Many years ago I worked with this wild hunter guy who insisted that to live in harmony with Earth it was necessary to be capable of killing and butchering your own meat. Every few days he’d head out into the bush with bow and arrow, kill a wild goat or pig, eat or give away the meat, and tan the hides. He said all meat eaters should do this, be capable of this, or stop being hypocrites and start being vegetarian.
I saw his point, but how many of us really have access to such methods of gathering food?
My chance came in a small part, while hiking through part of the Indio Maiz reserve in Nicaragua. This pristine, gigantic and mostly untouched rainforest houses a plethora of Central America’s colourful and interesting wildlife. It’s extremely difficult to access. There’s an overnight boat twice a week from island Ometepe (we “slept” in deck chairs in the freezing rain on the deck for 10 hours), followed by another 3-hour long boat ride down the Río San Juan to El Castillo, and from there you’ll need to hire a local guide to take you the rest of the way. This isolation was the area’s biggest drawcard for us, not much in the way of tourism here, just nature as it was thousands of years ago and a chance to be part of it.
Interestingly, the small border crossing to Costa Rica also takes place on the adjoining waters of Río Frio. Another torturous 14-hours to travel 66km means you’re again on the boat with mostly locals. This time I noticed that most of the Nicaraguans were paying to have their immigration forms filled out and then signing their names ever so carefully using very basic initials. It’s easy to fall into the emotional trap of patronising feelings akin to sympathy or pity at these humble moments. It was a nice reminder of how very glad I am for the outstanding public education system in Australia and the Netherlands, however, any pitiful thoughts were nipped in the proverbial bud when I remembered what we’d experienced the day before.
Our guide, Juan “Ardillo”, was a gold-toothed filo-fax on the region. In self-tought English, he pointed out hawks, iguanas, every type of monkey, woodpeckers, poisonous dart frogs, rubber plants, a plant that numbed your tongue entirely with a drop of sap, the list went on and on. Without his eyes, we would have only seen trees. For lunch we paused on a river bank, and while he lit a fire, we were given a cup of worms and some basic fishing equipment to try and catch (you guessed it) some fish. We had zero success. In fact I struggled to even put a worm on a hook. It turns out they bleed and just keep on wriggling, which I found upsetting, which HH and Juan found amusing. In fact, Juan found our ineptitude so very amusing so within 2 minutes of taking over he plucked 2 fish from the river. In that moment it was clear who deserved the sympathy. These poor gringos can’t even catch lunch.
This is not an announcement of a radical life change. I try to live my life as ethically as I can within my western world. But it was a wonderful illustration of how we can learn from each other, understand better where food comes from and start filling in a few blanks. I’ve learnt what a pineapple plant looks like for example. As a coffee addict, I loved finally knowing the process of coffee berries: from fresh red, to drying green, before the nicely aromatic, roasted brown beans we “freshly” grind. I’ve tasted raw hammered cocoa combined with sugar, which tastes sweeter bought from the small children in the centre of Guatemala, than from supermarket shelves.
And I’ve never been stopped being appreciative of the education and wealth my birth in a first world country gave me, that allows me the privilege to be one of the lucky few to gather such knowledge, and to recognise what I don’t know as well.
Elsewhere For Me 