The Bizarre Truth (7 page)

As we awaited the arrival of our food, I wandered around the side of the restaurant, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fishermen navigating their miniature flat-bottom canoes. I looked on as they fished about a mile out from the restaurant, collecting shrimp and snapper from their little clusters of nets. It was a physical endeavor—pushing and pulling themselves around the bay, tossing nets, reeling them in, then poling or paddling back over to the restaurant, where they would disappear from view. I walked to the edge of the deck, only to discover they were literally hoisting baskets of fresh fish, shrimp, and crabs directly from the bay to the kitchen window, where they would be dispatched and, within minutes, arrive at our table.

I’d pinned myself down to the grilled shrimp, the monstrously large sautéed crayfish, and snails with the coconut milk and banana flower—a dish that I had always wanted to try but hadn’t had the opportunity. It is literally the sturdy purple cone-shaped flower that grows from the bottom of the master cluster of bananas. The banana flower is available anywhere bananas grow, and every time I have seen it since tasting it for the first time in Palawan, I have asked if it’s used in the local food. From Puerto Rico to Nicaragua, Okinawa to Samoa: It’s an emphatic no. Filipinos, on the other hand, are addicted to cooking with it. The flower is sliced paper thin on a mandolin (or, if the chef has excellent knife skills, by hand) into little shreds, then sautéed with coconut milk. The flowers pair perfectly with something saline and gamy, like snails.

We dined on teeny grilled fish, served with Philippine soy sauce and a squeeze of Kalamansi—a gumball-size citrus fruit that’s a cross between a lime and a tangerine. Kalamansi is to Palawan what salt and pepper is to America—readily available and dispensed on everything. The grill was fired by fresh coconut husks, which impart a superb light smokiness to the food cooked on it. The grilled shrimp and mackerel actually melt in your mouth. Seafood lumpia were rolled and fried to order, the whelks with banana flower had a strong injection of lime before they left the
kitchen, and no one at the table could prevent themselves from inhaling the groaning platters of the food as they came in waves from the kitchen. With all the commotion over the persistent flow of dish after amazing dish (not to mention the fact that I was overeating to begin with), I’d completely forgotten about the final item, which had yet to emerge from the kitchen. I’d seen tuna collar on the menu and I thought to myself,
Gee, what a nice little treat. I’ll have some tuna collar
.

Even casual fans of Japanese food are used to the minuscule hamachi collars sold in just about every Japanese restaurant. Roughly the size of a small envelope and about an inch thick, those collars are lightly salted to dry out some of the moisture, then broiled and served with grated daikon radish, a squirt of lemon juice, and soy sauce. The collar bone is covered with fatty, rich scraps of meat that you have to fight to unearth, but worth every minute of the canoodling it takes to extract the tasty morsels of flesh. That’s half the fun, like a treasure hunt, and it’s addictive, so I was looking forward to trying Badjao’s version despite my straining waistline.

We’d finished up most of lunch when I realized, “Hmm … no tuna collar.” Assuming they simply forgot, I asked our server where my tuna collar was and I was calmly informed that it was still cooking. I mean, this is a tiny piece of fish. What the sweet Mary and Joseph is taking so long?

As I’m discussing the situation with our server, out comes the tuna collar, spilling over the edges of a twenty-four-inch-long platter. Here is Badjao’s version of this culinary gem: A seven- or eight-pound Flintstone-size roast of bone and meat from a gigantic yellow- or bluefin tuna. This fish had to weigh several hundred pounds when it landed in the boat. Brushed with sweet rice wine and soy sauce, served with fresh chilies and those little Kalamansi, this collar was quite the indulgent dish.

Foodies obsess about illegal foods like ortolans of western Europe, devouring whole roasted teensy birdies drowned in
Armagnac while a napkin is placed over their head to assuage the guilt factor. People wax poetic about attending foie gras orgies in New York’s underground restaurants. Sure, you can have all that stuff, but the rarest of the rare food experiences is the opportunity to eat something singular and unique, in the main because the ingredients aren’t available in any other spot in the world. An open source of giant fish, where chefs have inexpensive access to pristine precious ingredients, exists in very few places of the world. Consider this: At Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market, just the collar alone would cost thousands of dollars, and here I was, for the equivalent of a few dollars, chomping away at this giant, charred, fatty piece of tuna goodness. I didn’t have to force myself to eat the whole thing; I had a little help from my traveling mates. Going to the last stop on the subway in the Philippines afforded me the opportunity to dine in an environment where I wasn’t competing with too many people, finding ingredients in their own terroir, so to speak (with a neutral carbon footprint, no less!), and without paying through the nose. Eat the same dish halfway around the world and not only will it be expensive and somewhat ginned up, but the flavor will be compromised, diluting the experience to the point that it is almost not worth doing in the first place. If something is worth eating, it’s worth eating well, and that’s the advantage of going to the last stop on the subway.

ungfish is the common name for a primitive, freshwater, air-breathing fish that resides exclusively in tropical areas of Australia, Africa, and South America. Only six species of lungfish survive today, but fossil records tell us that lungfish were much more widespread and in more plentifully differentiated species in the distance past. Scientists agree that lungfish are closely related to the ancestors of the earliest vertebrates that adapted to live on land, which is very important, because lungfish are extremely unusual animals.

The name itself refers to the specialized lung that serves as the creature’s main organ for breathing. This lung allows the fish to gulp air as an adaptation to low-oxygen water environments, such as swamps or bodies of water that frequently dry up. Most fish use their gills to pull the oxygen out of the water. Lungfish also have gills, but theirs are relatively small compared to their fellow denizens of the deep. Young African lungfish have true external gills, which degenerate with age. The single lung on the lungfish is more like a modified swim bladder, the air-filled organ that almost all fish use to help them float at a particular depth, saving energy while swimming around the ocean, but in lungfish the modified swim bladder can also absorb oxygen. Freaky!

When kicking back and chilling out, lungfish excrete carbon dioxide through their gills or skin, just like most other fish, but most other fish get oxygen only through their gills. The special lung on the lungfish also removes carbon dioxide waste when the
lungfish is very active, an anomaly in the underwater world. African lungfish actually rise to the surface to breathe and can “drown” without access to air.

Lungfish have elongated bodies with a double set of fleshy limbs that resemble cylindrical fins. Their oddly shaped fanlike teeth act like an under-counter garbage compactor, ideally suited to their diet of fish, insects, mollusks, worms, crustaceans, and plants. These animals are very territorial and extremely aggressive, building nests where the male protects the eggs that the female lays until they hatch.

African lungfish aestivate, meaning they can become dormant, literally hibernating during dry periods or droughts for a few months if need be. If necessary, they can hit the rack for years at a time—
that’s years … plural!
These fish burrow into the mud and secrete a covering of mucus around themselves. This mucus hardens into a cocoon, but the lungfish leave a small, closable breathing hole in the mummylike covering. The fish reduce their metabolism to a bare whisper and simply shut down, becoming essentially inactive. The protective cocoon softens when it gets wet—say, at the end of the dry season—and the fish can reemerge and live in the water again.

The lungfish, like its cousin the coelacanth, are commonly thought of as living fossils, a reference to the fact that these animals have essentially remained physically unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.

Oh yeah, and one more thing: When lungfish are in that cocoon and they get hungry, they eat their own bodies, tail first … and they grow back.

All of which begs the real question:
What in the name of all that is holy was I doing fishing lungfish?

Let’s start from the beginning. The moment Travel Channel picked up
Bizarre Foods
, I wanted to live with an African tribe. It
seemed to me to be the ultimate family of
Bizarre Foods
experiences: Getting in with real indigenous people, many who live the same way their ancestors did thousands of years ago, would allow me the best opportunities to experience food and share cultures, and that’s exactly what we found in Uganda.

Uganda is located in East Africa, and is landlocked by Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zaire, and the Sudan. Much like its neighbors’, Uganda’s past has been turbulent at times. Despite the fact that Uganda achieved independence from Britain in 1962, the establishment of a working political community within such a diverse ethnic population has been a Herculean task. The dictatorial regime of Idi Amin (1971—79) was responsible for the deaths of some 300,000 Ugandans. Guerrilla wars and human rights abuses under Milton Obote (1980—85) claimed at least another 100,000 lives. Since 1986, the rule of Yoweri Museveni has brought relative stability and economic growth to Uganda. However, the country is still subjected to regionalized armed conflict, partially due to its large refugee population and the prevalence of the Lord’s Resistance Group, a separatist terrorist organization concentrated in the northern part of the country, which, for many travelers, has been essentially a no-go zone.

You’re probably wondering if this is a safe place to be traveling in the first place. Trust me, I had plenty of those thoughts myself, and it seemed anytime I researched this trip, I stumbled upon words like “insurgent activity,” “armed banditry,” and “roadside ambushes” each time I opened up my computer. We were staying in the city of Kampala, located on the northern edge of Africa’s largest body of water, Lake Victoria, for the first few days and last night of our stay, but for the majority of our trip we lived in an isolated village well outside the city. I always felt very safe in Uganda, but that’s a relative term. Flying in to Entebbe Airport, you can see the decades-old hull of the famous Lufthansa jet, hijacked in 1972 and left as a “training tool” on the runway where it finally came to rest. Not the most charming of welcome mats in
the Kmart catalog. Armed guards watched over us in Lwanika, hired to keep us safe. Frankly, I wondered how one old guy with a rusty AK-47 would fare against a jeep- or truckload of rebels intending to do us harm or steal our equipment. I bet my producer a hundred bucks that it couldn’t fire if he pulled the trigger a dozen times, which was a bet he wouldn’t take. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that.

Kampala isn’t exactly a hotbed of international tourism, but three minutes after leaving the airport, I saw traffic lights, an ambulance driving on another road, and a speeding police car, sirens blaring. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Infrastructure like that means someone, or something, is at least nominally in charge. Having just come from Ethiopia, where I never saw an ambulance or police car during our entire eight days in-country, I can safely say that I was relieved to be in Kampala and not Addis Ababa or Harrar. Walking down the streets of Anytown, Uganda, from the biggest to the smallest, has the same challenges as walking down Mainstreet, USA. Look like a fish out of water, get treated like one.

Arranging a stay with an isolated African tribe is no easy feat. You can’t exactly call or e-mail in your reservations. Our “in” with the Embegge tribe was through our local fixer, Haruna, a member of the tribe and a legendary local Ugandan musician in his own right. We wound up visiting and staying with his tribe in the village of Lwanika, located about six hours east of Kampala. It just so happened that our arrival coincided with the anniversary of his grandfather’s death. Haruna’s family, and his late grandfather in particular, are highly regarded in the community. In honor of him, they had prepared a huge celebration for the second night of our proposed stay, complete with a big, festive meal for the entire extended village. It was exactly what we were looking for.

We headed out to Lwanika by Range Rover, where we would stay with the tribe for four days. The drive was pretty much what you’d expect in eastern Africa. We started off on a main, paved highway
heading out from the city of Kampala, snagged up for a good half hour in the early-morning traffic of the congested city. Eventually, that road morphs into a simple, paved road, then to a dirt road, and finally you’re actually going all-terrain, driving over rutted grass byways to get to the heart of the village. In and around the village itself, we encountered a system of primitive dirt roads that connect the isolated villages of the region to each other. Villagers from one cluster of simple mud and straw homes would walk or bike from one to another to visit family or friends, or to help with work. While it’s extremely rare for most villagers to venture into the big city, modern civilization has touched their lives just enough that they have the occasional need to go into another village or a bigger town. The most traveled members of the tribes always seemed to be those involved with dance or music, and most of these villagers spent a lot of time traveling throughout eastern Africa performing in regional festivals and contests.