The Bizarre Truth (30 page)

Usually, having a hand in creating a dish builds up my excitement toward actually eating it. Not the case with chunos. After rolling up my pants and stomping potatoes in a field filled with snowy runoff, cow poop, and sheep shit, I was ecstatic to leave that farmer’s house with just a piece of my dignity intact.

Anyhow, back to the apthapi. The meal concluded with a shaman burning a llama fetus and saying a couple of prayers. His homily was stirring, including his two cents about how Mother Nature treated them that year and a request for better weather in the next one. When the shaman wrapped up his speechifying, the sun came out and the rain stopped. Coincidence? I think not.

After the meal, the elders sit around eating fistfuls of cocoa leaves and dance to live music until the point of exhaustion after eating one of the most delicious meals you could possibly imagine. An Andean barbecue at Lake Titicaca, with an offering up to the Earth Goddess of a llama fetus, followed by a shamanistically influenced weather anomaly, was about as cool an experience as I’ve ever had.

This fetus-burning ritual is a special form of a traditional ceremony called a limpia, which is Spanish for cleansing or cleaning. This Lake Titicaca festival was both a limpia, in the sense that we were cleaning the farm of evil spirits, as well as an offering to Mother Earth. Bolivians live in an incredibly superstitious society, and limpia ceremonies are quite common. In fact, the majority of homes, new and old, have a burned llama fetus buried somewhere in their foundations to ward off evil. The indigenous Bolivian culture still believes in both black and white magic, so if you’re looking to stock up on supplies for your next ritual, there is no better place to be than the Mercado De Las Brujas, the city’s witch market. Need to cure an illness? A dried toucan beak will cure what ails you. Empty bank account? According to traditional folklore, placing a cigarette in a dead frog’s mouth will increase your chances of rolling in the dough. Whether you’re looking for llama fetuses, gold and silver foil, waxed candles, or incense and coca leaves, you’ll surely find the vendor hawking it at this market.

For our next limpia ceremony, our fixer had a llama fetus hookup, so there was no need to buy one. We arranged to meet a group of guys who performed traditional limpias in an area called El Alto. Currently, the most rapidly growing neighborhood in South America, El Alto, is essentially a giant slum sitting on the hilltop high above La Paz. I adore Bolivia, but like many South American countries, the gap between the wealthy and impoverished there is overwhelming. Hundreds of thousands of European Bolivians live in the city’s relative splendor, while a million indigenous Bolivians, the first people of that country, live in a horrifically depressing slum. Very few houses have electricity or running water, leaving most people in an absolutely depressed condition. There are no movie theaters, no museums or arts institutions, nothing but row after row of threadbare housing, nickel shops for foodstuffs and bars. When it comes to class division, tensions run hot. The physical separation of the poor, indigenous Bolivians from the rest of the city is downright
shocking. I can imagine these people looking down, day after day, at the jewel-like old city of La Paz and eventually snapping. I picture them equipped, Frankenstein mob scene—style, with torches and wooden clubs, running down there one day and kicking all of the Valley Dwellers out.

That next limpia ceremony took place at the top of an abandoned four-story building. We discovered that this place was chosen not because of some spiritual significance but because there were no other options. It seemed counterintuitive to get cleansed in such a scary environment, filled with a horde of dicey characters wandering around smoking cigarettes and swilling cheap hooch, but I wasn’t about to piss off any gods, spirits, or thugs by leaving. Our hosts built a fire on a table on the floor of this abandoned place, burned their llama fetus, drank a half case of beer each, and ate fistfuls of coca leaf, which more or less has the same effects as snorting cocaine when chewed with the right resinous sap to make the drug’s active ingredients water-soluble and processable by the body. Delirious, drunk, and wired simultaneously while managing a fire set to a rotting piece of llama flesh—you can imagine that the scenario just oozed with spirituality. In their drunken stupor, our host mumbled prayers in my direction, most likely because I’d purchased the beer and coca leaf for them, then exited as fast as they could, leaving me and my crew to navigate back to the hotel on our own. It might be the only limpia ceremony in which, when it was all said and done, I felt exponentially dirtier.

The cleansing ceremony that has stuck with me the most took place in the highlands of the Andes. Otavalo, Ecuador, is home to the largest outdoor market in the continent. It’s really more of a huge merchandise mart or county fair than anything else. After a day of shooting, a “friend” suggested I see a yachac, Ecuador’s traditional witch doctor. Given that the Ecuadorians take their spiritual healing rather seriously—all shamans must be certified by a medical board—I figured this was the place to get the most bang for my buck.

Boy, did I ever. Armed with only a five-dollar bill and a live guinea pig, I met my doctor in his closet-size office. Despite the fact that the outside temperature was a chilly forty-five degrees, this windowless room was stifling hot. Daniel, my yachac, sat opposite me at a desk loaded with trinkets, chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes as he poked and prodded me. He graciously took my money, fired off a few questions, and then asked me to take off my clothes. In retrospect, I’m unsure why I answered so quickly, but next thing you know, I’m stripped down to my boxers in a strange man’s office.

He wrapped my head in a towel and proceeded to blow huge puffs of cigarette smoke on me for about twenty minutes, which didn’t exactly feel like the pinnacle of health and cleanliness. Next, he took the guinea pig and, holding its front legs in one hand and rear legs in the other, he beat my body mercilessly until the guinea pig died. He tossed the guinea pig into the pile of cigarette butts in the corner.

You’d think we were about to wrap this whole ritual up, but apparently, we were just beginning. Daniel then spat up all over me. I’m not talking saliva. This was phlegm cleared from the depths of his black lungs and throat. Then he took a few swigs of homemade Everclear and sprayed it from his mouth at my eyes, ears, chest, back … everywhere. He followed up by rubbing three hard-boiled eggs, which are said to represent the earth, all over me from the bottoms of my feet to the top of my head.

I completely lost it when he began beating me with poisonous leaves that burned my skin and caused me to break out in hives. If you’ve seen that episode of my old show
Bizarre Foods
, I’m seriously on the verge of a mental breakdown. I’m done with this healing shit. I’m pulling the plug. Daniel somehow convinced me to soldier on, reassuring me via interpreter that the hives would dissipate after an hour or so. He then filled his mouth with more grain alcohol, held a lighter up to his lips, and blew fire all over me. Our session concluded with Daniel setting fire to the branches, cigarette
butts, the bottle of booze, and the dead guinea pig. The evil spirits trapped in my body were passed along to these inanimate objects. The flames then destroyed that bad juju, leaving me free and clear of negative spirits.

At the time, I considered this hour one of the most abusive, torturous experiences I’d had in the past twenty years. However, the next twelve months were probably the best of my life. My wife and I adopted our amazing son, Noah.
Bizarre Foods
, which I’d been shopping around for years, became a smash hit on the Travel Channel. I need to send Daniel a big
gracias
for that.

While all these experiences hold a special place in my heart, they pale in comparison to the Ball Snipping Spring Testicle Festival that I attended in Temuco, Chile. I’ve mentioned before that Chile is one of my favorite destinations. It’s the California of South America, but it’s often overlooked. The country is never more than 220 miles wide, so you can go from ocean to highlands to Andes Mountains in less than three hours. The coastline extends 2,700 miles, stretching through a variety of temperate zones and climates. It has the world’s driest desert; it has lush expanses of forests and highlands, glaciers, fjords, active volcanoes; it has big cities and rural villages.

Chileans are predominantly mestizos, the result of marriages between the country’s indigenous people, most notably the Mapuche Indians, and those of European descent, predominantly the Spanish. The country does house some isolated pockets of pure-blooded Mapuche; however, these populations are quickly disappearing.

If you want to brush against the Mapuche culture, head to Temuco, a city of about 200,000 people. The city is the cultural center of the Mapuche Indians, who make up almost 15 percent of the population. It’s in southern Chile and it sits in the heart of the Lake District. It is stunningly beautiful—bold, with growth forests, rolling hillsides, and snowcapped volcanic peaks on the
horizon. Most of the activity there is agricultural: oats, wheat, barley, timber, and lots of hard fruits, like apples and pears.

The other appealing thing about the city is that it’s the heart and soul of the country’s beef industry. While Argentina and Brazil get the hubbub about their phenomenal beef-eating culture, I was really impressed with all the beef that I ate in Chile. I visited parilladas, the traditional Chilean steakhouses, where they bring a grill to your table piled high with every different cut of the cow imaginable—from udders and cheeks to filet. You rotate the meat around the grill’s hot spots, charring it on the outside. If you’re a wine drinker, nothing will quite wash this carnivore’s haven down like a fantastic glass of Chilean red wine.

It seemed that every time I sat down for a steak dinner, the beef originated in the Lake District. This got the dusty sprockets turning in my head. The Lake District: home of the Mapuche Indians
and
the best beef in the country. Why not kill two birds with one stone? My friend’s friend Mauricio agreed to arrange a visit with his friends, Moises Velasco and Cristina Doty, owners of Fondo Collanco, a 10,000-acre cattle ranch a few hours outside of Temuco. Fortunately, my trip coincided with a springtime ritual every culinary fanatic should witness at least once in their life.

In the ranching world, spring castration is an extremely important process. When the nuts go, they take the bull’s aggression along with it. Additionally, the steer will yield a tastier, more tender meat. Fondo Collanco, lying in the shadow of the Llama Volcano, castrates between twenty and thirty bulls a day, leaving one of every twenty-five bulls still intact for the beef-replication market, which I’m sure is a lot of fun for those chosen few.

As we pulled into the ranch, I felt an air of excitement. The quality of the red meat in Chile far exceeds what I’m accustomed to seeing in the States, and I eagerly awaited watching the meat go from farm to table. The cattle pens teemed with activity and commotion, which intrigued me from a distance.

The castration process is not taken lightly. Moises always has an experienced veterinarian perform the procedure, along with twenty of his Mapuche ranch hands helping out. These workers come from families who have worked on the Velasco farm for generations; their fathers worked there for Moises’ father before them, and so on. Little about the actual castration freaked me out. The whole process is sterile and safe, and not messy in the least. Everybody cares for the animals. They have to—it’s the lifeblood of their personal economy. The farmhands herd the bulls into a corral. They take one at a time, tie their feet together, and gently tip them over. The veterinarian places a giant hedging shear around the testicles, snips them off, and immediately sprays the wound with an industrial-strength vaccine/disinfectant to prevent disease and infection. This snipping noise, which sounds a lot like snapping a tree branch, was the only thing that caused me to cross my legs in phantom pain. The criadillas, or testicles, are tossed into one bucket; the capullo, or scrotal sac, is placed on a separate tray where it will be skinned or peeled off the hide. These were big balls, much larger than ones I’ve seen commercially available in Europe or the States.

I couldn’t believe how quickly these bulls recovered. The process took all of five minutes, and after the light medicinal spray, they hopped up as if nothing had happened. Later, Moises, Cristina, Mauricio, and I took a brief horse ride to explore the ranch. The newly minted steers lay in the grassy pastures, relaxing and resting very naturally, gathering back their strength again. I’m happy to report that after two or three hours, all of them were up and prancing around, and they were all free-ranging and drinking and eating, which is a sign of good health. I was in way more pain after having my wisdom teeth pulled. Castration is the ultimate outpatient surgery.

Then we retired to the barn, where everyone, from the Velasco family to the ranch hands, gathered for a celebratory feast. Different pieces of cooking equipment were set up all around the barn.
In an odd turn of events, the vet skinned the scrotal sacs, rinsed them off, and began to sautée the “meat” with onions and chilies over a wood-burning fire. He continually added pieces of the capullo, tomatoes, and copious amounts of white wine and covered the pot. The pot was moved to a less intense spot on the fire, where it simmered three hours.

When it comes to eating balls, I’m a seasoned veteran. Deer penis, rocky mountain oysters, even tuna sperm—I’ve tried almost everything in that buffet line. But up until this trip to Chile, I’d never eaten an animal’s scrotum. Everyone was excited for me to try it, which made me excited to do it as well. Long ago, I learned that a large population of satisfied customers can’t be wrong.

The testicles were peeled and cut into slices. The farmers took an old plowshare, a long, sloping, triangular piece of metal about the size of a kitchen table, and suspended it over a fire in the barn. Once this troughlike grill was ready, the vet-turned-chef added a generous pour of olive oil, twenty garlic cloves, and a handful of dried red chilies. Once the garlic and chilies were sufficiently scorched, he added hundreds of sliced testicles, which quickly seared on the plowshare. The testicles, now browned on both sides, were moved to a lower heat, where they cooked for a few more minutes. Seasoned with salt and pepper and placed on homemade rolls, we ate traditional Pil-Pil-style sandwiches as we waited for the capullo to finish.