. I have the power to bring down boundaries that separate people so we can legitimately spend more time talking and celebrating the things we have in common, rather than arguing about our differences. Xaxe saw that and wanted me to be sure to focus on the right message.

  I changed in many ways on that trip, and I saw many things that illustrate our overdeveloped disposable cultural zeitgeist. The Juntwazee make sizable ropes out of a small plant that looks like an aloe plant. First, they squeeze all the water out of it, which is used for ear medicine. Then they scrape away the pulp and extract the fibers out of the plant. Men and women alike work on creating this rope; they grease their hands, wet them with saliva, then braid the fibers by rolling them in the palms of their hands and knitting them together. They make both short and long ropes; three or four two-foot-long sections were rolled one day, and we were able to make little nooses out of them and affix them to the end of trip snares, which they set up using small sticks
that we found on site in an area where large birds would come to feed on little nuts and berries in the ground. The bird takes the berry, trips the snare, the noose comes up, and the bird is caught.

  As we returned from a hunt one day, we discovered a hawk bill dead in one of the snares, its neck snapped. We weren’t allowed to eat it that night, because if you eat the bird at night, the bird’s spirit will go out into the rest of the world and tell the other birds to avoid the snares. The Juntwazee have lots of myths about this kind of thing. But when we found the bird in the snare, I immediately took out my bush knife and unfolded it. I was trying to be helpful and offered to cut the rope. The Juntwazee looked at me as though I were crazy, asking the translator why I would cut the rope. They need the rope. They made that rope. No need to cut it—just loosen the rope and remove it from the bird and reuse it.

  I realized at that point, like a sledgehammer being taken to my head, how wastefully and thoughtlessly I proceed through my life as a Westerner. I don’t live a life based on necessity and need. When it comes to taking twine out of the kitchen drawer to perform a task, I don’t think twice about tossing the used twine into the garbage. Unknot and fold the string away—that’s what crazy old people do, right? Don’t save little balls of string. You need new string. I’m the product of the modern American consumer culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We’re the most wasteful society on earth, but we have the ability and curiosity to see things in the world and learn from them. That’s what is special about these types of experiences: taking away the moments that touch and change you forever. I am no longer a rope-tossing fool.

  It took a visit to a place 7,000 miles away from my home to be reminded—by somebody else’s grandfather—that life is meant to be based on love and respect for other people, not love and respect for self. Love and respect for self will come only by loving and respecting other people in the world around you, which makes the Juntwazee the most highly developed people on the planet. Love and respect is in all their hearts. There’s not a selfish bone in them. They have no personal possessions. The extended family, group, or tribe owns everything. These people are some of the last truly pure sprits on earth. Meeting and spending time with them is more important than spending time in the back of a safari vehicle in some national park, looking at elephants.

  A Santero drips the blood from a freshly

  slaughtered rooster over Andrew’s head during

  a traditional Santerian initiation ritual in Cuba.

  ¡Viva Cuba!

  he recent thaw in Cuban-American relations coincided with my recent trip there last spring. Travel can be transformative. One person, from one country, representing their own blend of culture and experience, meets another citizen of the world on their home turf. This is what makes what I do for a living such a powerful force for growth and change in the world. People often see me as the bug-eating guy, but I have only eaten bugs a handful of times in a few memorable minutes in hundreds of hours sprinkled across my television career. I see myself as creating a powerful voice for globalism and international understanding, for the idea that by sharing food we experience another culture in unique, personal ways, by breaking bread with real people, in truly local haunts, eating honest and authentic cuisine. You’ll never get the full picture clinging close to a hotel lobby. By focusing on our commonalities like our mutual love of food, we can really share life with people we just met in lands far away. We forget our differences, and the matters of our daily life that can only lead to conflict and misunderstanding. Cross the first barrier, share a meal, and the next conversation can safely be had. Trust me on this. I spent a week in Chile last year. It wasn’t until I shared a meal in a Chilean home that I finally got the real story about the struggles of dissidents, changes in national identity, and personal experience with both. Try learning that by shoving a microphone in someone’s face. It has happened for me in China, Vietnam, France, and Italy, even Tennessee. It was here that a young woman confided her personal story in me. We sat quietly in a corner and I listened, eating possum neck and dunking my corn bread in pot liquor from the greens. Just a Jew from New York and a mountain girl from rural Appalachia trusting each other because we were sharing a meal.

  Look what happened when the Berlin Wall fell, or in 1971 when the U.S. State Department lifted the ban on travel to China, leading up to the presidential visit there in ’73 that birthed “the week that changed the world.” A lot happened over dinner and dumplings, I can assure you. Mutual distrust with Russia and China, Vietnam, and other formerly closed worlds replaced by an advancing understanding and ongoing free exchange of ideas. Opportunity feeds relationships. I am of the mind that if it can happen with those countries it can happen now with Cuba, a country ninety miles from our back door. And I believe that cultural and political osmosis begins with a meal. I went to Cuba with an open mind and an open heart. I spent time in Havana, lounged at the Nacional, stayed in Frank Sinatra’s old room, prowled the music clubs, danced to the salsa beat, visited with world-famous artists, and strolled the storied ancient cobblestone streets of Vieja Habana. I saw for myself the beauty, inside and out, of this amazing country, and I believe more than ever that restrictions and barriers do nothing but foment misunderstanding and make life tougher on citizens of both our countries.

  We are all richer for a free-flowing exchange of ideas, and the people of Cuba feel the same way. I asked. We have a rare opportunity here to see a country on our doorstep redevelop in many ways, and the stagnating isolation of the last fifty years has been our loss. Canadians and Europeans, South Americans and Africans all travel safely to Cuba every day. They are the richer for it. We are the losers here, and I can proudly say we have a lot to offer Cuba. I ache to see walls removed, not created. I believe travel is a game changer for remaking our world in a more positive way, and I can safely tell you that Cuba is a once-in-a-lifetime travel experience. The country isn’t diluted or polluted by the corrosive aspects of culture that prevent our seeing what a people are really like or how they live. In some cases, Cuba is a paradise-prison. Ninety-nine percent of Cubans can’t get on a boat (even to go fishing), beef is considered contraband, and markets are sparsely stocked despite many resources.

  However, the country is changing at breakneck speed, and the sooner you see it for yourself the better. Once the Palm Curtain rises, the country is changed forever, for good and for bad. The doors to Cuba will open soon, and trust me, once they do, it will transform at a rapid rate. Look what happened in Eastern Europe. Estonia, for example, carried on in a style more like the Bronze Age than the Modern Age for hundreds of years. The moment the borders opened up, they experienced a Western technology boom, bypassed hundreds of years of development, and eased into the twenty-first century overnight. In Estonia, you can pay for a bus, a movie, or a parking meter with your cell phone. Estonia entered the modern era at warp speed.

  It certainly would not surprise me to see a similar change in Cuba. I’m sure they’ll devalue one of their two currencies—the Cuban peso, which is the official currency used by the citizenry, and the Cuban convertible peso, or CUC, which is typically used by tourists and was created to take foreign currency out of circulation—and the rush will be on. Take one nighttime stroll in Havana, one of the most glamorous cities in the world, and you’ll quickly discover the intoxicating sights, smells, and sounds of this sexy, caliente-hot environment. The old Russian buildings serving as state-run hotels in some of the most beautiful parts of the country will be demolished; most are empty anyhow, but they will finally be nudged out of the market by grand five-star resorts. The Four Seasons in Trinidad, Cuba, is not far from becoming a reality. Giant tourism companies offering too-good-to-be-true packages, cruise ships overtaking the harbors. Katy, bar the door! This place is going to be crowded in a hurry. My advice? Get down there while you can, because when the Palm Curtain does rise (or is it proper to say it will fall?), it’ll only be a few years before you are looking at Nassau, Jamaica, the
me parks, or, maybe even worse, the Dominican, a country where barbed wire surrounds the great resorts to keep the “locals” and the guests from intermingling, unless you count the towel attendant at your cabaña. Talk about a place that’s ripe for a revolution.

  I flew from Minnesota to Toronto, then on to Havana’s José Martí Airport, armed only with some elemental credentials for the Cuban government. The issue for Americans is in returning and in finding external travel help in booking reservations. Domestic travel businesses won’t even talk to you about Cuba. American travel to Cuba isn’t illegal per se, but the U.S. government prohibits Americans from spending money there. Our production company made the necessary arrangements working through a British company doing business in Cuba. I was nervous, even jittery, leaving Toronto. I’ve never been harassed or felt like I was in danger from any official representative; I figured the worst that could happen is having to spend the night in the airport and head right back home the next morning. But things went smoothly going in. I landed, breezed through immigration, and met our fixers, who took me to get my official credentials at the Cuban Press Association’s office in Havana. I continued on to our hotel, the Parc Central, located on the edge of the historic old city. Our stay coincided with the International Conference of Non-Aligned Nations, with every crackpot, two-bit dictator, and his delegates flooding the hotel. This made for great people-watching—if observing awkward security shakedowns and marveling at the audacity of snotty teenaged diplobrats is your idea of a fun time. The events of the conference made for more traffic, crowded eateries and cultural events, and increased security at every hotel in town. It also meant getting bumped from my room at the Nacional, where I had been booked for months. No matter, the PC was a great hotel, and ironically, the rooms were a lot nicer. New hotel, foreign owner/partners means nicer everything. Even with international heads of state around, the Cubans can’t quite get it together enough to serve anything other than tinned imported ham on the breakfast buffet line at the Nacional, where I did manage to stay my last two days in country.