by Adam Gollner
Part 2
ADVENTURE
5
Into Borneo
Note that at the farthest reaches of the world often occur
new marvels and wonders, as though Nature plays with
greater freedom secretly at the edges of the world than
she does openly and nearer us in the midst of it.
—Ranulf Higden
ONE MONDAY JANUARY MORNING in 2007, New Yorkers awoke to a nauseating odor of sulfur and rotten eggs. It was as though a gigantic fart had rippled through Lower Manhattan. The lingering gassiness, described in the media as “awful,” “nasty” and “ominous,” caused the evacuation of schools and office towers; 911 circuits were jammed, service on commuter trains and subways was suspended, and a dozen people were hospitalized. “It may just be an unpleasant smell,” said Mayor Bloomberg, seeking to calm citizens. Fingers were pointed at New Jersey’s chemical factories; others speculated that it was a leak of mercaptan, the substance that gives natural gas a noticeable funk. In the end, the source of the stench was never identified.
I think I know what might have caused it: durians.
The durian is the most odoriferous fruit in the world. Containing forty-three different sulfur compounds, including the same ones found in onions, garlic and skunks, this spiky fruit befouls any enclosed space. Its penetrating smell is intended to attract animals like orangutans, tigers and elephants. Fine in a rain forest, but not in downtown Manhattan, where a Dumpster full of gaseous, decaying durians could wreak havoc.
Think I’m exaggerating? A few months after our trip to Miami, Kurt Ossenfort and I held a durian-tasting party at his apartment in New York. Opening them unleashed such an invigorating gust that it felt like being in one of those old cassette commercials where the sound of the tape blows your hair back as you hold on to your seat. The two durians we’d picked up in Chinatown were so powerfully fetid that, as we feted the fruits, the rest of the building was evacuated due to a suspected gas leak. Unbeknownst to us, durian vapors were moseying down the hall and through the elevator shaft to other floors. Concerned tenants grabbed their valuables and took cabs uptown or waited anxiously in the deli around the corner. We found out only when the worried superintendent and an official from ConEd showed up to pinpoint the source of the leak.
We weren’t the only Manhattanites sharing durians that year. The London Review of Books mentioned a similar durian party attended by Susan Sontag, Lou Reed and curators of the Museum of Modern Art. Upon learning that durian would be served, Fischerspooner’s singer reportedly “emitted girlish little squeals.”
Other reactions aren’t as enthusiastic. It has been compared to rotting fish, stale vomit, unwashed socks, old jockstraps, low-tide seaweed, a charnel house, sewage in a heat wave, pig shit and baby diapers, turpentine, a disinterred corpse clutching a wheel of blue cheese and French custard passed through a sewer pipe. Eating them is said to be like eating your favorite ice cream while sitting on the toilet. The ones we ate in Manhattan tasted like undercooked peanut butter–mint omelets in body-odor sauce. Smoldering burps resurrected the flavor well into the following morning.
Not surprisingly, breeders are developing scentless varieties. Even so, true durian aficionados love its pungent aroma. In Malaysia, there’s a saying: “When the durians come down, the sarongs come off.” Durian-scented condoms are successful in Indonesia. Just as Southeast Asians are repulsed by raw-milk Roqueforts, Westerners have trouble understanding the attraction to durians. Many cultures enjoy foods on the edge of rotten, whether it’s Sardinia’s casu marzu cheese filled with wriggling maggots, Iceland’s kæstur hákarl—decomposing shark meat—or dessert wine made from grapes gnarled with botrytis mold.
Durian flesh, isolated from the scent, is actually quite sweet. An oft-repeated durian adage is that it smells like hell, but tastes like heaven. As fan site durianpalace.com puts it: “Imagine the best, most delicious, and sensuous banana pudding, add just a touch of butterscotch, vanilla, peach, pineapple, strawberry, and almond flavors, and a surprising twist of—garlic??!!” One of the first positive descriptions in the English language noted wafts of “incongruities” such as cream cheese, onions and brown sherry.
It is banned in many hotels and public spaces throughout Asia. In Singapore, signs on subway stations warn that durian carriers face a five hundred Singapore dollars fine. Durianpalace.com thinks banning nature’s grandest pudding is “a hopeless rule just like outlawing farts, when we know that it is such a pleasure and everybody’s secretly doing it.” Aviation alerts have been caused by passengers transporting the fruit in their luggage. Citing “grossness,” not safety, Virgin Airlines manager Brett Godfrey canceled a 2003 flight in Australia because of a castaway durian. “It just is the most pungent, disgusting smell,” he said, suggesting it belongs in an outdoor dunny.
It’s also advisable to abstain from alcohol while eating durians. Pairing them entails serious bloating. Jerry Hopkins, in Extreme Cuisine, mentions a newswire report of a “fat German tourist who devoured a ripe durian, followed by a bottle of Thai Mekong rice whisky, then took a hot bath and exploded.”
I also felt like exploding after our tasting party—not surprising given the quality of the fruits. If they’re malodorous when fresh, consider how bad it gets when a low-grade variety thaws on a congested Chinatown sidewalk after spending months with freezer burn. More than 10 million dollars are spent on frozen durian in the United States annually. They are all substandard, repugnant even, compared to a freshly picked Thai Golden Pillow. In the nineteenth century, as he was readying his own theory of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace claimed that durians were “worth a voyage to the East to experience.” Heeding Whitman’s assertion that getting a proper ultraexotic experience still requires travel to the tropics, I booked a flight to the pulsating heart of the durian kingdom.
ONE OF THE largest islands in the world, Borneo is a geopolitical triumvirate comprising Malaysia’s Sarawak and Sabah, Indonesia’s Kalimantan and the tiny sultanate of Brunei. Countless fruits that are unavailable elsewhere thrive in this remote center of endemism. In recent decades, the island’s rain forests, formidable hotbeds of diversity, have suffered devastating losses from logging. Fortunately, many of the region’s most valuable fruits are being grown and studied by conservationists.
Voon Boon Hoe is a botanist who has long been William Whitman’s and Richard Campbell’s contact in the region. Clean-cut and thin, with a salt-and-pepper mustache, Voon has spent his life studying durians at Sarawak’s Agricultural Research Center.
As we walk through the research orchard outside the capital city of Kuching, the island’s variation becomes increasingly apparent. There are bloodred, chartreuse, yellow and orange rambutans. Even sweeter are their relatives, pulasans, whether scarlet or green. We eat cluster bombs of dukus and langsats, tangy-sweet detonations of citric perfection. All of these fruits would be phenomenally popular if they ever became available in the West. Gungungs taste like wild strawberries accentuated with raspberry coulis. Dabais are like oversized purple olives that melt in the mouth, releasing an oily nectar. The star-shaped Baccaurea reticulata has a vermilion exterior and a milky interior with a glossy white seed the size of an avocado’s. Just gazing upon it puts me in a trance.
The island boasts more than 6,000 indigenous plant species. Borneo’s genetic pool is so rich because it’s a relatively undisturbed ecosystem that wasn’t affected by the crystallized extinctions of the Pleistocene Ice Ages. It gets up to seven meters of annual rainfall. Like other equatorial rain forests in South America and Africa, Borneo is bursting with extraordinary life-forms: tiny owls, deer the size of mice, flying lizards, Oz-like flying apes, luminescent mushrooms and colorful fungi resembling coral reefs. Butterflies suckle on human sweat while expelling creamy secretions. Voon points out a little bird called the black-breasted fruit hunter.
Clouds of mosquitoes trail me wherever I go. Although I’m taking anti-malarials
, the travel clinic warned me that there’s no vaccination against insect-borne dengue fever. Each time I’m bitten, I imagine some rare tropical virus coursing through my bloodstream. At least there’s no sign of the other pests I’ve been warned about: tiger leeches that gorge on blood, sharp-toothed ants that swarm up legs and man-eating crocodiles.
While hiking through durian groves, Voon and I hear something plummet off a tree. Voon scampers through the tall grass like an excited little boy. Proudly bearing a spiky fruit, he explains that in Malaysia, the best durians are freshly fallen (as opposed to Thailand, where they’re cut off trees before falling). We open it right up. It’s a kuning durian, says Voon, handing me a piece of salmon-colored meat. The interiors of kunings, unlike the better-known yellow-fleshed varieties, range from neon orange to deep carmine. This one has an intoxicatingly nutty, almondlike taste, and only the faintest odor. It’s infinitely better than the putrescent stink bombs found in Manhattan.
There are twenty-seven species of Durio, most of which are native to Borneo, including centipede durians, mini durians with almost imperceptible seeds and even a naturally occurring odorless variety called sawo. While most durians have spiky green husks and yellow flesh, some varieties, like the Durio dulcis, have bold red exteriors. One kuning tree in Dalat is so big that it takes fifteen people with outstretched hands to encircle it. The seed is said to have been given to the owner’s grandfather by a ghost in a dream.
As we walk on, we come to a tarap tree. Voon sends up an assistant to cut off a large, soccer-ball-sized fruit that has already been half-eaten by a flying fox. “That’s how you know that it’s ripe,” Voon explains. Brushing away some insects, he hands me a chunk. It tastes like a fully constructed dessert. The juicy white cubes of flesh fuse a custard’s richness with a cakelike powderiness. The whole thing seems topped with vanilla-spruce frosting. The sweetness is heightened by a jungle creature’s stamp of approval. There’s a sense of togetherness, something ineffably primal, about sharing a fruit with a winged canid.
By now, I’m so transfixed by all the fruits that I’ve stopped visualizing myself hospitalized from mosquito-induced fever. We come to a tall mangosteen tree covered with fruits. In Borneo, Voon explains, people climb trees to eat mangosteens straight off the branch the way North Americans do with apples. He suggests I try it out. Climbing up, I perch on a branch laden with leathery, brown, apple-sized fruits. I throw a couple down to Voon, who demonstrates how to open them using his thumbnail to pierce the thick leathery skin. Twisting off the top, I discover the interior filled with perfect snow-white sections.
At the end of the day, Voon gives me a perfumed chempedak to take home. Filled with honey-sweet orange chunklets, it’s an army-green fruit the size of a rugby ball. After taking a few bites, I leave it on the nightstand of my third-floor hotel room while I go out for the evening. Returning after dinner at a nearby hawker stall, its scent overwhelms me the moment I enter the lobby. Sneaking it outside via the rear entrance, I sit down in a nearby vacant lot and pull the fruit’s sections apart. As the moon wavers in the thick haze, I dig in. Its flavor has improved since the afternoon—it seems to be at its apex of ripeness. The taste is somehow familiar, yet elusive. With every bite I try to place the flavor. Then it hits me: Froot Loops!
Tasting it triggers a recollection of how, as a child, I’d use my allowance to buy boxes of Froot Loops. I’d sneak away and covertly eat bowlfuls in bed under the covers while reading Archie by flashlight. Soon all that remains is the skeleton of a chempedak at my feet. I’ve eaten it all, my hands tearing it apart, the fleshy globules offering themselves to me. I can still feel fructose crystals coating my teeth like icing.
THE FIRST EVER official fruit hunt was organized by the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, who sent ships to the land of Punt in East Africa to retrieve seeds and plants in the fifteenth century B.C. Whenever galleons blew into shore, local tribes offered fruits as welcoming presents. Columbus was served custard apples upon landing in the Americas. Natives presented Cortez with unnamed oddities. Captain Cook was given breadfruit “the size and shape of a child’s head … reticulated not much unlike a truffle.” Structuralist anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss were greeted at Amazonian deltas by flotillas of small boats containing exotic fruits. Even in relatively recent times, cargo cults in Papua New Guinea have been reported to brandish bananas at pilots.
After Columbus was welcomed with pineapples in Guadeloupe in 1493, the pineapple became a symbol of hospitality on gateposts and house turrets in Europe. They were adopting the aboriginal tradition of placing pineapples at entrances to welcome visitors and signify friendship. Five hundred years later, real estate agent William Pitt, specializing in Connecticut mansions, uses it as the company’s logo, as does high-end cookware store Williams-Sonoma. Certain Super 8 Motel owners advertise themselves as Pineapple Kind of People because pineapples are “the pinnacle of perfection in the hospitality industry.”
Fruit hunting has a storied legacy. One of the earliest European flora explorers was William Dampier, a distinguished pirate who swashbuckled through the Isthmus of Darien and down the Colombian coast. After being stranded in a canoe hundreds of miles from Sumatra, he somehow made his way back to England and managed to reinvent himself as a traveling botanist. His 1697 book A New Voyage Round the World was filled with fantastical fruits, which led to his being sent on several more official plant-hunting escapades.
John Tradescant gained notoriety with his 1621 expedition to procure the Algiers apricot. After joining a privateer’s fleet sent to capture Barbary pirates off the coast of Algeria, he returned with numerous hitherto undocumented varieties of stone fruits. On subsequent voyages, he brought home white apricots and “an exceedingly great cherye” now known as Tradescant’s black heart. In England, Tradescant discovered a new variety of strawberry, the Plymouth, growing on a rubbish heap in South Devon. It is noted for having miniature leaves that grow where the pips (or achenes) are usually found. All of his introductions were grown in “the Ark,” a magnificent garden near Lambeth. Even though he had anosmia (no sense of smell), he and his son were renowned for the quality of their melons. They are also believed to have overseen some of the earliest cross-pollinations, although they never set down their findings in a verifiable manner.
Dry science didn’t turn these adventurers’ cranks. Following Tradescant, plant hunting became a craze among young men intoxicated with the idea of exploring new worlds. They were happiest dashing off into the unknown—their diaries are filled with accounts of momentous discoveries made after enduring punishing hardships: getting lost, eating raw vulture flesh, trekking through rain forests shoeless and clothesless, being sucked into whirlpools for hours on end, fending off rabid buffalo attacks, falling with their horses into hippopotamus wallows, having all their hair eaten by rats while sleeping and negotiating with armed, xenophobic natives ready to stone foreigners for trespassing on their sacred farmland. In 1834, David Douglas, who discovered the Oregon grape, died in a pit intended to trap boars in Hawaii: he fell in and was promptly gored by a wild bull. David Fairchild’s protégé Wilson Popenoe’s own wife died from toxic shock after eating an underripe ackee.
Fruit discovery was, for a time, a sure-fire status booster. Fruits were named after successful voyagers like Sweden’s C. P. Thunberg, who managed to penetrate Japan’s borders to pinch the barberry—now known as Berberis thunbergii—and bring it back to Europe. The feijoa, or strawberry guava, is named after Spanish explorer and botanist Don de Silva Feijo, who found them in Brazil. The kumquat’s Latin name is Fortunella, after plant hunter Robert Fortune.
The French intelligence officer Amédée-François Frézier was spying on the Spaniards for the French government when he came across Chilean strawberries in 1714. Frézier—whose name, coincidentally, derives from the French word for strawberry—realized that the berries were more valuable than any state secret, and took every precaution to bring them home. The voyage took six months, and h
e almost died sharing his dwindling rations of fresh water with the plants, only five of which survived. These Fragaria chiloensis fruits supplied DNA that, when crossed with the Virginian strawberry, created the modern strawberries we eat today.
To introduce a seed into one’s homeland was a way of enlarging its range and widening the horizons of human knowledge. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” This rationale was how Jefferson justified smuggling rice out of Italy (risking execution) and hemp seeds out of China.
POPENOE DESCRIBED the fruit hunter’s methods bluntly: “You go to some forgotten town and hire a native boy. Then you buy three animals—horses, mules or maybe camels—one for yourself, one for the boy and one for the baggage. Then you head for the back country and keep going until you reach a place where there are so few cooking vessels that you can pay for a night’s lodging with an empty tomato can. Then you go to the village marketplace and watch like a hawk for everything brought in to be sold. You almost make love to the natives. You get invited to dinner. And finally you get the plant or seeds of the plant you want.”
Even in the early twentieth century, it wasn’t about plunging into the untracked wilds. It was about getting to the market. In general, the best varieties of fruits were found long ago and have been selected and bred for desirable traits over generations. Ethnobotanical work still necessitates firsthand surveys of forests, mountains, plains or valleys. Institutional fruit trackers have access to helicopters and parachutes, and use GPS and radar devices to hone in on their targets. For the most part modern fruit hunters don’t bother much with the virgin forest; they hire local guides to bring them to private farms, orchards, agricultural departments, botanical gardens, nurseries, herbaria, laboratories and those rural markets.