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Speaker 1: I'm in the co pilot seat of this small Cessna plane and we're circling the Bolivian Amazon. Beside me, pilot sweating because we're looking for a place to land and we can't find one. The weather was bad and and the pilot was nervous, and it was it was quite exciting. Behind me. Is this guy just been a day ago? This German accou hunter named Volker Lahman. Bolker looks a bit like the German director Werner Herzog. Sounds like him too. The more dangerous or tricky the situation dance of the kalmar Get. It's two thousand ten, and Folker's letting me tag along. If you searches for a holy grail while cocao tree that gives us chocolate. Coco's native to the Amazon, and now it's farmed all over the tropics, mostly in Africa. A few years before our trip, Focus stumbled upon an incredible variety of wild cow in Bolivia and he turned it into this mind blowing chocolate. So now there's a gold rush for these magic beans, and Volker's hope is to stay one step ahead. There's an indigenous group in the forest of the Europare. Rumor has it they have a ton of wildcata cell So the plan is fly in, find a landing strip, take a dugout canoe to the Eurokari village, strike a deal below us. The jungle looks otherworldly. The whole thing is steaming, miss rising to form these immense thunderheads, and the thunderheads are dropping ropes black rain back to the forest. At one point we punched through a storm and water comes spitting through the vents of the plain. Shoot a glance at the pilot, like what, but he just waves me off. It's getting hard to tell what to worry about and what not to worry about. For that, all I can do is counting vulgar because he's been navigating the Amazon for twenty years. This part of Olivia is all rainforests and grasslands. It's also a major cocaine flyaway. The rivers are dotted with these homemade landing strips and small planes swoop in, pick up the drugs, and head for Brazil. Those landing strips are super convenient if you need to get into the deepoots quickly, which we do, but it's also super dangerous. Hundreds of people get shot in the Amazon every year for all sorts of reasons. Just being an environmental activist is enough, But stumbling upon a cocaine lab that's one of the surest ways to make it happen. But when you need a landing strip, you need a landing strip. The problem is that it's the rainy season and everything is fly it. The rivers have risen like thirty feet, The trees are in standing water, the ground is gleaming like a mirror. At last, there's a strip near a small cabin on the river, but it's really short. The rain swamped part of the landing strip, and the landing strip was homemade. No, it's not official landing strip. The pilot swoops down to get a closer look, and he doesn't like what he sees, and neither do I. He pulls back up and circles the area looking for alternatives, but there are no alternatives. The pilot keeps circling back to that original strip. He's trying to psych himself up, and for all I know, we're running well on fuel. Get vulcars still sitting there like it's another day in the park. And that is making me more nervous because I can tell that his appetite for risk is a lot higher than mine. And then the pilot banks the plane towards that strip. For second, I think, well, this must be another reconnaissance run, because nobody would. Oh no, he's going for it right now. The ground is rising in front of us fast. So I grabbed the handle above the door, tucked my head and brace and we hit actually hits the wrong word. It's super soft thanks to all that spongey ground. So we break hard and slammed the stop spraying puddles, and I'm like, holy sh it, we made it. So I grabbed my back and hop out. Vulkers behind me and it's like, hello Amazon. It's a cathedral. When you're on the ground, there's these massive trees that are dripping thick fines. There's flocks of actual parrots screeching through the canopy. And then from that little cabin up ahead, four guys emerge and they're holding rifles. There were like one guy coming, and then the second, and the third and the fourth, and then they were surrounding us. And I was looking at the pilot and he said, I have to leave because of the weather, and you know, nobody said anything, and so he turned around this plane and off he off he went, and then I realized, oh, we are in the middle of some people we don't know. I was nervous. I am trying not to make any fast moves because these guys are twitchy. Everything they say confirmed my worst fears. They're watching the place for their boss, who's a Columbian man, and we've just landed on his private runway without permission. And I've been in the Amazon for all five minutes, and I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm not really cut out of this cacao anything. And all I can do is look over vulgar and think, I hope the hell you got this from Kaleidostoe and I podcasts. This is Obsessions Wild Chocolate. I'm Rowan Jacobson, Chapter one, The Hunt. So one thing I should explain is that I'm a food writer, but not a normal food writer. I don't write cookbooks or restaurant reviews. Instead, the thing I do is harder to explain. This is All Things Considered from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. Listen to how Rowan Jacobson describes a temperamental mollusk. I kind of think of these as the Sean pen of oysters like very intense and memorable, but you wouldn't want have him every day. Rowan Jacobson talks about oysters the way a lover might recall his favorite conquests. You have to think about the after globe. See what I mean. My call is to bring amazing ingredients to life, to use intense sensory experience as a wormhole to jump into a universe of exotic landscapes, diverse traditions, revelations, and obsessions. Back in two thousand nine, I was writing a book about the world's best ingredients, and I was working on chapter about chocolate. Chocolate, of course, is on anybody's shortlist of great ingredients, as it should be. It's our most complex food. It has more than six hundred different flavor components. If you think of flavor as a kind of language away the world communicates to us through our senses, then chocolate is like epic poetry. It speaks in these lush, rhythmic phrases that sweep over us and sometimes sweep us away at good chocolate does. But the stuff you find in your typical candy aisle that's more brain fart than epic poem. There's just not that much chocolate in your average chocolate bar, and the quality is nothing special. Just like great wine requires great grapes, epic chocolate requires the very best cacalbeans, and those are really hard to find. For decades, nobody outside the Amazon was really looking for them. Now that's change. A new wave of extreme chocolate makers is seeking out the best of the best and using it to make the most intensely delicious chocolate that has ever been made, chocolate that is so different from what has come before that the experience is like some sort of drug. In two thousand nine, I was tasting my way through these trippy bars from my book, and it kept coming across rumors about the trippiest of them all. Supposedly it was the first bar in history that wasn't made out of farm to cacab This one was all wild, sourced from the Amazon rainforest itself, and it tasted like nothing that had come before. Well. Summoning all of my journalistic skills, I managed to track down a bar. I had to order it from Switzerland and it cost me twenty six bucks was shipping, but a week later the FedEx truck dropped the hot little box on my porch and I tore it open. The bars cloaked in snazzy Swiss wrapping, slid off the sleeve and part of the gold foil to reveal a thin plank of chocolate embossed with a feather. I snapped off a shard, placed it on my tongue, and the bottom fell out of the room. It melted like silk, not a trace of bitterness. There's these notes of dried fruit and pipe smoke dancing through my sinuses. It was like finding an old chest in your grandparents attic and sticking your nose inside and breathing in the centuries. It was delicious, for sure, but that was almost beside the point for something else going on, something metaphysical. I don't really have the word for it. All I can say is, compared to all the chocolate I've known, this one tasted real. I wanted more of this wild chocolate, this wild experience, and I resolved to find someone who could lead me into this thicket of flavors. What I couldn't have known at the time was that seeking the answers to those questions was going to lead me into the rainforest again and again in the shadowed laws, civilizations, and in the company of some extraordinary people obsessed with making god level chocolate. It was frequently going to leave me soaked, bitten, miserable, and miles from the nearest bed. It was going to expose me to chocolate's dark history of exploitation and environmental destruction. But it was also going to show me cocow's sacred side and how can we used to protect the rainforest. But on that day in two thousand nine, I just wanted to know if the story was true, if this mythical wild cacao really existed. The chocolate maker said it was being supplied from Bolivia by a man named Vulgar Layman. And that's how I met the Herzog of coco hunting over Skype. Hello. Hey. When I told him that people I asked had never heard of wild cacao, he just laughed. He said, most people in the business have never even seen a cocountry, much less step foot in the rainforest. Basically, they were idiots, not close to being on his level. I go at ahead of the pank. Everybody behind me, No, still trying to catch me. Somehow not possible. I like the intensity he seemed to have swagger. He said, he was taking a trip into your car a territory in search of new sources. So why not come and see for myself what type of details you want me tool send you? Maybe the plant, the logistics. Yeah, I just want just yeah, where you want me and when? Basically, um, and then I'll run it by the podcast people who are interested. They give you money, yeah, hopefully they I'll make sure that they can cover my my flights and so on. Yeah, and then little money and for the steaks and beers and oh yeah, okay, yeah, I pictured that's paddling up a river, joining in wild chocolate ceremonies, rivers of molten deliciousness pouring down our chins. That was the plan anyway, Are there snakes to worry about? They are? Okay. That was age very large crocodile, which brings me back to that landing strip. We're staring at these twittery guys with guns, and I know what they're thinking. For two white dudes to drop out of an airplane in this region means one of two things. Either they think we're undercovered DA or they think we're traffickers, and either way is not good. It seems like that it was close to the weekend and they needed some money to buy food and booze. So I said myself, okay, they have a need to give money, and we have the need to get out of it. So he says, no problem with guys, what's the landing feed and the guys just look at each other, and finally one says five thousand bolivianos, which is about seven fifty bucks. And I'm thinking, oh my god, that's a pretty good deal. We've definitely got enough to swing that. And before I can get there, Bulker says, stone faced, sorry, we don't have that much. I said, look, I am myself. I'm poor. And he started looking at me and like, well, what what a story, you know? And they said, okay, you know, look, I represent a small project and and we're doing with Cacao. We're dealing with the indigenous Jura care people. I'm listening to Votres explanation and I can't tell how persuaded these guys are. Just then Vulgar pulls out five hundred bilianos, which is only seventy five bucks, and offers it up. I take a deep breath and watch, and the guy relaxes and takes the money, and then his buddies relax and suddenly the whole five changes and they invite us to sit down and have a drink. So we're making small talk. He actually want a tool, give me as a gift a book. It was a beat up John Grisham paperback someone had left behind. It was in English. So they us part and I said, no, keep it. You know, we want to travel light until use the money and think of her much and see you there you go how to win friends and influence people in the Amazon. After paying off our new friends, Bolker and I make our way down to the river. Two guys are waiting for us in a long, skinny dugout with an outboard on the back. Aurelio has a white gambler hat, a mustache, a cigarette, and a rifle. Talked into the bow of the canoe full cowboy vibe. In the back of the boat, the pilot Dante, a big guy with the scruppy beard, a huge wad of coca leaves stuffed into his bulgian cheek. We threw our stuff into the middle of the canoe and wedge ourselves in between, trying not to capsize the thing. All right, here goes nothing. Any last words before we launched the voyage, I don't never have last words. This is not the end at all. I want to taste of some of this god level chocolate. We got you covered. Kaliscope has joined forces with Louise Abram and Stetler Chocolate to make a special box to go along with its very podcast taste what has driven many to near madness at www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com. Chocolate is a Mayan thing a thousand years before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, the Maya we're already growing cacao all over Central America and using it for rituals and ceremonies. Maya people are the forced people. Known people used it, concurvated, domesticated it and for us. But it's a gift from the heavens above. That's Julio's the key. He's a man and elder. I met and belieze. Julia has a chocolate company, but he also does demonstrations of traditional Mayan chocolate making. There's a way of teaching others what cacow means to his people. We stood in his dashed hut just off the highway while trucks rattled by as he toasted cacow beans over a wooden fire, then ground them between two stones to form a paste. Then he mixed the paste with hot water and whipped the drink into a froth. This is how his mother did it before him, and her mother before her, sharing the drink and burning the beans on an altar is believed. This is our belief that the prayers that we're seeing, the tanks that we're saying, to the jungle, to the rainforest, to the wind, to the breeze, to the mountains, to the soil, our ancestors would feel it would take it. And this is what we strongly believe the connection is with between the upper world on the the lower world where we are to it. So for usc is essentially it's food. He's like talking about food being a religious experience, but traditionally the creation and consumption of chocolate is just that. Needless to say, that was lost on the first European to encounter cacao, a guy named Christopher Columbus. It was August and Columbus was on his fourth and final voyage to the New World. He'd blown it on the whole passage to India. Thing he hadn't found any big stores of gold, his ships were in tatters, and after his last voyage he'd been carted back to Spain and shackles. He needed a big score, and miraculously, off the coast of Honduras he got it. A huge mind trading canoe more than a hundred feet long, laden with cloth axes, war clubs, corn beer, and what looked like almonds. Columbus hauled them eye on their cargo on board, and when some of those alm and spilled, the mind merchants freaked. Glumbus's son wrote that they scrambled for them as if their eyeballs had fallen out. Obviously, to the Maya, these weird almonds were precious. If you're a master explorer desperate defined treasure, wouldn't you go ashore and see if there's any more of these things lying around? If Colemus had, he'd have learned that the eyeballs rolling around his deck were cacao beans, and they were the lifeblood of Mayan culture. Everybody had a few trees in their backyard, some people had whole forests. No wedding or holiday was complete without a round of hot chocolate whipped into a froth with a nice head of phone. The dried beans could last for years, so they were the coin of the realm. According to records from the fift hundreds, one coco bean to get you it to molly, three an avocado for a salamander, and eight a rabbit or a prostitute. Cocaw is still used as currency in some places. Julio Saki says that when he was growing up and believe in the nineteen seventies, cacao was cash. My mom mused to send me as she heard that somebody just got a fresh neat coming in from the jungle. She would send me over to treat to buy that meat, essentially with that half kilo of coca beats, and the owner never refuses it. They would say, oh wow, yes, yes, yes, here's here's your meat. The point is cocao was the sacred heart of Mine society and Aztec society. The Aztec emperor Montezuma was known to drink fifty cups of chocolate over the course of a single meal. When Spanish conquistadors rated his treasure vaults, they found nine hundred and sixty million cacal beans sitting inside. It was the Fort Knox of the New World, and Spanish quickly claimed it as their own. Soon they'd taken over the whole cocao operation. But they never learned to love chocolate until they began pouring sugar into it. Then they introduced it to Europe and the craze began. Chocolate houses sprang up from England to Austria. They were basically the Starbucks of their day, and Spanish controlled the entire trade. For all the talk of Elderado, the real treasure they found was chocolate. For a while, all the cocoa in the New World came from traditional varieties that had great flavor, But as demand exploded, supplies got tight. The old orchards just couldn't keep up. So the chocolate industry planted cacou all over the tropics, especially in West Africa, where labor was unfortunately cheapest of all, and the industry planted whatever hybrid varieties produced the highest yields, no matter how they tasted, because back then nobody paid extra for flavor. A bean was a bean. There's a saying in West Africa, Mark Christian, one of the world's leading chocolate critics, there's no cemetery for cocoa beans, which means it doesn't matter every single one of them. We sell them because no matter how good are bad they are, Nestlee's or whoever, you know, he's gonna get their hands on them. And then they'll standardize the flavor by smearing it with big vanilla. Maybe it'll go into milk chocolate or whatnot. You know, there are lots of ways to mask it, and they're fine with it because it's about volume, volume, but not taste. And that's still true. But now a few Indiana Jones style cocao hunters like Vulgar are trying something new. They're raising money for expeditions and scouring the jungles for cacao with real flavor, flavors that have been lost for centuries, or in some cases, new flavors no one has ever tasted before. The funny thing is this new way of thinking about chocolate. It's really just the old way of thinking about chocolate. It always was the gold of the forest. We finally got to this city called Boca, which is mouth of Acre, the Acre River, and it was dry season. It was August. That's Louisa Abram, the new rock star of wild Chocolate at twenty two, fresh out of culinary school, she launched her chocolate company and began looking around for source of fantastic cacaw. She heard a rumor that a tiny co op deep in the Amazon had a stash to sell, so she charted a skinny boat and made the trip. The river was so dangerous, Oh my gosh, like I've never saw so many trunks and so many like obstacles. Rivers in Amazonia are filled with buried tree trunks just waiting to impale your boat. It can be treacherous. But they made it through the big river and then they turned down a tiny stream just wide enough for the boat, and they followed it wherever. It was six hours in the little like stream. Suddenly you see like this big ass bridge. Humanous if you would, and you're like, something's here. It was a town of eight people in the middle of the jungle. It was called Mapia, which means heaven, and it was a very particular sort of heaven. We had no idea when we got there. They build the co op to sustain the Santo Daimi Community Center. DAM is a religion based in part on ayahuasca, a drink brewed from psychedelic plants that triggers visions and euphoria. It's part Catholicism, part paganism. It's practitioners drink ayahuasca in group rituals that involve chanting and dancing that goes on all night long. They believe the ayahuasca, or dim as they call it, brings the spirit of the divine into them. The farest around Mapia were filled countries, and the beans were one of the community's main sources of income. It was a perfect way to make a little money while leaving the forest. Intact, Louis loved the idea of working with wild cacao and using it as a way to support the dame A community and to protect their sacred forest. She began making regular visits to the community, slowly learning their ways and winning their trust, but she knew that to really be in sync with them, she needed to experience the ayahuasca. I think for them, it was important that I could see them outside of being a labor force. I could see them as people. I knew that I was going to keep on going there, so I said to one of the leaders in the community, can I be a part of the ceremony tonight. He was so surprised that he invited the whole community, eighty people. And I was afraid, I'm not gonna lie. I was a little bit afraid, like if I take this, it's gonna mess up my mind for my whole entire life. That night, the people gathered in the church with guitars and drums. The church is not a church that like we know, with like four walls, nothing like that. It's open, so you can here the environment. As the night sounds of the forest filtered into the church. Everyone lined up to receive communions. It's a thick drink, almost like a smoothie, and you take it like a shot, and it tastes earthy, bitter. At first, you don't feel nothing, and then it started. I started really feeling different, feeling lighter, feeling happier, feeling more aware of the sounds of the forest. There was this frog making this sound, everyone singing, moving to rhythms, them dancing, and closing my eyes and feeling that union with all the women singing and the men playing the guitar. The noises start becoming a sea of colors, different colors, and like a brushstroke of like purple, pink, and then green neon and then light bloom. It's just synestisia, the waves of color coming towards to me and going backwards. And then fourty minutes later we take another shot. I took three shots. Hour after hour. They keep saying, keep dancing, and the dime is rising within them. It starts becoming like more fluid, and you just like feel euphoria. But at the same time, you know that your energy is resignating towards the person that it's by your side, and the same with that person, and you're dancing the whole time, and you don't feel higher. And then the dima is everywhere, flowing through everyone and everything, emerging, the people and the animals and the vines and the trees into one unified being. Everyone surrounding you, and the forest they were one. Afterwards, she lay in her hammock, floating in the darkness, and she knew she had been changed forever. Here's a confession. There are times on this journey when I thought, hold on, now, what are you people doing? What am I doing? Usually these moments come when I'm hanging in some hammock in the jungle, nursing my bug bites and dreaming about a shower or facing down another dinner of dry fried paranya. Let's face it, this is a crazy way to make a living loan sharks on one end, jaguars on the other, and even if you do everything right, you could better money waiting tables. Sometimes I think a cow is edible gold, and sometimes I think it's fool's gold. But you know what, people keep committing their lives to this and it has nothing to do with money. So what's the draw. Well, that's an easy one. I remember when I first chocolate in my mouth, it was like it was like a drug. They were like, oh my god, Like I was just so amazed. This was like, you know, a classic symphony orchestra. When it's really good chocolate like that, the world screeches to a halt and the heavens let loose. Kind of crazy that a bunch of crust seeds can do that to you. But like I said, chocolate is epic poetry. It gives voice to the rainforest in the language your senses understand perfectly. I never had a chance to experience the sense of dimes eremony like Louisa, But the more time I spent chasing chocolate in the Amazon, the more I realized I didn't have to ayahuasca. It was all part of the well spring, all part of the library of transcendence that this most endangered and mysterious of places still holds. So we took off and we were just floating on on the river of the river was quite high and calm. The turtles normally sit on the on the river bank, on a on a on a little trunk and jump in the water when you passed. I'm in a dugout canoe with Vulkers sitting behind me. We're headed to the Urquari village, three hours downstream. It's our fixer, Ralio's recommendation. He's been selling the vulcan for a while, and when Volker said he was looking for new supplies, Ralio suggested we meet with the uk Arre. We glide over the brown water, leaving the heat and bugs behind at least for the moment. Pink river dolphins surface around us with little gasps. At last, I have time to breathe. Around a bend, we come upon a surreal scene. There were people going with canoes into the forest which were flooded and tried to get the pods from the trees, and so I I saw it, and I saw, oh, well, this is a very unusual situation. We pick a couple of pods ourselves and crack them open on the side of the boat and scoop the white pulp into our mouths. It's delicious, sweet and sour, like lemonade. We spit out the raw seeds, which won't taste like chocolate until they get fermented and roasted. Ulcer's eyes are shining as we passed more boats and trees in the flooded forests, and I start to understand why he's here chasing chocolate, Why anyone would take on such an impossible challenge, Because this place is unlike anywhere else, and he wants to protect it. And in wild cocao, he thinks he's found away. Dante hands me his coca pouch and I stuff a fistful leaves into my cheek and has the alkaloids trickle into my bloodstream and feel like God just bumped up the pop on my monitor. Thunder rolls over the jungle. Howler monkeys roar in response, and as we melt into the forest, I wedged myself into the bow of the boat next to Aurelio's rifle and lean back against the curved wood. Somewhere around the next bend lies revelation, the essence of the Amazon. And I'm not wrong, but be careful what you ask for. So the rain has just been pounding all my long, and the river is now as the rivers reclaimed all the land like, there's just water everywhere. There's no dry land to little walk on. We're supposed to head back up river and very just gonna be full of massive trees tearing down stream. Um and said, moving so fast. I'm not sure the boat's gonna be able to do it, but we'll see. This season on Obsessions, wild chocolate, chocolate sort of forms this vortex that sucks you in. I had no idea what this is going to be, and you keep getting deeper deeper into it. We're lost. What should we do. I can conquer chocolate like I can be the Queen of wild chocolate. There's always this risk of complete boss. It wasn't always money, yeah, but now there's no more money. Basically this like disgruntled guy and his family surrounded the building armed with machetes. We've heard all sorts of things that you know, somebody got shot over this, and I don't like guns, but I mean you saw the stacks of cash in our office. Sometimes I think all this for a damn bar of chocolate. Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I Heart Podcasts, hosted and reported by me Ron Jacobson and produced by Shane mckeit at Nice Marmot Media. Edited by Kate Osborne and Gesh how To Goudar, sound design and mixing by Soundboard. Original music composition by Spencer Stevenson, a k a Botany production help from Bahi ni Short from My Heart Are. Executive producers are Katrina Norval and Nikki Etart. Special thanks to Laura Mayor Costas, Lenos Oswallas and Aaron Kaufman, Will Pearson, conel Burne, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the team at Statler who are helping us make a very special chocolate of our own. That's right, We're working with Louisa and others to protect the rainforest and make delicious Amazonian chocolate. Visit www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com to taste it for yourself. That's www. Dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com. And if you want to hear more of this type of content. Nothing is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews. Please spread the love wherever you listen.
Speaker 1: I'm in the co pilot seat of this small Cessna plane and we're circling the Bolivian Amazon. Beside me, pilot sweating because we're looking for a place to land and we can't find one. The weather was bad and and the pilot was nervous, and it was it was quite exciting. Behind me. Is this guy just been a day ago? This German accou hunter named Volker Lahman. Bolker looks a bit like the German director Werner Herzog. Sounds like him too. The more dangerous or tricky the situation dance of the kalmar Get. It's two thousand ten, and Folker's letting me tag along. If you searches for a holy grail while cocao tree that gives us chocolate. Coco's native to the Amazon, and now it's farmed all over the tropics, mostly in Africa. A few years before our trip, Focus stumbled upon an incredible variety of wild cow in Bolivia and he turned it into this mind blowing chocolate. So now there's a gold rush for these magic beans, and Volker's hope is to stay one step ahead. There's an indigenous group in the forest of the Europare. Rumor has it they have a ton of wildcata cell So the plan is fly in, find a landing strip, take a dugout canoe to the Eurokari village, strike a deal below us. The jungle looks otherworldly. The whole thing is steaming, miss rising to form these immense thunderheads, and the thunderheads are dropping ropes black rain back to the forest. At one point we punched through a storm and water comes spitting through the vents of the plain. Shoot a glance at the pilot, like what, but he just waves me off. It's getting hard to tell what to worry about and what not to worry about. For that, all I can do is counting vulgar because he's been navigating the Amazon for twenty years. This part of Olivia is all rainforests and grasslands. It's also a major cocaine flyaway. The rivers are dotted with these homemade landing strips and small planes swoop in, pick up the drugs, and head for Brazil. Those landing strips are super convenient if you need to get into the deepoots quickly, which we do, but it's also super dangerous. Hundreds of people get shot in the Amazon every year for all sorts of reasons. Just being an environmental activist is enough, But stumbling upon a cocaine lab that's one of the surest ways to make it happen. But when you need a landing strip, you need a landing strip. The problem is that it's the rainy season and everything is fly it. The rivers have risen like thirty feet, The trees are in standing water, the ground is gleaming like a mirror. At last, there's a strip near a small cabin on the river, but it's really short. The rain swamped part of the landing strip, and the landing strip was homemade. No, it's not official landing strip. The pilot swoops down to get a closer look, and he doesn't like what he sees, and neither do I. He pulls back up and circles the area looking for alternatives, but there are no alternatives. The pilot keeps circling back to that original strip. He's trying to psych himself up, and for all I know, we're running well on fuel. Get vulcars still sitting there like it's another day in the park. And that is making me more nervous because I can tell that his appetite for risk is a lot higher than mine. And then the pilot banks the plane towards that strip. For second, I think, well, this must be another reconnaissance run, because nobody would. Oh no, he's going for it right now. The ground is rising in front of us fast. So I grabbed the handle above the door, tucked my head and brace and we hit actually hits the wrong word. It's super soft thanks to all that spongey ground. So we break hard and slammed the stop spraying puddles, and I'm like, holy sh it, we made it. So I grabbed my back and hop out. Vulkers behind me and it's like, hello Amazon. It's a cathedral. When you're on the ground, there's these massive trees that are dripping thick fines. There's flocks of actual parrots screeching through the canopy. And then from that little cabin up ahead, four guys emerge and they're holding rifles. There were like one guy coming, and then the second, and the third and the fourth, and then they were surrounding us. And I was looking at the pilot and he said, I have to leave because of the weather, and you know, nobody said anything, and so he turned around this plane and off he off he went, and then I realized, oh, we are in the middle of some people we don't know. I was nervous. I am trying not to make any fast moves because these guys are twitchy. Everything they say confirmed my worst fears. They're watching the place for their boss, who's a Columbian man, and we've just landed on his private runway without permission. And I've been in the Amazon for all five minutes, and I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm not really cut out of this cacao anything. And all I can do is look over vulgar and think, I hope the hell you got this from Kaleidostoe and I podcasts. This is Obsessions Wild Chocolate. I'm Rowan Jacobson, Chapter one, The Hunt. So one thing I should explain is that I'm a food writer, but not a normal food writer. I don't write cookbooks or restaurant reviews. Instead, the thing I do is harder to explain. This is All Things Considered from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. Listen to how Rowan Jacobson describes a temperamental mollusk. I kind of think of these as the Sean pen of oysters like very intense and memorable, but you wouldn't want have him every day. Rowan Jacobson talks about oysters the way a lover might recall his favorite conquests. You have to think about the after globe. See what I mean. My call is to bring amazing ingredients to life, to use intense sensory experience as a wormhole to jump into a universe of exotic landscapes, diverse traditions, revelations, and obsessions. Back in two thousand nine, I was writing a book about the world's best ingredients, and I was working on chapter about chocolate. Chocolate, of course, is on anybody's shortlist of great ingredients, as it should be. It's our most complex food. It has more than six hundred different flavor components. If you think of flavor as a kind of language away the world communicates to us through our senses, then chocolate is like epic poetry. It speaks in these lush, rhythmic phrases that sweep over us and sometimes sweep us away at good chocolate does. But the stuff you find in your typical candy aisle that's more brain fart than epic poem. There's just not that much chocolate in your average chocolate bar, and the quality is nothing special. Just like great wine requires great grapes, epic chocolate requires the very best cacalbeans, and those are really hard to find. For decades, nobody outside the Amazon was really looking for them. Now that's change. A new wave of extreme chocolate makers is seeking out the best of the best and using it to make the most intensely delicious chocolate that has ever been made, chocolate that is so different from what has come before that the experience is like some sort of drug. In two thousand nine, I was tasting my way through these trippy bars from my book, and it kept coming across rumors about the trippiest of them all. Supposedly it was the first bar in history that wasn't made out of farm to cacab This one was all wild, sourced from the Amazon rainforest itself, and it tasted like nothing that had come before. Well. Summoning all of my journalistic skills, I managed to track down a bar. I had to order it from Switzerland and it cost me twenty six bucks was shipping, but a week later the FedEx truck dropped the hot little box on my porch and I tore it open. The bars cloaked in snazzy Swiss wrapping, slid off the sleeve and part of the gold foil to reveal a thin plank of chocolate embossed with a feather. I snapped off a shard, placed it on my tongue, and the bottom fell out of the room. It melted like silk, not a trace of bitterness. There's these notes of dried fruit and pipe smoke dancing through my sinuses. It was like finding an old chest in your grandparents attic and sticking your nose inside and breathing in the centuries. It was delicious, for sure, but that was almost beside the point for something else going on, something metaphysical. I don't really have the word for it. All I can say is, compared to all the chocolate I've known, this one tasted real. I wanted more of this wild chocolate, this wild experience, and I resolved to find someone who could lead me into this thicket of flavors. What I couldn't have known at the time was that seeking the answers to those questions was going to lead me into the rainforest again and again in the shadowed laws, civilizations, and in the company of some extraordinary people obsessed with making god level chocolate. It was frequently going to leave me soaked, bitten, miserable, and miles from the nearest bed. It was going to expose me to chocolate's dark history of exploitation and environmental destruction. But it was also going to show me cocow's sacred side and how can we used to protect the rainforest. But on that day in two thousand nine, I just wanted to know if the story was true, if this mythical wild cacao really existed. The chocolate maker said it was being supplied from Bolivia by a man named Vulgar Layman. And that's how I met the Herzog of coco hunting over Skype. Hello. Hey. When I told him that people I asked had never heard of wild cacao, he just laughed. He said, most people in the business have never even seen a cocountry, much less step foot in the rainforest. Basically, they were idiots, not close to being on his level. I go at ahead of the pank. Everybody behind me, No, still trying to catch me. Somehow not possible. I like the intensity he seemed to have swagger. He said, he was taking a trip into your car a territory in search of new sources. So why not come and see for myself what type of details you want me tool send you? Maybe the plant, the logistics. Yeah, I just want just yeah, where you want me and when? Basically, um, and then I'll run it by the podcast people who are interested. They give you money, yeah, hopefully they I'll make sure that they can cover my my flights and so on. Yeah, and then little money and for the steaks and beers and oh yeah, okay, yeah, I pictured that's paddling up a river, joining in wild chocolate ceremonies, rivers of molten deliciousness pouring down our chins. That was the plan anyway, Are there snakes to worry about? They are? Okay. That was age very large crocodile, which brings me back to that landing strip. We're staring at these twittery guys with guns, and I know what they're thinking. For two white dudes to drop out of an airplane in this region means one of two things. Either they think we're undercovered DA or they think we're traffickers, and either way is not good. It seems like that it was close to the weekend and they needed some money to buy food and booze. So I said myself, okay, they have a need to give money, and we have the need to get out of it. So he says, no problem with guys, what's the landing feed and the guys just look at each other, and finally one says five thousand bolivianos, which is about seven fifty bucks. And I'm thinking, oh my god, that's a pretty good deal. We've definitely got enough to swing that. And before I can get there, Bulker says, stone faced, sorry, we don't have that much. I said, look, I am myself. I'm poor. And he started looking at me and like, well, what what a story, you know? And they said, okay, you know, look, I represent a small project and and we're doing with Cacao. We're dealing with the indigenous Jura care people. I'm listening to Votres explanation and I can't tell how persuaded these guys are. Just then Vulgar pulls out five hundred bilianos, which is only seventy five bucks, and offers it up. I take a deep breath and watch, and the guy relaxes and takes the money, and then his buddies relax and suddenly the whole five changes and they invite us to sit down and have a drink. So we're making small talk. He actually want a tool, give me as a gift a book. It was a beat up John Grisham paperback someone had left behind. It was in English. So they us part and I said, no, keep it. You know, we want to travel light until use the money and think of her much and see you there you go how to win friends and influence people in the Amazon. After paying off our new friends, Bolker and I make our way down to the river. Two guys are waiting for us in a long, skinny dugout with an outboard on the back. Aurelio has a white gambler hat, a mustache, a cigarette, and a rifle. Talked into the bow of the canoe full cowboy vibe. In the back of the boat, the pilot Dante, a big guy with the scruppy beard, a huge wad of coca leaves stuffed into his bulgian cheek. We threw our stuff into the middle of the canoe and wedge ourselves in between, trying not to capsize the thing. All right, here goes nothing. Any last words before we launched the voyage, I don't never have last words. This is not the end at all. I want to taste of some of this god level chocolate. We got you covered. Kaliscope has joined forces with Louise Abram and Stetler Chocolate to make a special box to go along with its very podcast taste what has driven many to near madness at www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com. Chocolate is a Mayan thing a thousand years before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, the Maya we're already growing cacao all over Central America and using it for rituals and ceremonies. Maya people are the forced people. Known people used it, concurvated, domesticated it and for us. But it's a gift from the heavens above. That's Julio's the key. He's a man and elder. I met and belieze. Julia has a chocolate company, but he also does demonstrations of traditional Mayan chocolate making. There's a way of teaching others what cacow means to his people. We stood in his dashed hut just off the highway while trucks rattled by as he toasted cacow beans over a wooden fire, then ground them between two stones to form a paste. Then he mixed the paste with hot water and whipped the drink into a froth. This is how his mother did it before him, and her mother before her, sharing the drink and burning the beans on an altar is believed. This is our belief that the prayers that we're seeing, the tanks that we're saying, to the jungle, to the rainforest, to the wind, to the breeze, to the mountains, to the soil, our ancestors would feel it would take it. And this is what we strongly believe the connection is with between the upper world on the the lower world where we are to it. So for usc is essentially it's food. He's like talking about food being a religious experience, but traditionally the creation and consumption of chocolate is just that. Needless to say, that was lost on the first European to encounter cacao, a guy named Christopher Columbus. It was August and Columbus was on his fourth and final voyage to the New World. He'd blown it on the whole passage to India. Thing he hadn't found any big stores of gold, his ships were in tatters, and after his last voyage he'd been carted back to Spain and shackles. He needed a big score, and miraculously, off the coast of Honduras he got it. A huge mind trading canoe more than a hundred feet long, laden with cloth axes, war clubs, corn beer, and what looked like almonds. Columbus hauled them eye on their cargo on board, and when some of those alm and spilled, the mind merchants freaked. Glumbus's son wrote that they scrambled for them as if their eyeballs had fallen out. Obviously, to the Maya, these weird almonds were precious. If you're a master explorer desperate defined treasure, wouldn't you go ashore and see if there's any more of these things lying around? If Colemus had, he'd have learned that the eyeballs rolling around his deck were cacao beans, and they were the lifeblood of Mayan culture. Everybody had a few trees in their backyard, some people had whole forests. No wedding or holiday was complete without a round of hot chocolate whipped into a froth with a nice head of phone. The dried beans could last for years, so they were the coin of the realm. According to records from the fift hundreds, one coco bean to get you it to molly, three an avocado for a salamander, and eight a rabbit or a prostitute. Cocaw is still used as currency in some places. Julio Saki says that when he was growing up and believe in the nineteen seventies, cacao was cash. My mom mused to send me as she heard that somebody just got a fresh neat coming in from the jungle. She would send me over to treat to buy that meat, essentially with that half kilo of coca beats, and the owner never refuses it. They would say, oh wow, yes, yes, yes, here's here's your meat. The point is cocao was the sacred heart of Mine society and Aztec society. The Aztec emperor Montezuma was known to drink fifty cups of chocolate over the course of a single meal. When Spanish conquistadors rated his treasure vaults, they found nine hundred and sixty million cacal beans sitting inside. It was the Fort Knox of the New World, and Spanish quickly claimed it as their own. Soon they'd taken over the whole cocao operation. But they never learned to love chocolate until they began pouring sugar into it. Then they introduced it to Europe and the craze began. Chocolate houses sprang up from England to Austria. They were basically the Starbucks of their day, and Spanish controlled the entire trade. For all the talk of Elderado, the real treasure they found was chocolate. For a while, all the cocoa in the New World came from traditional varieties that had great flavor, But as demand exploded, supplies got tight. The old orchards just couldn't keep up. So the chocolate industry planted cacou all over the tropics, especially in West Africa, where labor was unfortunately cheapest of all, and the industry planted whatever hybrid varieties produced the highest yields, no matter how they tasted, because back then nobody paid extra for flavor. A bean was a bean. There's a saying in West Africa, Mark Christian, one of the world's leading chocolate critics, there's no cemetery for cocoa beans, which means it doesn't matter every single one of them. We sell them because no matter how good are bad they are, Nestlee's or whoever, you know, he's gonna get their hands on them. And then they'll standardize the flavor by smearing it with big vanilla. Maybe it'll go into milk chocolate or whatnot. You know, there are lots of ways to mask it, and they're fine with it because it's about volume, volume, but not taste. And that's still true. But now a few Indiana Jones style cocao hunters like Vulgar are trying something new. They're raising money for expeditions and scouring the jungles for cacao with real flavor, flavors that have been lost for centuries, or in some cases, new flavors no one has ever tasted before. The funny thing is this new way of thinking about chocolate. It's really just the old way of thinking about chocolate. It always was the gold of the forest. We finally got to this city called Boca, which is mouth of Acre, the Acre River, and it was dry season. It was August. That's Louisa Abram, the new rock star of wild Chocolate at twenty two, fresh out of culinary school, she launched her chocolate company and began looking around for source of fantastic cacaw. She heard a rumor that a tiny co op deep in the Amazon had a stash to sell, so she charted a skinny boat and made the trip. The river was so dangerous, Oh my gosh, like I've never saw so many trunks and so many like obstacles. Rivers in Amazonia are filled with buried tree trunks just waiting to impale your boat. It can be treacherous. But they made it through the big river and then they turned down a tiny stream just wide enough for the boat, and they followed it wherever. It was six hours in the little like stream. Suddenly you see like this big ass bridge. Humanous if you would, and you're like, something's here. It was a town of eight people in the middle of the jungle. It was called Mapia, which means heaven, and it was a very particular sort of heaven. We had no idea when we got there. They build the co op to sustain the Santo Daimi Community Center. DAM is a religion based in part on ayahuasca, a drink brewed from psychedelic plants that triggers visions and euphoria. It's part Catholicism, part paganism. It's practitioners drink ayahuasca in group rituals that involve chanting and dancing that goes on all night long. They believe the ayahuasca, or dim as they call it, brings the spirit of the divine into them. The farest around Mapia were filled countries, and the beans were one of the community's main sources of income. It was a perfect way to make a little money while leaving the forest. Intact, Louis loved the idea of working with wild cacao and using it as a way to support the dame A community and to protect their sacred forest. She began making regular visits to the community, slowly learning their ways and winning their trust, but she knew that to really be in sync with them, she needed to experience the ayahuasca. I think for them, it was important that I could see them outside of being a labor force. I could see them as people. I knew that I was going to keep on going there, so I said to one of the leaders in the community, can I be a part of the ceremony tonight. He was so surprised that he invited the whole community, eighty people. And I was afraid, I'm not gonna lie. I was a little bit afraid, like if I take this, it's gonna mess up my mind for my whole entire life. That night, the people gathered in the church with guitars and drums. The church is not a church that like we know, with like four walls, nothing like that. It's open, so you can here the environment. As the night sounds of the forest filtered into the church. Everyone lined up to receive communions. It's a thick drink, almost like a smoothie, and you take it like a shot, and it tastes earthy, bitter. At first, you don't feel nothing, and then it started. I started really feeling different, feeling lighter, feeling happier, feeling more aware of the sounds of the forest. There was this frog making this sound, everyone singing, moving to rhythms, them dancing, and closing my eyes and feeling that union with all the women singing and the men playing the guitar. The noises start becoming a sea of colors, different colors, and like a brushstroke of like purple, pink, and then green neon and then light bloom. It's just synestisia, the waves of color coming towards to me and going backwards. And then fourty minutes later we take another shot. I took three shots. Hour after hour. They keep saying, keep dancing, and the dime is rising within them. It starts becoming like more fluid, and you just like feel euphoria. But at the same time, you know that your energy is resignating towards the person that it's by your side, and the same with that person, and you're dancing the whole time, and you don't feel higher. And then the dima is everywhere, flowing through everyone and everything, emerging, the people and the animals and the vines and the trees into one unified being. Everyone surrounding you, and the forest they were one. Afterwards, she lay in her hammock, floating in the darkness, and she knew she had been changed forever. Here's a confession. There are times on this journey when I thought, hold on, now, what are you people doing? What am I doing? Usually these moments come when I'm hanging in some hammock in the jungle, nursing my bug bites and dreaming about a shower or facing down another dinner of dry fried paranya. Let's face it, this is a crazy way to make a living loan sharks on one end, jaguars on the other, and even if you do everything right, you could better money waiting tables. Sometimes I think a cow is edible gold, and sometimes I think it's fool's gold. But you know what, people keep committing their lives to this and it has nothing to do with money. So what's the draw. Well, that's an easy one. I remember when I first chocolate in my mouth, it was like it was like a drug. They were like, oh my god, Like I was just so amazed. This was like, you know, a classic symphony orchestra. When it's really good chocolate like that, the world screeches to a halt and the heavens let loose. Kind of crazy that a bunch of crust seeds can do that to you. But like I said, chocolate is epic poetry. It gives voice to the rainforest in the language your senses understand perfectly. I never had a chance to experience the sense of dimes eremony like Louisa, But the more time I spent chasing chocolate in the Amazon, the more I realized I didn't have to ayahuasca. It was all part of the well spring, all part of the library of transcendence that this most endangered and mysterious of places still holds. So we took off and we were just floating on on the river of the river was quite high and calm. The turtles normally sit on the on the river bank, on a on a on a little trunk and jump in the water when you passed. I'm in a dugout canoe with Vulkers sitting behind me. We're headed to the Urquari village, three hours downstream. It's our fixer, Ralio's recommendation. He's been selling the vulcan for a while, and when Volker said he was looking for new supplies, Ralio suggested we meet with the uk Arre. We glide over the brown water, leaving the heat and bugs behind at least for the moment. Pink river dolphins surface around us with little gasps. At last, I have time to breathe. Around a bend, we come upon a surreal scene. There were people going with canoes into the forest which were flooded and tried to get the pods from the trees, and so I I saw it, and I saw, oh, well, this is a very unusual situation. We pick a couple of pods ourselves and crack them open on the side of the boat and scoop the white pulp into our mouths. It's delicious, sweet and sour, like lemonade. We spit out the raw seeds, which won't taste like chocolate until they get fermented and roasted. Ulcer's eyes are shining as we passed more boats and trees in the flooded forests, and I start to understand why he's here chasing chocolate, Why anyone would take on such an impossible challenge, Because this place is unlike anywhere else, and he wants to protect it. And in wild cocao, he thinks he's found away. Dante hands me his coca pouch and I stuff a fistful leaves into my cheek and has the alkaloids trickle into my bloodstream and feel like God just bumped up the pop on my monitor. Thunder rolls over the jungle. Howler monkeys roar in response, and as we melt into the forest, I wedged myself into the bow of the boat next to Aurelio's rifle and lean back against the curved wood. Somewhere around the next bend lies revelation, the essence of the Amazon. And I'm not wrong, but be careful what you ask for. So the rain has just been pounding all my long, and the river is now as the rivers reclaimed all the land like, there's just water everywhere. There's no dry land to little walk on. We're supposed to head back up river and very just gonna be full of massive trees tearing down stream. Um and said, moving so fast. I'm not sure the boat's gonna be able to do it, but we'll see. This season on Obsessions, wild chocolate, chocolate sort of forms this vortex that sucks you in. I had no idea what this is going to be, and you keep getting deeper deeper into it. We're lost. What should we do. I can conquer chocolate like I can be the Queen of wild chocolate. There's always this risk of complete boss. It wasn't always money, yeah, but now there's no more money. Basically this like disgruntled guy and his family surrounded the building armed with machetes. We've heard all sorts of things that you know, somebody got shot over this, and I don't like guns, but I mean you saw the stacks of cash in our office. Sometimes I think all this for a damn bar of chocolate. Wild Chocolate is a Kaleidoscope production with I Heart Podcasts, hosted and reported by me Ron Jacobson and produced by Shane mckeit at Nice Marmot Media. Edited by Kate Osborne and Gesh how To Goudar, sound design and mixing by Soundboard. Original music composition by Spencer Stevenson, a k a Botany production help from Bahi ni Short from My Heart Are. Executive producers are Katrina Norval and Nikki Etart. Special thanks to Laura Mayor Costas, Lenos Oswallas and Aaron Kaufman, Will Pearson, conel Burne, Bob Pittman, Daria Daniel and the team at Statler who are helping us make a very special chocolate of our own. That's right, We're working with Louisa and others to protect the rainforest and make delicious Amazonian chocolate. Visit www dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com to taste it for yourself. That's www. Dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com. And if you want to hear more of this type of content. Nothing is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope than subscribers, ratings, and reviews. Please spread the love wherever you listen.
