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, slicing and scarfing huge chunks of fresh tuna, raw, under 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 juice and coconut, cracking open the eyes of the fish and filling them with lime juice and soy sauce, and arguing over who would eat the still-beating hearts of the fish. We even got to try palolo, a rarity even in this part of the world, where these tiny little coral worms are eaten 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 woke at dawn and traveled to the southeastern coast, to the little town of Aleipata. 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. Five-pound giant fruit bats, often referred to as flying foxes. Large, furry, brown-and-black bats. Yum-o!
THE “TINY TIN CAN” BOAT
It was on the beaches of Aleipata that I met the man who would eventually save my life. Afele Faiilagi, an environmental scientist with the Samoan Forestry Department. 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, fastened to the transom with picture-hanging wire. We piled on the crew, our guests, and five hundred pounds of gear, pulling 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 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. On the road, the small sum of money we see as only a token payment is often a gargantuan amount to the person staring down at it. So the person takes risks—stupid, unfathomable risks.
Well, the bay outside the harbor dock is flat as glass, it’s ten feet deep, and the boat is gliding out of her slip. We get out in the middle of the channel, and it’s only five miles across to Nu‘utele, when all of a sudden, about a half mile from shore, we are in ocean several hundred feet deep in fourteen- or fifteen-foot seas, big rolling waves coming under the pontoons, and this little tin can of a boat is being pushed sideways. I’m petrified. I look around: There are no life jackets … there is no radio. The vintage forty-horsepower engine that is trying to push us over to this island is failing miserably. The guy who’s driving the boat looks like the kid who carried my bags at the hotel but doesn’t seem half as confident about making it to his destination, and he’s got this worried look on his face. And all of a sudden, what had started as a Wow, this is sort of scary and thrilling thing became scarier and scarier and scarier as the waves got bigger and the boat began to get pushed around more and more.
The overcast sky swirled around us, the wind rose and fell, and my producer started singing the theme from Gilligan’s Island: “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship.” Chris volunteered that when he’s really scared he does that to calm himself, and I looked over at Joel, one of our videographers, and he looked really scared. I felt really scared, and I realized in a flash that we all felt somewhat doomed, in the middle of the ocean, on the boat ride to nowhere.
HOPE ON THE HORIZON
After much nail biting and hair pulling, we finally got within the calm natural harbor of Nu‘utele. The sun came out, the waters were tranquil, and all we had to do was navigate through a maze of car- and bus-size rocks in this bay and try to beach the boat on the rocky shoreline. We did, and ran two lines, one to either end of the pontoon boat, then up and around the massive palm trees that stand vigil on the shoreline. For about an hour, in waist-deep water, we ferried all our gear off the boat and made a temporary base camp in the trees.
Afele does a fantastic job helping us get situated under a little lean-to that is hidden in a small glade about a hundred yards up and off the beach. When you reach it, dense tropical rain forest is all around you and at times you can’t see five feet in front of your face, so the clearing and the corrugated steel topper on the old tent poles make a nice resting spot. No one lives on the island, but a lot of visiting biologists and other scientists venture out to Nu‘utele to aid their studies, and the shelter is a constant on everyone’s trip here.
TO THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN
Afele shows me water vines and edible snakes. We hack apart rotting palms looking for bugs and grubs, and he shows me sleeping snakes. We hack away with our machetes almost every few steps, looking for coconut grubs, and can’t find any. In fact, we spend all morning looking for coconut grubs—after all, that was supposed to be an important part of our story—and we finally get to the point where Afele, exhausted and dejected but keeping it all close to the vest, suggests we start to climb the mountain. There is only one mountain, rising up out of the center of this island—and remember, the whole island chain is essentially volcanic, so the general topographic vibe is like you are walking on a giant inverted ice cream cone squished on top of a small pancake, and since Nu‘utele’s soil is clay-based on this side of the mountain, we are having an incredibly tough time making any headway.
The rainstorm that came through last night and earlier in the morning keeps threatening rain again, but it burns off every time the sun appears ready to peek out. It’s a bright but cloudy afternoon, and the ground is so wet and slick that you can’t get any traction on it even with sturdy hiking shoes. The slopes are almost a full forty-five degrees steep, but it feels worse as we slip and slide, and one by one our crew gives up—something that has never happened before—forced to turn back, unable to climb this mountain.
Everybody is carrying tripods, cameras, and equipment, so it takes us a while on the narrow path we are cutting to actually turn around. Afele sends us back on our own as he continues to scamper up the incline in his flip-flops, cruising up the mountain in pursuit of a few weevils or grubs, and we go back to the little shelter to wait for the arrival of the second group of intrepid locals coming to meet us for part two of our island experience.
By this time, the mood is sour. Half the day is gone and we still have no story in the can, Afele is up on the mountain and we don’t know what he is doing or when he is coming back, and we roll into our base camp to meet the Samoan Bat-Hunting Club, coming to take us on a bat hunt.
WITH HELP FROM THE HUNTING CLUB
With a name like that, the Samoan Bat-Hunting Club sounds very elegant. But it was a group of just eight guys, all of whom really dug going out into the woods and blasting away at bats with their guns. Also, the members were divided into two cliques. The first was made up of their self-appointed leader, named Paul, and the four guys who were his pals. The other clique was made up of the three guys who didn’t give a whit what Paul said or did. They had some kind of independent life outside of the hunting club—one was a cop
, the others local laborers—but all absent allegiance to the loudmouth who ran the show.
Extreme Ink: Samoans are known for their intricate and significant tattoos. Getting the traditional male tattoo, called pe‘a, is a very painful ordeal. The tattoo is etched onto the skin with handmade tools made of bones, tusks, turtle shells, and wood. Once completed, the pe‘a covers the entire body—from the navel to just below the knee!
You can’t really start hunting bats until the sun starts setting, so we had quite an amount of time on our hands while we were waiting for Afele to return to camp. We enjoyed talking to some of these guys, so we began to shoot B-roll and do some of the little nuts-and-bolts TV business that we needed to capture before the big scene, getting a safety lesson on the weapons, doing the meet and greet, and so on. We almost lose our lives in the water getting turned sideways going out to Nu‘utele, and now the boat breaks free of its moorings and we almost get stranded out there. Sometimes I tell myself that what we are doing is just a little too goofy and dangerous, and at that point in the evolution of the show we had no satellite phone with us and no way to get off the island if something really bad happened. The idea of being marooned was not appealing.
THE GIANT FLYING FRUIT BAT
Eventually, we get the boat squared away. The dust begins to settle and the magic begins to happen. The weather has cleared up, the humidity has dropped, the ruckus on this abandoned island is settling down, shadows begin to appear on the mountaintop, and we stand vigil underneath the breadfruit trees and wait for the bats. Well, the bats on Nu‘utele are not very far-ranging—and when I say bats, you’re probably thinking of something flitting around the backyard in Connecticut on warm summer nights, a pest that weighs a couple of ounces and occasionally flies by accident into your living room, and you fetch a tennis racket and shoo it out the kitchen door. No, these fruit bats tip the scales at five pounds—giant tropical fruit bats, also known as flying foxes because they are so ferocious-looking, supersized, and furry. This bat has as much relation to a bat in your backyard as my sitting in your garage has to my being your car. It is an awesome sight to see hundreds of these things pinwheeling in the sky, circling down, down, down from the mountaintop caves they live in toward the breadfruit trees dotting the shoreline.
All these bats do is sleep, poop, and eat ripe breadfruit. These animals are a rarity in the animal kingdom in that once you do kill them and begin preparing them for eating, you don’t even have to clean them in the traditional butchery sense of the word. Even the stuff in the intestinal tract is good to eat, and the natives eat all of it. These animals are not purged or bled after harvesting; these things (with a six-foot wingspan) are simply held by two men over an open fire to be scraped of their fur and roasted whole, simply scored with a little X mark in the chest so they cook evenly. These animals are supremely clean. All they eat and digest is breadfruit, and since that’s all that’s in their system, their gastrointestinal acids and enzymes are relatively mild, so you can eat the whole animal with impunity. That’s quite an unusual thing to partake of in the food world, an animal so clean and limited in range that you can eat every edible portion without cleaning it.
So we position ourselves in the jungle, spread out in a line in the little clearing between a couple of breadfruit trees heavy with ripe fruit, and begin shooting bat after bat after bat as they soar into the trees, dropping four or five fairly quickly. The cop who is a member of the shooting team makes one of the most miraculous hunting shots I’ve ever seen in my life. Out of the corner of his eye—I don’t know how he could see it given that it was pitch black at night—he sees something fluttering about eye height and he drops it on the fly in the dark about forty feet out. Turned out it was a true wild chicken, taken on the wing.
CAVEMAN DINING
We’ve got the five or six coconut grubs that Afele had scrounged up; we’ve got a half-dozen bats and a wild chicken. Things are looking up. We head back to our shelter, burn a couple of coconut husks, and start a roaring fire.
Want to nuke your meal in the microwave? Forget about it! At a Samoan fale, food is prepared outdoors in an umu—a pit dug in the ground and filled with hot stones. Fish, pork, and chicken are often cooked in the umu, wrapped in banana leaves or placed in halved coconut shells. Once the stones are red hot and the food is placed on them, banana leaves are placed all over the food to seal in the heat. Two hours later, the umu is opened and the piping hot food is served. Yum!
We clean the bats one by one, stretching them across the fire, scraping off their fur as they scorch, and scoring them across the chest. We toss the bats on the coals and squat on our haunches, turning them every few minutes, getting hungrier and hungrier, just like at a Sunday-afternoon weenie roast back home. Almost. Holding a bat whose wingspan is five or six feet from tip to tip, stretching one of these critters over an open fire to singe the fur, scraping off the hairy soot, taking a sharp knife and putting an X mark in its chest, opening the body up so it cooks evenly, watching the guts start to puff out as the meat cooks—well, this is really caveman-style eating, to say the least.
Dining on bats in the great outdoors is a very greasy, smelly affair. You chew and tear as you go, the meat and sinew are fairly tough, and the process is slow and sloppy. We rinse ourselves off with buckets of rainwater, and finally we cut the cameras and the lights and pack up all of our stuff. By this time it’s about eleven at night and we are exhausted. We head down to the boat and load all our gear. The shooting club guys have gone off as quickly and mysteriously as they arrived, piling into their boat and heading off to Upolu. We start to putt-putt out of the protected harbor beach area on Nu‘utele, only to find that with the tide up you can’t see all the giant rocks that were so easy to cruise around and through on the way in.
OUR BATTLE WITH MOTHER NATURE
The “crew” of our little tin dinghy have no idea how to get us out of the bay on Nu‘utele, and we discover that in fact they have never left the island after dark. We also come to learn, as we are going back and forth performing K-turns in vain attempts to get out into deeper water, that the crew are not sure how to get us across the channel to where the water is hundreds of feet deep. The water we are heading into is so deep that the swift, angry current creates huge waves between the big island of Upolu and the little island of Nu‘utele just off the coast. The speed of the current in this deep V-shaped trough is scary fast, but eventually we get turned toward Upolu in our little vessel more suited to flat, lazy lakes than to the deep South Pacific.
We get about a half mile off the island, and despite the whistling winds and boiling seas, we can hear the sickening scrape of metal against rock. I will tell you there is no worse feeling in the world than standing in a tin can of a boat with no radio and no life preservers, with a bunch of crazed, unseaworthy crew members.
That scrape of boat against rock meant just one thing and we all knew it, and if we hadn’t already gashed open one of the pontoons and the boat was going to sink, we were about to. I considered my options quickly and figured out that if the boat started to sink, we could all make the decision to try to swim to shore for ourselves. What was really scary was that the boat was stuck on top of one of these rocks, and because the rocks were close to the surface they allowed rollers from out in the open ocean to become breaking waves. The waves threatened to swamp the boat after flipping it over, which would have been disastrous. That’s the type of scenario where people really get hurt and—we all realized at the same time—panic begins to set in.
Everyone is screaming at each other. The guides and the crew are all vainly grabbing at poles that are stowed on the boat to push us off the rock. Two, three, or four waves in a row almost loose us from atop this rock, but in doing so also almost flip us over each time they swirl and crash around the rock and our craft. Out of nowhere, Afele tosses aside his T-shirt and dives into the water in the middle of the ocean, swims around to the edge of the boat where the rock has snagged us, waits for the next wave to c
ome, puts his little flip-flop feet up on the rock, and pushes the boat off from where we had been wedged as the water crashes over him. He nonchalantly hops back onto the boat, grabs the handle of the little outboard engine from our incompetent captain, and motors us off into the deeper channel.
Out in the deep water the rollers were surprisingly big and soft and the wind was nil. We flitted and threaded between the waves all the way back to the safe harbor on the big island of Upolu that we had embarked from fourteen hours earlier, capping one of the most energizing and thrilling evenings of my life. On this night I had thought on several occasions that I might lose my life, and it turned out to be one of those great days, a day that you look back on and say, yeah, I did that, making my bat meal taste all the sweeter each time I thought about it.
Time is the enemy of great-tasting food, and so I believe in pursuing food at its source. I want whatever is freshest on my plate. I want lobster that goes from the sea straight into a pot of boiling water. I want shrimp that’s pulled directly from a fisherman’s raft through a rope-and-pulley system out of the bay and right into a kitchen. Those ingredients can’t compare to the sitting-around-the-food-locker stuff from a nameless, faceless mainline supplier. God knows how long those edibles spend in the depths of some industrial freezer, how far they’ve traveled to get to your plate, and how they’ve been handled along the way. With the exception of a few ingredients—wine and cheese come to mind—the idea that freshness counts is as old as the hills. Traveling in its purest form allows you to gain unbridled access to foods at their source.
Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food Page 3