When you’re in a fourteen-foot flat-bottom Zodiac in rolling waves, maybe about eight or ten feet high, it’s like being stuck on the longest roller-coaster ride of your life. No life preservers. No radio. Just me and Pall the Viking, cranking down the engine as hard as it could go in this little rubber dinghy. Oh, and in case you forgot, we’re in Iceland. The water is just a degree above freezing. We are miles and miles from civilization as the crow files, at least ten miles from the nearest town. If you fall into that water, you’re a goner. You can’t survive; it’s just too cold. I say a prayer in my head.
Out of nowhere, an entire pod of killer whales pops up next to us. All those friendly, SeaWorld-inspired killer whale images go right out the window when you see this thirty-foot monstrosity cresting the waves adjacent to your little boat. I am sitting so low in that boat that I am almost eye level with the water. The killer whales are right there. The immediacy of the situation is oddly thrilling. The fear that is on my face becomes more and more evident to Pall, who just keeps smiling at me.
We finally arrive at our destination after about half an hour at sea, up the side of a wave and down the other side, repeat. The island looks like a giant cylinder of granite rising straight up out of the water—topped with a grassy 1980s haircut. As we get closer, I can see a wooden cabin built on stilts on the side of the cliff. And I think I can see Pall’s family waving at us.
It turns out that every year in puffin-hunting season, which is about two weeks long, three generations of Pall’s family—father, brothers, kids—head to Alsey and spend a few days hunting as many puffin as they can. I’m talking thousands of birds. They’ve done it every year since Pall’s father, now the patriarch of the family, was a kid. This is their ancestral tradition.
Puffins are excellent underwater swimmers and are known to dive to depths of 180 feet.
We cruise into some softer water about a quarter mile offshore and idle beside a two-inch-thick wire coming from the house and disappearing into the water beside us. I learn that the only way to unload the gear is by means of a pulley system. Several years earlier, the family sank a giant anchor into the water, attached a wire cable about five hundred feet off the cliff, and then pulled the wire up to the house, securing it with block and tackle to a landing about fifty feet below the house’s platform. They lower the tackle, hooked up with a giant cargo net, toward the water and we load up all our gear from the two boats. I watch the net disappear as six or seven guys yank all the equipment to the top of the hill.
OUR AEROBATIC CLIMB
Here’s the method of hopping onto Alsey: You run the little Zodiac boat at top speed, straight toward the rock face of the cliff. A split second before the boat’s nose smashes into the granite wall, Pall guns it into reverse. The boat freezes and you jump out at the last possible moment of sweet inertia, grasping, struggling to clutch the flimsy climbing rope dangling from some pitons high atop the cliff. As the boat pulls away, you hold yourself there, balance your feet on the slippery wet rocks, and essentially pull yourself up, Batman Bat-rope style. Foot over foot, hand over hand, while (if you are lucky) kind people who’ve arrived before you attempt to pull on the rope to make it a little easier for you. In comparison, getting back is a piece of cake. You just hang on to the rope, and when the boat comes in, you let go and fall (indelicately, I might add) into the Zodiac with a big thud. But leaping out of that boat onto the rock wall, aiming for this little piece of climbing rope about the width of your pinky, is one of those experiences that I will never forget. A literal leap of faith.
I knew that this great test of my manhood was not going to get any easier. Fortunately, Pall was a great coach, and he talked us through the whole thing. Our crew was wet, bruised, and scraped, but without Pall’s expertise, we didn’t have a prayer. Our success was directly related to the skill set of our leader, and he had gotten us all on the island.
From Poop to Root? Surtsey was declared a nature reserve in 1965, and island access is restricted to a few scientists. All visitors are subject to search to ensure that no foreign species or seeds are accidentally introduced into the ecosystem. They take this very seriously—in fact, when an improperly handled human defecation resulted in a tomato plant’s taking root, the plant was promptly destroyed.
We reconned on the top of the granite cliff and climbed our way to the crest of the upper hillside, walking carefully along the cut-in path to the stone path at the highest part of the bluff, then up and over the last ridge to the family’s hunting cabin. We walked about a quarter mile from the landing point to the house itself, where we changed into our puffin-hunting clothes, sturdier shoes, tough mackinaw jackets, hats, and hunting equipment.
HOW TO HUNT A PUFFIN
Now, puffin hunting is done in a very specific way. You hide yourself in the rocks, holding on to a long and extremely unwieldy, twenty-foot-long, thick wooden pole that weighs at least forty pounds. At the end of the pole they’ve attached a big net. You time it precisely. When you see a puffin flitting past you, you swing this massively heavy net at it and attempt to guide the net toward the puffin’s flight path. It’s an ungainly process; the stick is so heavy and awkwardly long, it’s like netting extremely speedy butterflies but on a much larger scale. The birds are so dumb that they don’t really know how to move out of the way. Once you get a feel for how the puffins react, you can be very successful, starting your long, slow, arcing swing, aiming at an imagined point where the bird’s flight path will intersect with the future position of your net.
Iceland is home to one of the world’s largest colonies of puffins. Over half of the world population of the Atlantic puffin breeds in Iceland.
When you see someone with a lot of experience do it, it almost seems like they can will the bird into the basket. Pall’s eight-year-old nephew netted about four of them while I was just getting comfy in my spider hole burrow. Pall’s youngest son nabbed an additional two or three birds. His twelve-year-old son did the same, as did Pall and his brother. In an hour and a half, I netted one. It is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, but only if you know how the puffins fly and aren’t completely preoccupied by the thought of slipping and plummeting to your untimely demise. I almost fell off the hill the couple of times I summoned the courage to stand and swing my pole. The hill is nearly vertical, pitted with puffin nests that are covered in thick matted grass, so you can’t see the rocks and ridges. That, in addition to the steepness, makes the terrain impracticable for anything other than squatting on it.
Puffins don’t build nests like most birds. Instead, they create soft underground burrows. The burrows are usually about two feet in length. Unless it is destroyed, puffins often use the same burrow for years. In one study, scientists discovered that one puffin returned to the same burrow for over thirty years!
There was a charming aspect to it. If you leaned out over the edge of the cliff just enough and looked down, you could see all the wild seals basking on the rocks, swimming to and fro and making cute seal noises. You could see the orcas blasting through their blowholes, rounding up krill, and all the seabirds diving into the water for their evening meal. It was glorious.
As the weather began to cool off, we took the birds out of the net, gently put them out of their misery, and breasted them out. Puffin meat looks a lot like that of wild bufflehead duck: very dark and very purplish, with a small breast size. I’m accustomed to eating wild ducks and I’ve sampled sea ducks, which have some of the worst-tasting meat in the whole world—chewy, fishy, dry, and oppressively oily. I was expecting puffin to fall into this category, but the grilled puffin I ate on the deck outside the Alsey cabin was one of the most delicious meats ever to pass my lips. It tasted like a delicately mild, finely grained piece of elk (or ostrich, even) that had been waved over a pot of clam juice. The salty and sea-life-intense diet these puffins have makes them naturally seasoned, in a sense. Not grilling them past medium-rare helps. Pall and the lads sprinkled the meat with salt, pepper, and a dash of their favori
te grilling spice from the local supermarket and we devoured the entire platter before we even got inside the cabin.
Our hosts served up some smoked puffin once we got indoors. Smoked puffin is the most popular preparation you will find in Icelandic restaurants, mostly because it is so stable and can sit in the fridge for weeks at a time without degrading in quality. We sliced it paper thin, pairing the meat with sweet Galia melon. Here is yet another oddity of Iceland: they have no growing season. Sure, they have some hydroponic stuff that is coming out of local greenhouses, but not much of it. A bag of carrots in Iceland costs ten dollars, but a pound of lamb or a pound of crayfish costs next to nothing. It’s the exact reverse of the way it is in the rest of the world. Imagine a culture with plentiful meat and fish that are very cheap, but where all the vegetables are very expensive because they’re shipped in from other places.
Puffins usually keep the same mates for life.
BACK TO SEA WE GO
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 onto the wet bottom. 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 putt-putted 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 quashed by 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 unique. It’s hard to measure it against anything else. I have yet to bump into any other group of people in my world who 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 this adventure. The day after our excursion, the cabin cruiser that took us home hit a rock and sank. Due to all the volcanic activity in the area, the ocean floor is always in flux. Giant rocks can form quickly, rendering depth charts useless. It’s ironic that during the time I felt most secure, I was probably most in danger.
Traveling from American Samoa to Samoa is a shot in the arm. 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. 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 fast-food places and motels.
Just a white-knuckled puddle jump away lies the stunningly beautiful, relatively unvisited islands of Samoa. A multi-island chain of breathtaking atolls, Samoa just might be the last great unspoiled deep-Pacific country.
The islands of Samoa are made up of solidified lava produced by volcanoes, but only one island, Savaii, is still volcanically active. The last eruption occurred in 1911.
I was beaming as our six-seater twin-prop departed American Samoa, destined for its much better-looking sibling.
It takes only a half hour or so to head into Upolu, the most populated of the Samoa Islands chain. We hopped into our van after a gentle landing and were off to the Aggie Grey’s Hotel in the heart of Apia, the capital city of Samoa. This Samoa is the one 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.
The islands of Samoa are home to roughly 188,000 people. There are 362 nu’u (villages) found throughout the islands, with a total of eighteen thousand matai (chiefs).
Fale, Sweet Fale: Enjoy alone time? Then a traditional Samoan home is probably not for you. Samoan fales (houses) traditionally don’t have walls. They use blinds made of coconut palm fronds during the night or in bad weather.
We rounded the main harbor, snug with luxury sailcraft, industrial rust buckets, and professionally outfitted fishing boats 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 and 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 guests willing to endure the agony.
Mind your manners and your feet! It’s customary to remove your shoes before entering a fale. Once inside, it’s best to sit pretzel-style (with your legs crossed), kneel with your feet tucked under, or cover your feet with a sarong. Pointing the bottoms of your feet at others is considered rude.
Aggie Grey’s is the Samoa of William Somerset Maugham and Robert Louis Stevenson, an ancient hotel with luxurious gardens and a pedigree that most hotels would kill for. Ignore the fact that services like Internet or phones are offered but don’t function, and focus on the fact that other hotels like Aggie Grey’s simply don’t exist anymore; they belong to 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.
TO THE VILLAGE WE GO
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 matai, 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.
Avoid walking through villages during the evening prayer curfew (usually between six p.m. and seven p.m.). This usually lasts for ten to twenty minutes and is often marked at the beginning and end by the ringing of a bell or the blowing of a conch shell.
The staple products of Samoa are copra (dried coconut meat), cacao bean (for chocolate), and bananas. The annual production of both bananas and copra has been in the range of thirteen thousand to fifteen thousand metric tons—that’s equal to the weight of about 1,180 school buses!
In Samoa, every shoot each day begins with a business deal. Every story is shot in a different location, and the locations are 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.
THE FOOD OF THE LAND AND WHAT THE LOCALS REALLY EAT
The Samoans are addicted to the cheapest processed meats in the world. Canned hash, Dinty Moore stew, SPAM—they can’t get enough of it, so doing business in Samoa required a constant shuttling 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 strolled around the island, dosing out canned meat products with casualness, we ate very well. Oranges, grapefruit, dozens of banana varietals, and every other tropical fruit you can imagine grow extremely well here and can be had for pennies. Tuna is sold on the side of the roads for about a dollar a pound, and that’s the rip-off tourist rate.
Up until 1993, the taro root crop, traditionally Samoa’s largest export, generated more than half of the country’s export revenue. But a vicious fungus destroyed the plants, and since 1994 taro exports account for less than one percent of export revenue.
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 pounds, often as big as a man, the local tuna are traded around the island like a commodity. You can pay bills with tuna, 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.
Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food Page 2