The Bizarre Truth (27 page)

Since childhood, I’ve dreamed of seeing the Great Barrier Reef in Cairns, Australia. When I had the opportunity to travel there as an adult, I regressed back to that giddy little kid staring out the window of my New York City apartment, dreaming of the world. Surfing, sharks, amazing snorkeling—what’s not to love? Few more incredible natural structures exist than this reef that rims almost the entire northern coast of the Australian landmass.

I was stunned to discover just how far offshore the reef is located. Operators run giant diving barges with semipermanent structures floating above the reef, which support the massive influx of annual visitors ferried in and out. There is no question about it: Pressure on a reef kills it. Activity in the water equals
damage. The growth of the shipping lanes and commercial fishing, combined with the environmental circumstances of global warming, have resulted in a less productive and less vibrant reef. That being said, the Great Barrier Reef is one of the top ten attractions in the world, as far as I’m concerned. My palms were sweating as we boarded our boat in Cairns for the two-hour drive to our dive spot.

When it comes to describing Australians, “crazy” seems to be just part of their psychological makeup. Everyone has sort of a screw loose, and I mean that in a really beautiful way. My diving companion was a gentleman named Lurch. He was a crazy Australian if there ever was one, a carefree guy who spent his formative years on the water. His family made their living on the water, and he’s stuck with the family business, resulting in days filled with free diving for fish equipped with only a mask, an incredible oversize spear gun in hand, and a pair of flippers. We finally arrived at our diving spot, where Lurch instructed me to start putting on my gear. As I dealt with my equipment, Lurch gave me a fifteen-minute tour of the shark bites and moray eel stings that covered his body (I think this an intimidation technique, which, frankly, kind of worked). However, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I didn’t have time to freak out, so over the side we went.

Lurch and I have the same idea of a good time. We spent a couple of hours in the water, pulling up as many shellfish, crustaceans, and mollusks as we could. We headed to a deserted island, fired up the “barbie,” and ate. We got a giant coral trout for the grill and a beautiful Spanish mackerel, but the real star of our lunch was a rainbow crayfish—or a proper rainbow crayfish, as Lurch likes to say.

Often referred to as painted lobsters, these creatures are actually members of the crayfish family. When I hear the name “crayfish” I think of some mud bug down in Louisiana, boiled with a mess of corn, potatoes, sausage, garlic, and onions. This is one of
my favorite food treats, and I was expecting to experience the Down Under versions with the hundreds of crayfish we were to collect that day. Lurch kept looking under these giant rock over-hangings in about eighteen to twenty feet of water, where most of the hefty ones live. He pulled out the first couple, showed them to me under water, and signaled that they were too small to keep. I was stunned. These crayfish were the length of my arm, with a tail as big as my forearm. These were no mud bugs; they looked like giant tropical lobsters, complete with brilliant blue, red, and orange flanging all along their exoskeletal armor.

I’ve seen tropical lobsters before, usually in the Caribbean, where they are camouflaged to disguise themselves in the sand and dark rock of their environment. They need to blend in with earth tones and shadow—hence all the brown, black, and sometimes sandy orange color displayed on their shells. The rainbow crayfish, however, live in rocky recesses not necessarily all the way down on the ocean floor, but sometimes midway on the reef itself. Consequently, they live in a vibrantly colored environment, their shells becoming a canvas for some of the most beautiful hues in the animal kingdom.

Lurch finally found one big rainbow crayfish, weighing in at about two and a half kilos. This massive beast was lunch. I’m a New England lobster guy and just assumed this lobster was going to be roasted whole. Lurch had another idea. He brought a small pan to put on top of the grill. Next, he dabbed a tablespoon of butter in it, twisted off the lobster tail, cut the tip of the tail off the rear fin flaps, pushed this giant two-pound raw lobster steak out of the tube of skeleton that it lives in, chopped it into one-inch chunks, and panfried the meat in browned butter, finishing it off with a generous squirt of lemon.

We sat there on the beach while the Spanish mackerel, the king-fish, and the coral trout cooked. I tolerate warm-water lobster. The North Atlantic
Homarus americanus
is my kind of crustacean. However, the second-best lobster I’ve ever had is that rainbow
crayfish from the Great Barrier Reef. Taxonomists can take issue with this—I know that technically it’s a crayfish. But to me, anything that frickin’ big, that tastes and looks so much like a lobster, is getting called a lobster.

Rainbow crays are one of those delicious foods that you can find only down in Australia and some of the island countries just north of it. They have them in Indonesia and Okinawa, Japan, but physically plucking them from the Great Barrier Reef with a man who has spent his lifetime diving there is an experience I wish for everyone.

Samoa also offered up some pleasant surprises in the food department. Samoa is a food lover’s paradise. People still live very much in an old-fashioned, timeless manner. It’s extremely remote, and many of the simple ways of life that have all but vanished in other parts of the world are still alive and kicking in this South Pacific region. Men stroll the towns barefoot, decked in lavalavas, an island sarong that is comfy in the extreme

No matter how primitive a country, markets are a barometer experience against which you can measure the best aspects of a culture. In Samoa, the markets serve as a place for licensed vendors to set up small booths—no matter how humble; sometimes it’s just two stumps of wood and a plank put across them—for them to vend their product. It may be as simple as hawking bananas, but they still pay a license to the Market Co-op setup business. However, there’s a time of day at Apia’s Maketi Fou Market when anyone can bring their fresh catch and sell it. It’s almost like an amateur section of the market where you can find a random assortment of sea creatures.

The Samoan island of Upolu is surrounded by a massive reef that stretches anywhere from a hundred yards to as far as a mile out from the beach. Beyond that, the water quickly drops off. The inland side of the reef reaches a depth of 60 feet tops, whereas the outer side of the reef drops to 400 or 500 feet immediately. Within another quarter mile you’re at 1,000 feet, and in another quarter
mile you’re at 3,000 feet. The channels around there are just spectacular, and the depth creates a strong current ideal for attracting big game fish, including tuna.

Samoans head out in small canoes fitted with outriggers and paddle past the reef through sometimes fifteen- or twenty-foot seas. Somehow, they manage to use hand lines while dealing with these incredible currents in a boat thinner than a kayak. They will put two or three tuna into their boat, sometimes ten-pounders, sometimes fifty-pounders. If they live in a well-traveled section of town, they’ll hang their catch from the trees near their homes. Some people will even collect root vegetables or oranges, bananas, and papayas and set them next to the fish. A ten-pound tuna will cost you a few dollars; fruit is a quarter apiece. You won’t believe how cheaply you can put together the lunch of your dreams.

For those who don’t live in a high-traffic area, hawking fish at the Maketi Fou is the best option for making a buck. Fishermen set up in the amateur section of the market, where a few empty tables are always available. The fishermen stand by their fish, scribbling the price on a piece of cardboard or the inside of a matchbook and perching it on the fish itself. Some even write the price on the fins with a marker. This setup may be bare-bones, but it’s as fresh as it gets. It’s the type of tuna that you would pay hundreds of dollars for in a restaurant in New York or Tokyo. Every Samoan restaurant serves tuna, raw and cooked. It’s inescapable. It’s more ubiquitous than the hamburger is in the United States. For just a couple dollars, you can have platters of freshly sliced tuna that has never seen the inside of a refrigerator. Giant tuna schools populate the area surrounding the island, and there is really no formal means to export it. Tuna is sort of the poor man’s food of the island, but one they know the limited population of visitors really gets excited about—quite a unique system, since in the rest of the world the tuna economy has turned this fish into one of the most exclusive ingredients on the planet.

With fishing this great, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try it myself. We spent the day on the water, where I actually caught three or four yellowfin tuna. We ate them on the boat, which was quite a thrill. It was here I learned of the Samoans’ love for tuna eyeballs. They will pluck them out of the head, add a few drops of lime juice, and squeeze the eyeball into their mouth with a pop. It slides right down your throat, sort of like an eyeball shooter.

While in Samoa, I spent most of my evenings sitting underneath the stars at the Apia Yacht Club, gazing at the Southern Cross and eating fish. Before you start envisioning Thurston J. Howell III, I have to explain that the yacht club is more of a dilapidated wooden deck with a smattering of rickety card tables and chairs. The old hut of a building was built about 120 years ago and served as a hangout for the U.K. expats who arrived during the nineteenth century’s Robert Lewis Stevenson era. These days, it’s basically a place for ten or twenty expats to sit around and drink way too much scotch whiskey. Loneliness and sadness hover like a haze over these civilization escapees, which is a stark contrast from the vibrant generation of young people who’ve recently come to the island. These groups intermix at this run-down yacht club. They do a fantastic, extremely spicy deviled grilled chicken. However, every meal commences with a platter of tuna oke-oke, the Samoan version of Hawaiian poke.

Bits of onion, coconut milk, lime juice, and minced hot chili are added to a platter of freshly sliced raw tuna. They don’t bother to slice it artfully like the Japanese do with sashimi; nor do they attempt to create a miniature masterpiece on a plate the way the Italians do with crudo. Samoan oke-oke is a four-pound chunk of tuna, coarsely cubed and piled on a plate as if it were lumber shavings. Throw eight or nine toothpicks into the massive mound of tuna and serve with some fresh lime juice. There’s always a bottle of soy sauce, hot sauce, and vinegar sitting on the table, so dunk the tuna into whatever you like or sprinkle it with some local
Samoan sea salt and have at it. A simple, pleasant surprise—especially when they come at drive-thru, fast-food prices.

At the end of a long, bountiful summer at home I’m usually swearing that if I never saw a fresh local tomato again, I’d be okay. I gorge myself on those things for a month every August and into September. By the end of this Samoa trip, I harbored those same sentiments toward tuna. I seriously thought that if I saw one more plate of raw tuna, I’d spontaneously combust. However, much like the way I long for a decent tomato in the dead of winter and spring (all I can find at my local grocery store are mealy, pink tomatoes grown in a faraway land), by the time I landed back in Minnesota I thought to myself,
God, I can’t wait to get back there
. These days, I no longer think of Japan as the tuna capital of the world, nor do I believe the best tuna fishing lies off the shore of America’s East Coast. Samoa takes the cake in both arenas. It’s a pure, unadulterated tuna economy.

Speaking of fish, when it comes to seafood destinations, my favorite might surprise you. Japan certainly comes to mind, as do lots of places in Southeast Asia, even the East Coast of the United States. When it comes to seafood, Chile is a force to reckon with.

Interestingly, Chile is probably my favorite destination to recommend to any traveler, whether they are well-seasoned or heading abroad for the first time. Geographically diverse, financially sound, socially conscious, and certainly a very developed nation, Chile offers something for everyone. Gorgeous, relaxing beaches? After Brazil, Chile features the continent’s longest coastline. Bustling cities? Santiago, a modern, pulsing, Latin city, is a great global hot spot for everything from late-night dining and clubbing to historical tourism. If hiking and breathing the fresh mountain air are more your style, head to the Andes Mountains. The best part? All of this can be done on a shoestring of a budget.

I don’t care what anyone says, Chilean wine is right up there with the best offerings from France and California. As someone
who doesn’t drink, I didn’t spend a lot of time in Chile’s world-renowned wine country, but I stopped in a couple of wineries as we toured and I was really impressed. Anyone who’s ever been to Napa knows wine tasting is a waiting game. You wait in line, along with 3,000 of your closest friends, for a tiny swish of mediocre vino from a plastic cup. In Chile there’s none of that. Instead of feeling like a teeny speck in a giant herd of tasters, you will be welcomed like a family member. In fact, many vineyards offer great accommodations. The lotus-eaters and the beef-eaters (more on that later) can all find happiness in Chile.

And then there is the seafood. The cold Humboldt Current runs from the Antarctic Ocean along the Chilean coastline, creating a perfect environment for an abundant fishing industry. The quality and variety of the fish boggle the mind. One trip to Mercado Central’s Seafood Hall in Santiago will confirm that Chileans are on top of their seafood game—gooseneck barnacles, abalone, pink-lipped angel clams, and loads of fresh fish. Exploring the Mercado Central is a singular experience. This is not one giant market, but several small, specialty markets located within the hustle and bustle of the capital city. Whether you’re looking for fresh produce, fine cuts of beef, or the country’s best horse meat (yes,
horse
meat), you’ll be sure to find it here.

The market’s seafood hall is a hub through which the majority of Chile’s seafood passes. Giant squid, conger eel, oysters the size of my hand, piles of mussels—you name it, if it swims, you’ll find it at Mercado Central. People always ask me about the strangest food I’ve ever encountered. I think piure takes the cake. Piure is a giant sea squirt about the size of a small piece of luggage, and until this market trip, I’d never even heard of such a thing. If you were to encounter one in the ocean, you’d certainly cruise by it a million times, convinced it’s a rock, not food. The best way to eat piure is raw, and the fishmonger slinging the stuff let me try it right there at the market. He took a huge serrated knife—really a sword, it was that huge—and sliced the animal into two giant halves.
Hundreds of pulsing, red, jellyfish, oyster-esque entities live within small nooks and crannies inside the coarse, spongy, rocklike carapace. You simply scoop them out with your fingers, squirt lemon or lime juice on them to both season and coincidentally stun the creatures (which, by the way, are alive and suctioned to your fingers), and pop them into your mouth. These little guys taste like a fish’s rear end dipped in iodine. Not surprisingly, after a few bites, I loved it.