Welcome to the Jungle: Adventures in Bolivia Part 3 | S5E07 | MeatEater

[Music] [Music] i'm stephen runella to me hunting isn't only about the pursuit of an animal it's about who we are and what we're made of i live to hunt and hunt to live i am a meat eater i've spent the past week hunting and fishing deep in the jungles of central bolivia and south america my guides are patrick and federico of angling frontiers who lead fishing expeditions up this remote stretch of river to pursue the prized golden dorado but my real teachers on this adventure have been the crew of native chamane men who we hired to help us make the journey for them hunting is more than a lifestyle it's a matter of survival and observing them has challenged some of my own personal taboos such as poisoning fish and hunting and eating primates there is no meat parallel to that but witnessing those things firsthand has opened my mind to an entirely new notion of what it means to be a modern day hunter now i've headed into the jungle with marco and alberto two of the most seasoned hunters in our group we're out night hunting with flashlights for the chamane it's the preferred way of hunting mammals though in my native land it's a practice that is largely illegal not long after we got started i got nailed on the ankle by a bullet ant which equates to an hour of pure misery followed by an hour of your standard sucky kind of misery but marco treated the bite with a local anesthetic and eventually the pain subsided enough that i could press on [Music] the cacophony of the jungle at night is deafening and also confusing it sounds like we're surrounded by animals but all we see is the occasional rustle of leaves where they've been [Music] we catch a few glimpses of mysterious critters and get a good look at a regular old possum no come out but for whatever reason these animals are ignored by the chimane i think these guys are looking for bigger meteor game of course i cannot ask them outright the one language we have in common spanish none of us can actually speak very well we've been gradually learning how to communicate with gestures but there's still plenty that i do not understand [Music] oh something i just got yelled at i think oh oh now i'm gonna held it again [Music] so [Music] what is that [Music] huh okay yeah rocket deer deer of the jungle i had no idea what was going on but i saw marco get kind of excited and move forward with the shotgun and he shot and it sounded like something huge going down and i now see that he hit the deer with buckshot but only hit it in the nose area so it was confused but hardly mortally wounded [Music] it's cool to have my bow handy to help them finish it off because they treat shotgun shells like bars of gold they do not waste shotgun shells [Music] it's nice to have my bow because i feel that they like relate to me as a hunter more and seem very willing to show me stuff and take me seriously [Music] okay back at camp marco and alberto begin to butcher the brocket deer at the edge of the river i lend a hand and it's obvious to me that the differences in our approach to hunting are not limited to what happens before the kill i've seen hundreds and hundreds of deer cut up i've never seen one cut up quite like this when it gutted the deer in the field they gutted it from the diaphragm back so you take out the organs that sour quickly and leave all the edible stuff forward and then he just pulled all the other parts out the heart lung liver out and then beheaded and quartered the deer hide on with good learning experience i'm just curious to see how this is going to play out it's interesting that you have um so many like do's and don'ts just don't do this and don't do that when you're cutting up meat but all these things you're like never ever you know get it all wet it's all wet and it's hotter than hello in addition to the deer the other guys have hand lined a couple of maturo catfish that will butcher as well they do cut off some fillets but for the most part the catfish is left largely on the bone almost all of it is salted and stored in bags to take home none of it goes to waste so there's no like taking certain parts hucking them out in the river and keeping other parts i mean it just all gets cooked [Music] the next morning the nighttime rain has carried over to dampen our breakfast but marco will not be deterred he's built a shelter to cover our cooking area when we first came out there was this big wall primarily between me and the guys there around the crew everything being separate all the time i think through fishing together and hunting together and then because i'm really interested in the food it just got a lot more comfortable and a lot more loose look at the time i used to feel kind of like not real welcome where i'd come up and everybody sort of drift away but it's nice now to be able to hang out [Music] the deer meat still hair on skin on they cut into the thick spots you see like here's the back ham they kind of splated open and salted it very heavily now it's going on this smoker rack with one catfish head the meat will smoke all day if i came over to some dude's house like where i grew up in michigan and i saw that he was cooking deer like this i'd be like oh man you got it all wrong you know and it really opens up your idea there are many ways to do things if the skin wasn't on there i'd have kind of an idea of what it's going to wind up being like i cannot picture what it's going to wind up being like i'm very excited and intrigued by this i can't wait to eat this [Music] and for breakfast took some of the deer meat seems like some meat off the back leg butterflied these pieces and put a lot of salt on them and deep fried them it's very good wildly different diet wildly different location but that venison just has that great venison taste to it meanwhile the catfish is being made into a stew that's similar to how the monkey was prepared it's a big pot and they put the catfish back bones i think one of the heads is in their tail just like the scraps of the catfish one thing you see in all the cooking we bought a lot of it on the way up at the villages we passed is bought tons of plantains and they'll add that in there and that'll wind up being as thick as porridge it'll wind up being almost like uh like very thin grits [Music] a very good fish man like honestly that catfish cooked that way tastes like grouper to me and has the same texture and flavor and density as grouper i would never eat that and think that that was a freshwater fish waiting for the deer to smoke gives us one more good opportunity to do some fishing so marco and i grab our bows and head to a small tributary that has the clearest water we've seen this whole trip see ya torana salomon oh [Music] at this point i've developed something of a rapport with my companions the language barrier that seemed so insurmountable before now feels less daunting we communicate pretty effectively with simple hand gestures and facial expressions and maybe a word or two of spanish here and there there's a connection now and it's refreshing a lot of us have gotten so far away from the land from connections with food [Music] it's just a wonderful experience to be able to hunt with some people who've maintained a constant intergenerational connection to the land and to hunting the same place [Music] i'm of italian descent a little bit and a bunch of other stuff i don't even know i'm not like an ancestral hunter and things got lost during those generations and generations of my family that didn't hunt it's a little out of my comfort zone for range right there but i think to be able to go out with people mark where that chain is unbroken is it's just like rejuvenating to me i mean it makes me feel so alive and grateful [Music] [Music] after a light drizzle the sun comes out and visibility improves there are fish everywhere that's when i get my most satisfying catch of the day [Music] it's a tanker [Music] that's the first one of these i've seen but they keep talking about a fish that lives here called yaturana look he's got like a piranha-like tooth they're very popular fish to eat these guys like them a lot it's been an exciting afternoon and the perfect cap to the trip got their honor all that's left now is to head back to camp and enjoy a mixed and somewhat odd collection of meat from the jungle [Music] [Music] it's our last night in camp and we're having a like a banquet of sorts [Music] we've got a ton of stuff including the yadarana that i arrowed it's been heavily salted and is now resting on a grill over the fire while we were fishing some of the chimane bagged a couple of large game birds that came through the forest canopy over the camp they've got a razor build curacao and a crested guan some of it will be fried some stewed with rice then of course there's the brocket deer which has been smoking all day so this is like dried meat you bring home you just pull pieces off it and chew em up and it's just like smoked jerky [Music] the food here is born of the place literally and also it's born of the climate everything is cooked well it has to do with the lack of refrigeration and just like a food safety thing that's come up over time a lot of things are smoke you know it's like again but in a really hot place a lot of humidity things rot instantly here you're really seeing how our own ancestors used to harvest and prepare food if you want to get a good glimpse of what our home was like i think you have to travel far away from our homeland to start getting a better sense of like where we came from and this is probably the most vivid look you will get at the truly ancestral ways of cooking like true local boarism [Music] everything ready we all sit down to enjoy the fruits of our labor and it's very satisfying knowing that everyone here contributed to this meal in some way that looks good man but what strikes me most is just how familiar the camaraderie feels a bunch of fellas enjoying some laughs and some wild game we could just as well be dove hunters standing around a grill in virginia or hog hunters at a luau in hawaii that's a nice fish man very meaty really tasty yeah very beady as excited as we might get about the most exotic distant complicated dishes that excitement is not any higher than what people get about this food here the shank is super good [Music] it's not like through all of our complexity in our wealth we achieve some higher level of satisfaction from things i just i just really don't think we have you can find the same level of happiness in much simpler ways than we have success he says that is a song about this trip it says about how he came here to the jungle with his friends and clients and then went out fishing and hunting and came back and cha paper the food and ate it all together in a good time so patrick and federico i want you to thank all your guys for working so hard to help to help show us such a remarkable place gracias i like their home because all the fish and animals taste so good thank you an exception to my earlier statement about how scenes like this play out all around the world is that the camaraderie in those cases usually carries with it an assumption that you'll at least try to meet again maybe next year's opening day at deer season or when the weather turns and the ducks come through but honestly way down here that's just not gonna happen i know that this trip was a rare glimpse into another way of life that i will not get again i'm reminded of something that's known to most fishermen it's when you tie into some huge fish and you don't even know what it is all you really know is that you'll never land it you try to enjoy the fight for a second or two knowing full well the fish is gonna bust you off and you will not hear from it again i can't escape the sense that something very similar happened down here i wanted to get to know the chimane and for a good chunk of time i had them on the line but all along i knew it would end before i ever got a really good look the line inevitably had to break all that's left is to remember the feeling and be grateful that you felt it you

Channel: MeatEater

Views: 215,193

Rating: 4.9647102 out of 5

Keywords: Steve rinella, Steven rinella, bass fishing, bolivia, bow fishing, deer hunting, elk hunting, fishing, fly fishing, hunting, jungle fishing, meat eater, meateater, saltwater fishing, travel, turkey hunting

Id: cU88WfI4C5w

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021