The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 060: Guyana. Steven Rinella talks with Makushi guide and fisherman Rovin Alvin, along with Garret Smith, Rick Smith, Korey Kaczmarek, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: April 20, 2017

Subjects discussed: bear spray used in all the wrong ways; This Hole Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us-the next great American fishing novel; Guyana and Amerindians; big ass yams; casiri, paracari, local drink, farine; capibara, maccaw, toucan, and harpy; how to hunt an arapaima; the Latvian Eagle's mystery fish, a.k.a. the flower-eating-rainstorm piranha; handlining; Relaxation Culture; hammock sleeping; getting cursed by a jealous shaman; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, the first order of business that we have has nothing to do with what we're doing or where we are.

But, dude, we were talking about whether people actually spray themselves with pepper spray one day. And because there's this rumor you always hear about a Japanese woman who went to Yellowstone National Park and doused her kids down with bear spray as like a repellent, like you would with insect repellent. And I was saying I didn't know if that's true. And this dude wrote in, this guy writes in, he used to fly 207s. as like a repellent, like you would with insect repellent. And I was saying I didn't know if that's true. And this dude wrote in, this guy writes in, he used to fly 207s,

you know, Cessna 207s in southeast Alaska. Oh, actually, we talked about this, we got to talk about RUARC. RUARC. A correction. Another correction. Okay. So this guy used to fly 207s in southeast alaska this didn't happen to him but it happened at the place he worked where a guy a tourist wanted to get dropped off at a place near haynes alaska and he wanted to bring along his bear spray with him and they had

it in a and he put they would fly with bear spray so long as they could put it inside a PVC tube and then lock it in a.50 cal ammo can and then stash it in the nose compartment of the plane. The pilot brings this guy into an airstrip for a little hike about, drops the dude off, gives him his bear spray, and the pilot lifts off. And as he's circling on, he and the the hiker is laid out on the ground circles again the hiker doesn't get up and lands the plane and goes over there and sure enough the hiker had put his bear spray on himself as a repellent and was diagnosed with chemical pneumonia and spent his vacation in the hospital. When you get that.

Wow. The other thing is, is another dude wrote in to say, I had credited Robert Rourke with writing Death in the Tall Grass. If we had an internet connection, I'd tell you who did write it, but he told me that that's not who wrote Death in the Tall Grass. No, it's Peter Kapstick. There you go. Why didn't you bring that up when we were talking about it?

He was just zoning out. I was in the zone, I guess. You know, it's funny because I do remember talking about Ruark and I remember thinking... So you'd let me say like a bald face? That's not his best book. His best book is The Old Man and the Boy is Ruark. And Ruark is Use Enough enough gun i'm sorry i just

missed it in passing no all right it's because we tune you out steve yeah speaking of literature um i got a book idea for any aspiring writers out there it's called this hole ain't big enough for both of us and what it is is a fishing book and and like with fishing books like you look at hemingway's the old man in the sea right it's about fishing but it's not it's a fishing book. And with fishing books, you look at Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, right? It's about fishing, but it's not. It's about growing old and tenacity and perseverance and the futility of it all, right? And then River Runs Through It, it's supposed to be about fishing, but it's about fatherhood, brotherhood, what are your obligations to the people that love you. And This Hole Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us will be a fishing book that's about a love triangle. brotherhood what are your obligations to the people that love you and um this hole ain't

big enough for both of us will be a fishing book that's about a love triangle oh the title like right speaks volumes um so there i'm throwing a bone to any aspiring writers. Now, we are in Guyana, and Guyana is in northeast South America. So if you imagine the Caribbean or the Caribbean, Guyana, its coast is on the north and faces up into the Caribbean, and some of its biggest rivers flow out into the Caribbean. If you go to the headwaters of certain rivers, you'd kind of drop down into the Caribbean. If you go to the headwaters of certain rivers, you'd kind of like drop down into the Amazon basin.

It's 90% rainforest. 90% of the population lives on 10% of the land. And the land, how do you, Rovan, Alvin's here with us, and Rovan is Makushi, Amerindian, born in Rewa village. That's all true and correct, right? Yeah, correct. The coastal peoples are largely like descendants of slaves and other laborers that were brought in to work plantations on the coast. Guyana is now an independent nation. It's bordered by Suriname, Brazil, Venezuela.

But in the interior jungles where we are, it's primarily Amerindians. And Robic, you named some of the different tribes of Amerindians that live in this area? I know you have the Makushi. Then we have the Wapishana. Those are the guys that come down that river upstream from here. Right, right. Patamona. And then Waiwai.

Waiwai? Arawak. And Kareeb, right? But they were on the coast. Yeah, Kareeb, yeah. They were coastal. Right, they were in the coast. Yeah.

So the biggest river that drains Guyana is the Esquibo. And when the Esquibo flows out into the southern Caribbean, it's a giant river. I think it's the third largest river in South America. It's got a delta that's 20 miles wide. If you go way the hell up the Esquibo. You come to the confluence of the Rewa River and the Rupanuni. Am I saying that right?

River. Like they flow together right here where we're sitting right now. Yeah. Come straight to the Rupanuni then Rewa River. Oh, so you go

you enter the Rupanuni then Rewa River. Rewa River. Yeah. And that's the Rupa Nuni, then... Rewa River. Rewa River. Yeah. And that's where we're sitting right now. Right. Correct. How many people live in your village?

309. Last time I was here, it was 200 and some. Why the mass population growth in your village? I don't know. A good place to live? Good place to live. People migrate to come here. And we have more babies coming up.

Yeah. So we have more population. In this village, what percent is Makushi? About 70%. About 70% Makushi. And what other groups live here? So we have Makushi, which is 70%. About 70% Makushi. And what other groups live here? So we have Makushi, which is 70%.

Then we have the Waiwai. Then we have the Wapashanas and Carib. Okay. So Wapashanas live here? Yeah, they're here. We all live together. And you can intermarry?

Yeah. No problem. No problem. Is it very uncommon for people to leave, you know, younger generations, to move to another tribe? Yeah, that's how it is here. If I want to marry a girl from other villages,

I can go and do that because I'm not foreigner, I'm not Morinian. And you married a woman from another village, I can go and do that because I'm not a foreigner. I'm not a Morinian. And you married a woman from another village? Yeah. Is she Makushi? No, she's a Wapushana. Oh, really? Yeah.

Oh, I didn't know that. Really? Yeah. So she's a Wapushana and I'm a Makushi. But like I said, we are Amorinians and we all live together. Yeah. Now, when Roven met his wife, the primary crop, Roven is a guide, a fisherman, and a farmer. Is that fair?

Correct. The main crop that they grow in Rewa Village is cassava, which in some places is known as manioc, and it's a root. And name the things you guys make from cassava. So out of cassava, we can make our farin. We can make our tapioca, our local drinks, which is cassiri. Or purple drink. Yeah, whatever you call it. Yeah. And para curry.

And black kership, which comes from cassava. And I think that's it. More of it that comes from the cassava that we make. Yeah, and you eat cassava several times a day, every day. Every single day. We just did a long river trip. I shouldn't say long. How many days did we spend on the river?

Seven, probably. Yeah, seven days. Spent a week on the river. Camped in three different places on the river. And fished many many many kinds of things and watched Roven and his wife and some of the guys

that Roven works with and camps with and travels with cook all manner of fishes but the first thing we did when we got here is went out and saw how they do cassava. So we watched Rovan's mother take some cassava root, which comes out of the ground and looks like a big-ass yam. Does everyone agree? Looks like a big-ass yam hooked to a tree.

You pull the tree out of the ground, and the tree comes out. The tree's not even as big as your wrist. It comes out with three big-ass yams hooked to it. You grate it and squeeze the liquid out. And in its raw form, the liquid will kill you, your dog, anything that drinks it. Is that right? Correct. It has cyanide in it.

Which made me wonder maybe Rovan knows the answer to this. Rovan, are you familiar with the Jonestown Massacre? The Jonestown Massacre? No. Okay. In the 70s

a Christian sect from the Bay Area in the U.S. led by a minister named Jim Jones came to Guyana and they set up a large commune. And it had commune slash cult, Jim Jones being the cult of personality. And they set up a large commune that had 800 some people in it and they became like sort of as many groups do they they formed a sort of like a post-apocalyptic vision and some things happened there was like an investigation some congressmen

were coming down because a lot of relatives in the bay area of the U.S. were wanting to know what happened to their kinfolk. And there was a lot of talk about they were going to get disturbed and there was going to be arrests and there was a lot of bad things going on. And they fixed up a big batch of Kool-Aid that was poisoned with cyanide. I now wonder if it was poisoned with cassava water. I would think. Easy to find out, but we don't have a way to log on and find out. Unless they had some bottles of cyanide shipped in.

Which would be like a weird thing to ship in. So with the suicides, firearms, and cyanide Kool-Aid. So when you hear someone say don't drink the Kool-Aid. So when you hear someone say, don't drink the Kool-Aid, that's what they're talking about. And 800 and some people all died in Guyana. Americans. Americans.

Wow. It gave name to what I consider one of the greatest rock bands of all time, which is the Brian Jonestown Massacre. So Brian Jones was the member of the Rolling Stones, and he drowned. The Jonestown Massacre was what we're talking about now, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre is a great band.

You hadn't heard of that? No, I never heard of it. Yeah, it was before you were born. It wasn't Guyanese. It was all Americans. Okay. Yeah, weird deal. However, have you ever seen anything drink cassava water and die

i just saw the chicken the the chicken drink a little and then run on that why don't you guys guard that water more do you know is there like a protocol in place For when you squeeze the water Out of grated cassava Is there like a way that you guard it So that no children will drink it Is it ever left out? We get used for it So what we do is

After squeezing out That's the one goes in the pot to be boiled over and over. So you never leave it laying around. You immediately boil it. Yeah. I got you. Okay. What he's getting at is when you squeeze the water out of this thing,

and it looks like they weave a thing that looks like a Chinese finger trap, but it's five feet long. Yeah. Big around as your leg. And they put all that grated cassava in there, and there's a pole in it, and you sit on it. So you're sort of like, as you sit on the pole, which is through a handle in the Chinese finger trap, it tightens the Chinese finger trap and squeezes out the liquid. That liquid is boiled. Once it comes to a boil,

it's not poisonous anymore. Is that right? Yeah. And that is called, that drink is called what? Local drink. No, the water

after it's boiled. It's called the black kerosene. Yeah, it's reduced. No, no, no, not reduced. Just when your mom first boiled it and we drank it. Oh, that is called kassiri. Kassiri. Yeah.

And that's not alcoholic. It gets alcohol after three, four days. That includes the actual gradings, not just the liquid. The gradings are in there. Oh, really? Yeah, just the grading and then the color, the black potato combined together,

and then that's the one goes in the pot and boiled. And that's a good drink. No alcohol. Alcohol would be next two, three days. It ferments, yeah. Let me back up for a minute because you're hearing, you already heard Dirt Myth talking. Howdy.

Dirt, he started chewing his little, what are they called? Snoofs. Yeah, and his ongoing efforts to kick his tobacco habit, he's chewing little mini chewers. Little mini, like they're like skull bandits, but not. Yeah, they're healthier for you. They actually are healthy for you. They're organic. You can't afford the grizzly.

Yeah. They come in a package that is useful once the pouches are used up, though, which is kind of nice. So he knew that since he cannot buy dip here, if he chewed these weakened dips, pouches, that it would start to wean him off and thinking that when he goes home, he'll continue on his path to quitting. But he also knows that when he's going to go home, he's going to take his 80-year-old pickup truck and buy gas and walk in to pay for the gas. And be tempted.

And there will be an entire wall of dip saying, Dirt Miff, welcome home. Welcome to the United States. I'll be like, hey, boys. And he'll buy a big thing of Coke. And a thing that Dirt Miff was talking about tobacco, too, real quick, is that when you see a dude buying Grizzly, it's not because he likes it. It's because it's cheap. Example, my dad. He's very frugal.

Quality dip is Coke. Yeah. And you chew what? I chew Coke, man. I got a good job. And then Rick Smith, who just baffles me that this man's single. It always has baffled me that he's single. I thought we made a deal not to talk about this on the podcast anymore.

We didn't? Oh, sorry. He's got a girlfriend. Which doesn't surprise me that he has a girlfriend, because this man knows how to juggle machetes. And not only that, juggles machetes where there is not even a prayer of medical help. No one's coming for you. Yeah.

When you injure yourself juggling machetes where you chose to juggle machetes this week. That was my main concern looking through the first aid kit. And then he later, later took a look through the first aid kit and was disappointed to find that there were no sutures in case for instance someone got cut by a machete while juggling we do have that on video so yeah rick rick knows how to juggle machetes which in which here they call it cutlass which is a nice touch and then uh cory who pronounces his name two different ways catchmatic is the right way uh well, there's Kaczmarek. Which is what everyone says.

Then there's Kaczmarek. And then there's Kaczmarek. So it's three. Kaczmarek is the Polish way. And then there's Janita. Prudel. Which is a term of endearment. You know, you'd have to say Janitis.

Janitis. Janitis. So, you good? Yeah. You'd have to say Yonitis So You good? He's the guy that failed to correct me When I had the book wrong Now, Rovan So, we made the drink And we drank the drink But when we left for our river trip

You had between your legs In the boat A five-gallon bucket, which had originally contained motor oil, filled with what? That was casserole. That was casserole. Yeah. But you were waiting for it to ferment a little. Ferment and get a little bit alcoholic

Like beer Now Roven likes it From a bowl So as you're motoring up the river You just open the lid On the five gallon bucket And have a bowl And that's sort of like the main hydration

So that's one form Of Kassiri But when Kassiri gets like Toward the end we were drinking it hydration. So that's one form of Kasiri. But when Kasiri gets like toward the end we were drinking it and it was stronger, does it have a different name then? No. No. No. Stays Kasiri. Stays Kasiri. That's the different stuff.

The other one that you had. Yeah, the other one is the Parakari. What is that made out of? Same cassava. Same root. Yeah, the same one is the par curry. What is that made out of? Same cassava. Same root? Yeah, the same root, but different steps. So that has been baked on a huge pan.

So it's like a rooty pan, but bigger. Oh, that's where you bake it. It looks almost like a big, what we would call a pizza crust, which I know probably doesn't give an image to you, but like a big round bread. Right, right, right. But what part of it? The gratings? Yeah, the same.

Well, that goes. So the grating started. Peeling, of course. Peeling, grating. And then after grating goes into this matapi. Squeezes out all the stuff that left in the matapi. In the finger trap deal. Right.

Oh, the matapi is the thing that squeezes out. Right, right, right. So from there it goes to the sifter which we made here. Yep. And then we have this huge pan which is ready. And then we bake the huge pan which is ready and then we bake that the meal

which is there comes out from the matapi. So, we bake it there. No liquid? No liquid. Remember,

it's squeezed out from the matapi. The liquid is here. One that is in the matapi, that's the one we sieve out

and bake it and goes on the floor, cover it for two nights and then open it. When it's open, it's sweet, first day. And then after four or five days it gets real

alcohol. It'll get as strong as rum. It gets stronger, yeah, like rum. Yeah. We brought some of that with us, too. Yeah, I took half a bucket. Half a bucket. So five gallons of Kisiri and two and a half gallons or so of? Parakari.

Parakari. Raw. So that's the beverages that you derive from the root now the meal the the variations on the meal that rovin and his and his fellow travelers eat every day would be that that you wow let me let me back up now because it gets more complicated in this just so people just so listeners can catch, imagine that instead of saying cassava, which you can't picture, let's imagine that you had some apples, okay? And you grated

the apples. And then you squeezed, you took all that grated apple and squeezed out the liquid. And boiled it. That would be like what we're talking about when we're saying cassiri. Then, you take the actual pulp of the apple and make a pancake out of it

and cook it and ferment that with liquid, and that makes the strong alcohol one. What is the farine, which you guys eat when you're traveling? You eat three times a day. Well, how do you make farine? Farine is prepared differently. First, we go to the farm. Okay.

Get a root of cassava, which would be one warshie. That would be roughly 50 pounds. Okay. So what we do... What is the unit of measurement? A warshie? Yeah, a warshie is backpack Oh, one of those backpacks you guys make out of the woven

Right So what we do is that we put the cassava in any flour or sugar bag Put it in the river So that the cassava can rotten soft Oh So when it's like three days

in the river so when we go check the skin get soft so what remains inside

which we call cassava yeast now we take that and put it in an oil bucket and then we go and look for

you mean like the five gallon motor oil bucket right and then we go and look for You mean like the 5 gallon motor oil bucket? Right, right. And then we go get some fresh cassava roots. So, to our ratio, one 5 gallon would be

equivalent to two washies. That would be like 100 pounds. To mix the one that is rotten fresh roots and then roots

you soaked right right right yeah then the grating start

of course the grating and then what we do after grating we grate the one that's

rotten combine it together and mix all both okay you have to mix it

very good and then leave it for a night. The next following day, start the matapin. Once you start the matapin, you're getting rid of the juice. Okay. So you're putting it in the squeezer.

Right. What we've been calling a Chinese finger trap device, which you're probably not familiar with, but something that pressurizes it to get the liquid out. Right. Here we call it matapi. Yep. So the ladies do matapi. Can I interrupt?

How long does it take to make a matapi? About three days. Three days of weaving. And a man would make it or a woman would make it? A man would make it. a woman would make it? A man would make it. Yeah. So now, the ladies will do the mataping,

and then after mataping, we have a special sifter for that. Special foreign sifter. So we sieve it. Now after sievingving there is a pan that is set up made from a gasoline barrel okay which which we bust in half and make a palm yeah which is like maybe six feet. And so we got this pan ready, but heated with fire.

We have like fire ready. So you split open a barrel, a steel barrel. Yes, steel barrel. And set it over a fire. Right. So we have the firewood ready. Now the fire started to light up. Now we are going to heat the pan.

Now it's like when you're making a pan cake, started to light up. Now we got to heat the pan. Now, it's like when you're making a pancake, you have to use fry oil. Yep. But for farine, we use cow fat.

It's perfect. Cow fat? Cow fat. Yeah. So we use the cow fat. Where do you find cow, where do you get cow fat? It's on sale in our area.

So you just buy it? Because you guys don't raise any cows. No. Yeah. So what we do, we put the cow fat on the pan. Because if you put the fresh sieved cassava meal there, it gets sticky and burn. To avoid that, we use cow fat to oil up the pan.

Then the stuff came in and then we started storing the whole meal that goes in there. Yep. Roughly, roughly it's like two and a half hours to complete the whole from

from putting in the pan until the finishing part. That's when it starts to get hard. Yep. You got to be very careful when you're storing the pan because you got to look out for fine ones

burning out. When that happens the whole of your frying will get burned up. So to avoid that, you got to store it. Yeah. Is that something you and your wife do together? Yeah. When you make it? Yeah. And then you do it all the way till it's dry?

Yeah, all the way till it's dry. And then when you got to feel it, put it in your hand and start putting it out, start chewing. Once you can bite it, well, that's good. Now, who equated it to grape nuts? I said that. Corey thought.

I'll claim that. I repeated it. I concurred. It's like if you imagine the end product would be like if you had, the product is the color of cornmeal. It's not homogenous in size the size of the the meal ranges from a uncooked grit let's say and there's some that are like a couscous piece on up to like a grape nut piece. Maybe even a pea. Yeah. Every now and then. I call those parts gravel because they are very difficult to chew.

But Robin says that children especially like to chew them. So when these guys travel, they carry a – tell me – I already forgot the name of the stuff. Farine. When they travel, the main thing you need when you travel is a big thing of farine. Yeah. And they grow hot peppers, which just really look like American small peppers. And they dry them and pulverize them. And you put those in a pot bottle.

Right. So you got a pot bottle full of dried peppers. And you have farine. And when it's lunchtime, you catch fish and either chop the fish up, bones and all, gut them, and then part them out. And when I say chop them up with a machete, it's going to, like, I think that people envision, people envision someone just randomly hacking up a fish with a machete, but it certainly is not that. It's like a surgical chopping up of a fish. Very precise. Yeah, they's like splitting certain, splitting the spine, splitting the head, oftentimes pull out the spine, leave the rib slabs on, head open, uniform pieces.

Done where it's beautiful to see the fish get chopped up. That fish can be roasted on a, what they call a barbicut, which is a grill you set up with like all out of green wood set 24 inches off the fire probably. That might be a little generous. No. Yeah, I'd say it's more like 18, right? Foot and a half. I think it's two feet. Yeah, I'd say it's more like 18, right? A foot and a half? I think it's two feet. Get a big fire

and then you build a grate over with green wood and roast the fish on there or just take raw fish and boil it. Then, when that fish is cooked, for lunch, you take a bowl and put the the cassiri.

No, I'm messing it up. Put the frein in the bowl. Dip up some river water. Pour it in there. Put on some cold boiled fish. And then put on some of your pot bottle full of ground peppers.

And that's lunch. And when you add liquid, it's like adding milk to the grape nuts. Yeah. They get a little softer. Softens it up. Yep. For dinner, it's basically the same except they make a broth with river water and the addition of a syrup produced by making a cassery reduction

until it turns into a black syrup. You flavor it and color the broth with that, put the peppers in there, and then put whatever fish you caught or whatever animals you hunted in there, and that's dinner. Breakfast is that.

Yeah, correct. And you guys can go hard day after day after day after day with great enthusiasm and being spatially aware to a degree that i've never seen of aware of your surroundings what birds you hear what fish you see see, you find, you spot all game. You drag boats, row boats, right? Haul things, portage stuff, work your asses off eating that thing. Yeah. I asked Rowan if they like green vegetables. He said no.

You get hungry fast. Yeah. So the good thing with the foreign is like when we have our pepper pot or the barbecue set up, when we're eating, the foreign,

like once you soak the foreign, it swells. And after eating, it swells more in your stomach. Yeah. It can keep you up. And then if you have your local drink,

the barkery or the cassery, like it's, you can be, stuff up pretty good and then you can do a hard work throughout the whole day. Yeah.

It's like drinking a juice or lime juice. Yep. Whatever juice you have after a meal. No snacks. No. No dessert.

No dessert. Fish. Just fish Fish Three times a day With the meal made from the root Yeah You don't appreciate how From an American ear From our the way we live How like unusual that is

We eat so I mean, we... How many different things are you eating today? It just is really impressive to me. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do

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club, y'all. I like it. Is there an ancestral, like, legend of the cassava plant? Like, it's amazing how a poison can be turned into something, like a powerful food. Yeah, a lot of people ask that question, but it's trying to get the background of cassava and where it came from, all of that.

You know, it's hard to see, hard to explain. But since I get to know myself, I know my parents were doing the same. They were doing fishing, farming, hunting. So I grew up the same way. When Rovan was young, the river we're on now, we went up the river. How many, you guys figured out like river miles, 65? No, 45 or 35 miles. That's air miles.

No, 60. It was 65 kilometers. Oh, okay. Yeah. So we went up the river a good bit. Basically like three days of motoring with 15 horse, like, what are they, like 18, 20 foot boats being pushed by 15 horse Yamaha outboards? Yeah.

Three days of motoring up a river. Big sandbars, virgin jungle, a lot of rock outcrops, holes, rapids, that kind of river. What the hell was I getting at? Back in the day. Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So when Robin was a boy, now to give a sense of how much give a sense of the way times have changed, when Roven was a boy, you guys never went as far as we went up the river

because you were traveling in handmade dugout canoes. Correct. When Roven's father needed to get money, when he needed currency, the way to get currency was that he would take your whole family? No, just his big son, which would be like a week leave. The older sons. Mm-hmm. Help him paddle and to get more fish. or a weak leaf and the other older sons to help them paddle and to get more fish.

But your mother would not go on those trips? She would stay because the other small kids. To take care of the small kids. And you guys would paddle a dugout canoe with the heaviest paddles I've ever lifted up in my entire life.

Purple Heart, man. Yeah, they make a paddle out of a very durable wood called Purple Heart and these paddles are probably 12 pound paddles I've ever lifted up in my entire life. Purple Heart, man. Yeah, they make a paddle out of a very durable wood called Purple Heart, and these paddles are probably 12-pound paddles. You would paddle upriver for one week? Yeah. Camping along the way? Camping along the way. Then you'd get to a fishing spot?

Right. Spend another week there. Just fishing and hunting? Fishing and hunting. Fishing and hunting one spot. And salt all of the catch? Yeah, correct. Paddle back down

and your father would sell those salted fish? Yeah. To who? So in the area they have store owners that buy fishes.

So who would you sell the salted fish to? So we have store owners. They have markets. So what they do, they request for salt fish. My dad would go up, get 100-pound-plus fish, take him up the river from here to Anna. It's like two days paddling. So he'd paddle back down to your village and then back up another river. Right, 50 miles up the river.

And then use a bullet cart to take the fish because back then there were no tractor, no car, no truck. So from the river to the village, it's a one-hour walk. Back then there were no tractor, no car, no truck. So from the river to the village, it's a one-hour walk. So my dad would not walk with that load. So instead he had like a bullock cart hired and then put the stuff inside and take him straight up to the... I'm sorry, what kind of cart? The bullock cart. Like oxen or something?

Yeah, yeah. Oxen. Are you what kind of cart? The bullock cart. Like oxen or something? Yeah, yeah. Oxen. Are you saying bull and cart? Yeah, you know, there's two cows with a trailer behind. I understand. Bullock cart. Yeah, I got you. So they would haul the load of salted fish into the place to sell.

Yeah. And if you did a trip like that, do you have any recollection? Like how much money would that be? How much money would you make in those days? Those times were cheap, really cheap. I think it's like $80 a pound then when I get to know myself. $80 Guyanese dollars per pound. Yeah, yeah.

That was many years ago. Now the price has gone up. Maybe like $15,000, $16,000 after a sellout. And what would that be in today's U.S. dollars? $15,000, it's $75 U.S. dollars. Yeah. Many days of work. Many days of work.

But now it's far different. The price has gone up. But, well, then there were no jobs here in the village. You had to hunt and fish and that was it. Yeah. Hunt, fish, go fish, catch more fish, 100-pound fish, 200-pound fish, then go sell. We had no job employment here. So that's what my dad had been

doing. Yeah. Just to support me going to the school. That was what the money was for. Yeah. And I buy the basic salt, sugar, and stuff like that. In those days, when you were little, before you found out, before you started to be a river guide

and to take people up the river to fish and to experience like a way of life or to view wildlife and all these other things that you guide for how many days and i've asked you a lot of questions like or i say like how many days a year and i gather you don't really think in that way. Like that's not a way you count time. But like how often would you hunt and fish when you were 20 years old? Maybe like twice a week. Twice a week?

Yeah, twice a week. And that would get you enough? Yeah, I got a wife and I have my household and that's just for me and my family. My parents are close by whenever I have more than I share. So if you,

just to get a better sense, if you were to kill a peccary, how many days would that peccary last? That would last a week. Okay. It's one of our favorite too. It was faster. A favorite is packery.

Yeah. You were saying that catfish was two days, right? The one you salted on this trip? Yeah. For your family? For the family. The leopard catfish. When we left here,

okay, try to think, as we traveled up the river, try to think of the notable bits of wildlife we saw traveling up the river. Scarlet macaw. Lots of macaws. Powerful. And a different kind of macaw that's a different color. Green.

Red and green. Scarlet, blue and yellow muccles. Yeah, Rovan knows every bird and every bird call. And this is a place that has how many hundreds of species of birds? Yeah, there's like 1,500. So it's like one thing if you think you're cool because you know the seven birds that come to your bird feeder, but we're talking like an encyclopedic amount of, you know. So we saw macaws.

We saw capybara, which is the world's largest rodent. That's an interesting point to bring up about this river. This river has the world's largest alligator, black caiman, the world's largest rodent, the capybara, the world's largest snake, anaconda, and the new world's largest eagle, which I saw today, which is a harpy eagle who preys on monkeys. I did not see it, and I'm jealous. Yeah, Rick cares more than I do, and he didn't see it. So we saw capybaras on the way up, macaws, toucans. Like Toucan Sam, the breakfast cereal bird.

I think we saw a different one. Which one did we see? I saw one with Rudy. We have two types. They look similar, but you got to be careful which one you're looking at. So one is called the channel build token and then the other one is white throat token.

We saw the channel build. What were the white cranes that you see a lot of? Those are kukui herons. A lot of herons. I forgot to mention an important part. Another thing before we left, besides messing with the cassava is

Rovan made some arrows now Rovan fishes and hunts with a bow which they call a Makushi bow and he makes his own bow and the bow is made from what tree?

Wamara tree. Wamara tree. The bow string is made from? Kroa. Kroa plant. Yeah, imagine if you took like a, imagine if you took a aloe, like picture a giant aloe plant. And there's like a fibrous part of the plant and you stripped away all the pulp

and then took just the string, the fiber string and twisted it into a string. That is Rovan's bowstring. Rovan makes his arrows from a plant called arrow plant. Yeah. Which is my favorite name

for a plant in the world. Arrow plant. He is my favorite name for a plant in the world. Arrow plant. He fletches his arrows with a black or crestless curacao feather.

Ties the fletching on with the same fibrous plant rope that he makes the bowstring out of. The knock is made from purple heartwood? Bullet wood.

Bullet wood. And then on the other end of the arrow plant there's a shaft made from the same wood, bullet wood. And then they take a chunk of, depending on what kind of point you're making, either if you're making a blade for hunting peccary or deer, you cut out a piece of a machete, what they call a cutlass, and make a blade, and that gets affixed.

Other fish points are made from a piece of hog wire fencing that they pound and pound and flatten it and then cut barbs into it to make drop points and wire points. And that is Rovan's tool. And we made an arrow. And then we went to a plant. What was the plant where we got the maggot bait?

The cocrit. A palm. Yeah, it's called a cocrit palm. So we went to a cocrit palm. Yeah, cocrit. A palm. Yeah, it's called a cocrit palm. So he went to a cocrit palm, and it had dropped all of its fruit. And we cut a couple of the fruits open, and the grubs, there's a grub in each one. And a lot of the grubs had already turned to moths and flown away because you'd find a little hole bored in them. Then we went to another tree, and it was the right ripeness where every time you found one that didn't have a hole in it

from the moth escaping, the beetle escaping, would have a big maggot, a big larva. Once you've identified it as being the right fruit, then you just fill up your pockets or a bag with the fruit and bring those along as a fishing bait.

Yeah. Our first night out the river, we caught for dinner black piranha. Tell me about that fish. In this river here, there are a lot of black piranhas. Different species of piranhas. Different species

of piranhas. Yeah, can you name off the different species of piranhas? So we got the black one, the biggest we have here, the black piranhas. Then we got the red-bellied piranhas. Then the orange-cheeked piranhas. And what next?

Well, cat-to-back and paku are both herbivorous piranhas. Yeah, those are families ofaku are both herbivorous piranhas. Yeah. Those are family to piranhas, the vegetarian piranhas. The paku and the catabac, which we call. Yeah. Now, you guys were kind of humoring me when we went out to fish black piranha because I was throwing a crankbait.

And not successfully at all. And eventually, I can't remember if I caught one. Maybe I caught one. And all of a sudden, your brother Dennis made some cut bait and had about a hand line with 10 feet of line on it and took a hunk of piranha meat on a hook and hung it over the side of the boat and started slapping the surface of the water with a stick to make like a frantic water slashing noise.

And then started knocking the shit out of huge piranhas. Big piranha. How big are the piranhas? Three pounds? No, more than that. I think it's four or five pounds. And we caught a pile of them. Yeah.

Is that a favorite fish? Yeah, they're a favorite and easy to catch. Why do you guys not eat... Why do you not eat caimans because you have a lot of fish in the river but you like to hunt for

certain birds and peccaries and also a large rodent called a goody and a large rodent called paca yeah but do you know what I'm saying if you ask me if we were in my if we were in my country hunting and we saw a possum okay and you said to me why don't you are you going to get the

possum i would say i would have a difficult time explaining why we were not going to eat the possum but it would kind of come down down to people don't really like the meat. They're difficult to deal with. And it's just not a thing that we traditionally hunt for and eat, though in some parts of the country, some people do eat them. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Because I was in Bol bolivia and they ate the amerindians in bolivia like to hunt for red howler monkeys when i told you that you laughed why like why is that why is that not a thing that the makushi hunt and eat? Well, I guess, like I said, we have fish, and we are not so much being monkeys. And then we have the animals, like the agoti, lava, vicaries, deer. We have them here.

They are more tastier, I would say that way. So you think it really comes down to you have like a big abundance of food yeah we have a lot of food a big abundance of fish so if yeah so i think if we don't have fish or any animal then we could perhaps start eating monkeys if you were desperate yeah but it's really just a matter of it's like the fish are better, they're easy to catch, they're very abundant. Right. I noticed that

as much as you've had long exposure to them, you really like to stop and watch the monkeys and observe all the different animals even though you don't have any thinking about them as like a food item did you like to watch when you were a kid or did you learn to like watching them because americans and other in europeans and things want to come and see these things

uh i i started like doing that when i I started board guiding and taking forest nature hikes. You learned that people like to see these things and then you started observing them more instead of just focusing on the food items. Yeah. So that's why I keep looking at the monkeys and the behavior. Yeah. And then there are some animals that used to be hunted here but became very rare. Yeah. Like the arapaima.

Yeah. The world's largest freshwater fish. Right. That used to be a thing that people here hunted and sold to Brazil, right? Yeah. And now you, in this area, generally people don't kill them anymore. Yeah. And now you, in this area, generally people don't kill them anymore. Yeah. They're worth more alive than they are dead.

Yeah, that's correct. They're worth more alive than dead. Because why? We sport fish for them. People want to come and catch them. People want to come, pay a lot of money. Not many fishermen come, but pay lots of money to catch an arapaima

for a week. An absurd amount of money. Yeah. Like, the amount of money that it costs to come and catch an arapaima would be equivalent to an elk hunt. Oh, twice as much.

Twice as much as an elk hunt. Depending on an elk hunt. Oh, twice as much. Twice as much as an elk hunt. Depending on the elk hunt. I mean, elk hunts vary, but... That's what strikes me as such a huge change that occurred in your lifetime. And you're not that old. You're in your 30s. 32.

To be that you used to go on trips with your father to spend two weeks of labor to make $75 in salted fish. And now people will come and give a hundred times that to catch and look at and let go the same fish that you used to catch and sell. Yeah. It's a big difference. It's a big difference. What do you think about that difference? I can see all the positives, right? Yeah. When I walk around your village, and I've traveled a fair bit, right?

When I walk around your village, I see very happy, prosperous people. Mm-hmm. For how far out you live, for how far you live away from a city i see people like healthy happy prosperous like a place that anyone would be pleased to walk around like good friendly people right i see all the pot and i'm not saying that all that came from having a lodge and having an airstrip where people can come in and experience it.

I know that it didn't all come from that. But that helps, right? Do you recognize other negatives? Are there things you miss about the old way? Well, like are there things you miss about the old way well the negative the it's it's it's hard it's hard to say but um if there's not a don't make one up i mean if you really don't if you know i mean i'm not like pressing you to think of one if there's one that is always on your mind, that's fair to say. But you don't need to like try hard to think of a negative.

Yeah, it's hard to say. You view it as very like a positive thing. Yeah. Because what? Why is it it's a big difference? It's like my father and I would go just to get a little bit of money then. Support me going to the school. There were no jobs.

There were no ecologies here. But then when we built up this ecology, you have the borders coming in, different type of stories coming in. Then we have, well, good thing for us, we have this Arapaima. They were close to extinct, but then we conserve them, and then the population increases a lot now. Yeah. So instead of harvesting them, we sport fish for them.

That's where I said it's a big difference. Yeah. And then going with my father, he showed me some ponds where we go fish. Now at this age, I know where to take my guests. Oh, really? Because he showed me where the ponds are. Same ponds.

The same ponds, the same knowledge he showed me. Now I'm taking the guess to the pond, fish for aropaimas. Yeah, let me explain real quick. So the aropaimas, correct me if I say something wrong, tell me. The aropaimas are in the river, but generally

live in Oxbow Lake. So if you imagine like a listener is imagining a river how it flows in like a long series of s's now and then one of the s's will jump itself like the river will cut through take a shortcut through and jump to the next s and that leaves a big u-shaped lake where the river changes course but the old river channel stays full of water that that is what we call an oxbow lake and river rivers change all the time like we're right now i'm sitting near the river on a spot that absolutely was at one point in time the river

and then the river moved over that way and someday it'll move over back this way, creating these new channels. And the arapaimas live in there and they get up to hundreds of pounds. Over 400 pounds. The lakes flood during the rainy season. So the arapaimas aren't necessarily stuck there. They get there during

the rainy season. The water recedes. They stay in these stagnant areas and feed on peacock bass and other fish and then they can move when everything floods again robin was telling me that last year there was a lake that was it was very dry and the lake was going to dry all the way up and they rescued 26 arapaimas out of the lake and dragged them over to the river. Yeah. Ranging from 80-some inches long down to 50-some inches long.

Yeah. An arapaima rescue operation. Yeah. How'd you move them? Put them in the boats? That would have been a good episode of TV. We put them in the boat. No, I wouldn't have. Not joking.

Yeah, we put them in the boat. So the plan was like, maybe from here to the dining area, shallow water, but those Arapaima did dig their own hole, so it was like five feet depth. So most of those Arapaima, the bark

were missing, the scales were missing. Oh, really? From the birds. From birds pecking on yeah because they were that stuck in there yeah so one of those one guy like checking upon is it hey you know what our payments are driving up so here because our payment you know it means a lot to us. We make a lot of money through our pimer. So instead of allowing them to dead there,

we go and rescue them since we were making a lot of money from the Arapaima. Because if we lose 26 Arapaimas and then that's where we take our clients, there'll be like no

more Arapaima in that pond. So what we do is that we rescue the arapaima. So after the rainy season, they would be able, or throughout the rainy season, they would be able to go back to the same spot. Yeah. And then... Can you explain how you rescued them? So we get a net, which is like six-inch high net.

We surround one, not two, one only. Because if you surround like two, one will dead. So we do like one at a time. We grab them, put in the boat, put some water in the boat. Because Arapaima, they breed here. So we have probably like 15 guys ready to run with the Arapaima at certain point they will lift the fish

give the fish some breath and then continue straight to the river yeah every 10 or 12 minutes an Arapaima will come up and gulp water yeah come up to gulp air yeah

and how many days did it take to do all 26? It took like, what, four days. Really hard work. Yeah. Can you explain to me how, in the old days, how you guys would hunt for arapaima? Well, I saw my dad once. He spot some arapaima rolling in the pond.

The technique that he used is like climb up on the tree. Climb up in a tree? Yeah, and wait. Because arapaima was rolling. So he spot the spot, and then he find a tree, and he climb up there and wait. So when the fish roll, and he's up in find a tree and he climb up there and wait. So when the fish roll and he's up in the tree and he aim and shoot the fish. With his bow?

With his bow. And then track down the chest behind the arrow. I'm sorry but I need to just, because people won't be able to picture how this works. They make a arrow. What is the arrow called that you use for Paku?

We call it drop point. Okay. It's basically an arrow mounted with a detachable harpoon head. The arrow is buoyant. Picture

the closest equivalent would be to imagine a piece of bamboo as thick as your thumb. It's not like bamboo at all, but just picture how a piece of bamboo the size of your thumb would float. That arrow is long, much longer than American arrows. And it's mounted with a detachable harpoon point. The harpoon point has line on it, and the line is coiled around the shaft of the arrow. So when you shoot, the harpoon point goes into the fish,

detaches from the arrow, the arrow floats up, and all the line that's been woven around, wrapped around the arrow unspools. So that wherever the fish goes, he's dragging around a buoy, so to speak. If you ever harpooned a halibut, it's the same principle, but this is driven by a boat. Your father climbs up in the tree,

waits for the arapaima, and thwap! Hits him. The fish takes off with the arrow. Then the arrow pops off. The point pops off on the point and then the arrow floats. Then he's just behind. In a dugout?

In a dugout. What he does is he has like a 100-pound line with a single hook. So he swings his hand and then grabs the arrow that is going away. Okay. So he pulls the arrow pylon when he hooks the line. Gotcha. So now he's hand-lining the arrow pylon. Yeahima when he hooks the line. Gotcha. So now he's hand lining the arapaima.

Yeah, so he has to pull. And how long did it take? Like 45 minutes to land the fish. Wow. Yeah. And then he butchers it. Yeah, butchers it. Then make some slabs, four slabs of it. Yeah.

On our trip, we didn't fish. On our trip, we just did with Roba. We didn't fish Arapaima. And I'm not like, I'm very respectful of the program they have, but it's like I just not, it's great. I recommend people come and do it, but it's just not something I'm interested in. What we were doing was traveling with a group.

How many people were all together in our group? We had four boats. Ten. Ten people. Ten crew members plus us, so 15. Yeah, we were traveling four boats, 15 people, and we were exploring, observing wildlife doing some amount of hunting

and a lot of fishing and we were basically catching the amount of like enough fish that we were eating fish as we went and traveled along and we caught black

piranha, cataback, right? Now, one day we're sitting there. Yanni, talk about your mystery fish because this is an interesting thing that happened. The flower-eating rainstorm piranha is what I call them. Yeah. That was a cataback, right? Yeah, cataback. So explain that. Big gully washerating rainstorm piranha is what I call them. Yeah. That was a cat-a-back, right? Yeah, cat-a-back. So explain that.

Big gully washer, rainstorm. But yeah, probably the first big rain we had seen, I think, of the trip, we're sitting at some tables underneath a heavy-duty tarp. And yeah, it's the kind of rain where it's like frothing the water. You know what I mean? Just so many big, heavy water droplets that you can't really see the water serv You know what I mean? Just so many big heavy water droplets that you can't really see the water servicing. I call it full balls rain.

Full balls rain. And somewhere up river, there must have been a tree. Do you know what kind of flowers those were, Roven? What tree they fell out of? Probably, I don't know, probably rosebud sized. Not rosebud, but just like the flower of a rose. I kept thinking, I just remember that charity organization I don't know probably rose bud sized not rose bud but just like the flower of a rose

I kept thinking I was remembering that charity organization when you were a kid they're called hoppers or something when you were a kid they'd come up to your window

and you'd give them money and they'd give you that little red flower with a green fake stem and it had like a wire in it it wasn't the Shriners I was going to say something like the Shriners.

I haven't seen those flowers in forever. They're that big. If you're old enough to know what the hell I'm talking about. I think it's Veterans Day. Was it? Those little flowers? Anyhow. Smaller than a rose then. Yeah.

They're beautiful. Yeah, beautiful yeah beautiful pink hot pink they've been knocked out of the tree by the rain and they are being basically funneled through this uh new cut that's actually created in oxbow and coming out of that cut there's basically a just real classic scene that's like going into a big pool so you've got like slow water on one edge and you've got this faster moving current there's like a foam line in there and just like in the american west you'd see bugs and stuff floating through there and you'd see trout you call them the food conveyor belt yeah or the fish treat it like a food conveyor yeah exactly they can

sit in there and just have the food coming right to them. Well, we're just watching this rainstorm and watching the flowers floating by. And all of a sudden there's a, you know, from that distance, we were, what, 100 yards away? It's like what looks to be like a 5 to 10-pound bright red fish comes up and gulps one of these flowers. Like, holy shit, you know, and they proceed. I don't know. There was probably maybe, what, three or four of them over there doing that? But for 15 minutes while it was really pouring and there was a lot of flowers in the water, we got to watch that. Yeah, feeding on a bouquet of flowers coming down the river.

Yeah, and it turns out to be a vegetarian piranha. Yanni was throwing a popper at it, but Roven was incredulous of the plan, and Roven believes that that fish is very sensitive to smell, and that he's smelling those flowers and hitting the flowers. Now, to back up, the first

fish we caught was the big-ass black piranha. This is like your classic piranha, like your horror movie piranha. Roven has a large scar. Was that from a black piranha. This is like your classic piranha. Like your horror movie piranha. Rovin has a large scar. Was that from a black piranha on your leg? That was from a red belly piranha. Red belly piranha. He was shooting fish with his bow when you were a little kid,

right? And you got attacked by a piranha. Yep. That would cause that. Then hooked a fish called a swordfish, which is like a gar with a very fat body. A gar mouth. Imagine your classic long-nosed gar with a big fat body.

Then the catabacks, which are the flower-eating. We heard the basha. Can you explain the basha? Basha, they make songs late in the afternoon. Songs? Yeah, like... So the one, I don't know if you could remember, the one that are lower,

those are the ones that are far away. The one that is louder that they are close in the deep pool. It transmits through the bow. It transmits through the hull of the boat. Yeah. A croaking noise. Yeah, the croaking noise. So they like to sing in the afternoon.

Yeah. And apparently they're a bitch to catch. I wanted to catch one bad. He said it looks like a white peacock bass, and they'll take live bait on the bottom, right? Yeah. That's awkward. We went out and hooked some big-ass catfish.

Vampire fish. Yeah. Prior to that. One of my favorites. No, vampires were above there, weren't they? No, they were below there. Yep. So we stopped.

Talk about the vampire fish, your word for it and where they like to live and what they do for a living. Vampire fish, they are... Payara, right? They are called payara. We call them payara. They have two very huge teeth. They feed on any fish that passes, and they hang around rocks, rapids. And when the water comes up, they can travel up the river.

Like we were seeing them this morning. Some they can travel up the river. Like we were seeing them this morning. Some of them travel up the river. They go up to breed in the rapid area. And, yeah, they can get really big. And the eyes, they have big eyes too. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I don't understand how,

because those teeth, the one that Steve, these guys caught, those were like two inch dagger teeth, inch and a half. And they go into a sheath on the upper jaw. Like a saber tooth cat. Yeah.

Like a pocket that houses the tooth. And Dirt had a great question. Yeah, like how if they hit a fish it's like trapped on that tooth, right? Yeah, how's he ever get the fish back into his throat? One of the great mysteries. Yeah. He must somehow open his mouth and inhale.

Yeah, it kills him, the initial strike kills him. And then he, yeah. And those things are a pain in the ass to hook. They got it. You can't get a hook into them because they got all this teeth going on. And one of them jabbed you, right? What happened? Well, I tried to see how sharp his tooth was.

How sharp was it, Steve? Sharp enough where I was bleeding pretty good. I had to check how sharp his tooth was. Just as Robin was advising that I don't check how sharp his tooth was. That was a badass fish. It looks like a salmon with a saber-toothed cat head. How big is the biggest one of those you've ever seen? Like four feet.

Oh, gosh. It's a nightmare. Whoa. Real big. Do you keep the teeth for ornaments? No. Stronger. Okay. Do you keep the teeth for ornaments? No. It's a strong one.

When we decided to go and catch big catfish, what was the bait you guys were trying to procure for the big catfish? The fish that I know from Bolivia and Argentina as sabalo, but you have another word for it, a Makushi word. Local name is yakutu. Yakutu. Yeah. It's good bait. It's basically a sucker. Picture an American some species of American sucker.

That's what that fish looks like. And then you also liked Cadabac for bait, right? Yeah, they have good scent. So Piret, Black Piranha. We call it Piret. Black Piranha, they don't have

very good smell. So what we do, we kind of mix up the smell. So instead of having the black piranha all the time, we can switch to a catapark. Catapark have more smell. And that's why we were catching with those

maggots. Yeah. Cook it warm, we call it. And then to get a catfish. That's the one we were catching with those maggots. Yeah, cook it warm, we called it. And then to get a catfish. So you catch, we caught some small bait, and you guys like to run cut bait. And then you go, just like you're fishing an American river. I mean, you read the water the same way and go to a hole and drop in with weight down to the bottom. I now know from our experience, there are

four species of very large catfish. The leopard catfish, which I thought was make-believe until I saw one. It's a catfish that looks like a leopard. Tiger catfish Which is known in some places as a sarubi

Banana or red tail catfish What's your word for it? Banana catfish That's your word And then what's the giant catfish That I hooked and lost When we got it up by the beach The local name is Siana.

We call it Jau. It's in Portuguese. And I know in Bolivia, I think they call it the Matoro. Matoro. Like the bull. And they get hundreds of pounds. Yeah, so, and then

we have the biggest one that lives more in the Escribo River, which is the lau-lau. It gets about over 400 pounds. Lau-lau. Yeah, lau-lau, very huge. Have you ever caught one of those? I caught one small.

Yeah. Now, the ones we were after that you like to eat are the banana catfish, and I can't even begin to describe what they look like. Heavily armored. Patterned red. Yeah. Yellow belly, kind of a green, dark olive back and a red tail. There you go.

Some red fins. Looks like bananas. Yeah, looks like a banana. The leopard catfish Has such a hard head When Roven got his up Roven asked for an arrow He wanted to jab it with an arrow Sort of like how you use a gaff to get a fish in the boat

I took my bow My fishbow And pulled back And tried to shoot it in the head And the fishbow arrow bounced off its head And then I realized you can't shoot them in the head You gotta shoot them in the body And then Roven jabbed it with a its head. And then it realized you can't shoot them in the head, you got to shoot them in the body. And then Rovin jabbed it with a drop point arrow

and pulled it up. But the banana catfish were much bigger. And the really big catfish though, you said you guys do not like to kill that catfish because it's very rare and not good to eat. Yeah, not good to eat. What's the best one to eat? The leopard one. That's the best one to eat? The leopard one.

That's the one you salted? Yeah, leopard, catfish, and the banana. When you're out, how do you decide, like when you're fishing, how do you decide what fish you cook what way and whether or not you're going to salt it and bring it home or whether you're going to eat it right there. Because when we fished catfish, we took the banana catfish

and roasted them on the barbicot over the fire. The leopard catfish, you salted and dried to bring home. How did you make those decisions? So, the banana catfish, the way we barbecued it, it has more

taste after the roast. Okay. When you cook it, it's more tastier than fresh. That's how we

normally roast the banana catfish. So, if you cook it after, after the roast, theyana catfish. If you cook it after the roast, they have more taste. Gotcha. The leopard one, it can be used

fresh, but since that was the only chance I have deer, I got a fish I had to salt it to bring home. Yeah, because it's such a good fish. Yeah, it's a good fish. You get divorced if you don't bring fish home. Yeah. Yeah, on that note,

Robin was telling us that a lot of the folks that stay at home waiting on these the crews that are out doing these trips now, they don't always understand when they're not coming home with fish because they're like, well,

weren't you up there fishing for a week? They don't understand that Roven's crew was just out there working hard, setting up camps, cooking for the clients and they come home and they might not have fish. Right. Yeah. And the wives get mad. The wife gets real mad.

Um, And the wives get mad. The wives get real mad. I've been hogging it up. Does anybody have questions at this point? Questions for Rovan or observations about what Rovan said? I've been getting all my questions answered. Handlining. The effectiveness of just throwing a hand line. No rod. Rovan has it mastered. Yeah, I just throwing a hand line. No rod. Rovin has it mastered.

Yeah, I think it's a fact. From my perspective, yeah, it's very effective if that's what you've learned to do. I think a lot of people would pick up the hand line and promptly snap the fish off. Yeah. What do you think that big catfish weighed, Giannis? The biggest banana we caught. Oh, I don't know. 30 pounds?

Maybe 40? Not more than that. No, I wouldn't say more. Probably not more than 40. The one that got away was probably over 100 pounds, the one we weren't going to keep. Or maybe not over, but in that range maybe. What do you think?

I shouldn't say. You should say. All I will say is big. No, it looked like a six or seven-year-old child laying in the water next to the boat i mean with whiskers with whiskers and a big fat green head i mean just for you know to give a relative size i mean it's big fish yeah so roving uh they they don't braid their own fishing line they obviously you know now use not obviously but now they use monofilament. What's the wood you carve your spool from,

your hand line spool? It's cedar. Cedar? Yeah, it's a light wood. So if a fish, big fish like take, take the fishing line handle, which we call it, from your hand by mistake

in the water, it can float. You can get it back. So you pick that wood because of buoyancy. It can float. So he's got like a picture of something you'd wrap a kite line around or something, but it's not quite like that

because it's open on one end. It's got handles, but the line can just spool off. So if you imagine like your classic kite cord, how it's got like a – help me out here. It's an H. Yeah, imagine a kite cord being like an H, right, and you're wrapping it around the horizontal bar. This is an H minus the one side. Yeah. Minus two legs, basically.

Yeah. The H minus two legs. So you can hold the handles and let the line to spool off. And they wrap it with 80 or 100 pound mono. For sinkers, Roven buys a

sheets of lead marketed as fishing weights. And out of this sheet of pounded lead, he cuts strips of lead. And then using his pliers, folds these cut pieces of sheet lead into what we would call a plum sinker that passes through his line. And he runs his mono to a wire leader, to a big ass hook with a, with a hand fashioned sheet lead sinker. And it's the same thing.

When the fish picks it up, you let him run before you set the hook. Then you set the hook, and he pulls all kinds of drag. And you gain on him, and you lose on him, and gain on him, and lose on him. And it's all the same thing, but you're doing it by hand. Very effective. And these guys can cast accurately. Which is more impressive to me. Using a hand line.

And far too. It's like throwing a lasso. Like a circular motion overhead. Let it go at the right time. Yeah, and they get about three quarters the distance what your typical person is going to get throwing a spinning rod. Half to three quarters the your typical person is going to get throwing a spinning rod. Half to three-quarters the distance that you're going to get with a spinning rod.

But very good accuracy. Okay, Rick, that was a question. You feeling good? Yeah, covered. I got a mannerism question. Please. Because you had talked about when we were at the village. I got to restart this over.

Take your time. These guys, Ronan and the boys, were like these badasses, obviously, from what we're talking about. But extremely soft-spoken and kind of very quiet and polite and not boisterous. Do not yell. Yeah. No yelling. Do not yell. Yeah. No yelling. Do not hail a person. No.

You do not speak from boat to boat. Yeah. And get along great. Like there was some stressful stuff going on and it always seemed like, is that unique to your community or is that, you know what I mean? You said you had to learn to kind of interact with the tourists because of that nature of your community. Is that unique to the Manoruk here? Yeah.

So the way we speak here is Creole way, not the perfect English speaking. So if I have to speak to one of my friends, I will speak my own way if I have to speak to you I have to try to speak the right way where you could understand because if I speak to you the way I speak to my friends

you would understand you would be like what? because it's some it's Creole but also there's some local words Makushi words put in. Right, in between. Yeah, and then we speak to one another in a quiet way where we understand. We are not yelling at each other.

But since I started to work with different people, started guiding, I try to speak more louder, try to speak more louder tried to speak more better all of that but that but the nature like that calm nature is that unique to the community yeah yeah yeah I think what Garrett's asking is like do

like is that just here in Rewa village with your people or would you go to any Amerindian community and you would find everybody speaking softly, quietly? Yeah, I think it's like it's all around the region.

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if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So, just an observation about that. When you guys speak, it's something, I'm sure it's something you never thought of,

but it's unusual for us because we're loud. You guys always speak at a whisper. Yeah. And you do not, you wouldn't yell to another boat. Matter of fact, I saw you today. You stopped to speak to a man

on the bank of the river and we pulled up at a distance that I would be very comfortable carrying on a conversation. And you got out of the boat and spoke to him at a whisper almost in touching distance um you do not hail you would never yell over hey go that way you would never yell to get someone's attention like hey grab my thing don't forget the you go up to the person and whisper to

that person not whisper but a very very low voice that would never um you wouldn't detect it do you think does that come from needing to be quiet because of hunting and fishing, or does that come from some other thing, do you think? That you wouldn't yell at another person ever. I think it's just the way we grew up here. It's a respect thing? Yeah, it's kind of a respect. My parents are not yelling at each other every day. They don't yell at each other?

No, so I grew up the same. And the rest of the villagers as well. Would you ever yell at one of your kids? At some point. If I see the kid is about to fall, I would yell at them. I would say, don't climb or don't do that. But you would never yell about something that was an urgent emergency? Yeah.

You had mentioned in one of our conversations that since you started guiding, that you learned how people would yell, hey, Roven, and say hi. Yeah. And you mentioned the challenge now of remembering, of learning to do that, but remembering when you go into your village to remember to be quiet and calm, as you said. Yeah, it's hard. At first, well, it was a little easier for me when I started guiding because my guests did not hear what I was saying

yeah that was the problem for me as a guide so what I do and I start to pick up speak up more so that my guests can hear what I'm saying if it's a snake deer and it's a different snake just imagine you are guiding like eight persons one of them wouldn't hear or one of them would have problem with hearing and then everybody said there's a snake there and probably might step

back and march the snake and get might get bite so that's where I got to speak louder so that the guests would hear don't touch that Watch where you're stepping Watch the bullet ants Run snake

There's a hole there Dinner time Dwarf caimans which hide in the rocks In the rapids The risks Earlier I used a term I don't know if you've ever heard of the term But there's a term like spatial awareness.

It's like a thing like pilots, like helicopter pilots, need to have tremendous spatial awareness where they see everything around them in a broad sense. So everything within eyesight, outside of their aircraft. They need to be aware of all things on all sides. But then also spatial awareness of these instruments and mechanisms that are

right around them. So they're just capable of being aware of everything. They don't bump their heads. Like a military helicopter pilot does not walk through a low door and bump his head because he's caught he like he's aware all the time of everything going on yeah i noticed that you guys that we were traveling with carry that spatial awareness where when you go to touch a stick or step over a log, you're very aware of what insects or snakes or things might be there,

but you're also pointing out a red howler monkey 300 yards away up the river and in the top of a tree. So it is this like continual thing. And the threats are real and you rattle off a bunch. Like in this area, you have a couple of kinds of ants that have like a debilitating bite. The world's most deadly snake or the new world's most deadly snake, the coral snake,

maybe the world's. Dwarf canines which can bite. It's a lot of things to pay attention to. And imagine when you're guiding, you kind of feel like an obligation to have it be that people don't get it. Have you had anyone get messed up by anything? I was with you one time before and got zapped by an electric eel.

Which would be difficult to notice at night underwater. I wouldn't be surprised if they could see it still. Yeah. You know, growing up here, we grew up along with the snakes and the ants, whatever, in the forest, up by that way. So when we walk to the forest or we go travel to the river, camping, whatever, we know which ants could bite, which ants does not bite. What to touch, what not to touch.

Where to hold on, where not to hold on. Yeah. Because of the rotten wood and stuff like that. And now if... When you told me not to step on a piece of rotten wood, was it because you thought it would break or because it would have things that could get you inside of it? There are both things.

One, it could be broken. You might get broken legs. Second, probably there is some ants that could bite and be painful. So that's why I said don't step on the redwood. Well, all of that is part of guiding when you're guiding a group of people you have to be telling them all of that because they don't know what is there

and even like a little tick bite it can be scratching you I have two of them right now they don't even know about that I know when tick can bite me even like the jiggers Yeah, so they don't even know about that. I know about tick. I know when tick can bite me. Yeah. Yeah.

Even like the jaguars. I know when the jaguars get in my foot. I will take them out right away. Oh, did you guys hear that last night, because we decided to skip out on bathing time, we missed the jaguar sighting? Wow. You guys saw a jaguar last night? Yeah, those guys went on the beach, on the bank.

On the beach where we were all hanging out. Oh, where the tracks were? The jaguar came back? Yeah. those guys went on the beach, on the bank. On the beach where we were all hanging out. Oh, where the tracks were? The jaguar came back? Yeah. While they were in the boat, it was just on shore? That was on the shore. And the Chinese jaguar there. Oh.

Is that jaguar in there? Is that jaguar? Because all the turtles had laid eggs there. And there were lizards and vultures and caracaras feeding on all the turtle eggs. Do you think the jaguar is in there because of all that activity with the turtles? Is he hunting turtles? Yeah, he's after turtles. When the giant river turtle comes up to lay eggs, the jaguar sees the turtle and then comes and gets him.

So that's what they're doing is hunting turtles. Yeah. That jaguar, the jaguar track we saw was traveling with another jaguar. Probably its own sub-adult baby, I would guess. Would that make sense? Or would it be a large male and a female? It could be that.

Or probably have the young one. Or it could be two. Male and female. Yeah, yeah. You got questions? For Rovan? Comments? We haven't hit up the whole bow fishing

paku. Oh, we're getting to that. Don't you worry about that, Rick. Yeah, I was going to ask, Rovan, do you have enough time to keep talking? You don't have to be anywhere? I'm good to know. Okay. I just don't want to be the only guy that gets to ask questions.

No, no, no. I just want to make sure we're not keeping roving too long. No, let's get on to bow fishing. Corey, you don't have any... My question was going to be, do you have a favorite thing to do out here in the bush? Is it fishing? Is it hunting animals, four-legged creatures, or is it bow fishing?

It's both. It's all. Yeah. You don't have a favorite though. No, it's just both. So with the arrow, bow and the arrow, it's like you could do hunting and fishing. I could shoot poeys or a laba with bow and arrow. That's a large semi-aquatic rodent and a very large,

smaller than a turkey, but a very large game bird, poeys they call poeys. And then I could do the paco shooting with my bow and arrow so you know it's it's like fun it is fun looks fun

so he didn't say bow he said you said bow that's your favorite to do yeah just to walk around

with the bow bow and arrow and then whatever comes about whatever pops up you like so you like let me back up a step

How many days a week When you're not doing any guiding How many days a week do you farm? Like twice a week Okay so you spend a couple days a week Fishing and hunting A couple days a week farming Yeah

Do you like fishing and hunting? I know you don't like this kind of question Do you like fishing and hunting more than farming? How? You like it all. I like it all. Because if you don't farm, nobody will support you.

Hey, here's your farine. Or here's your local drink. Or here's your kassiri. So it's rather, you got to have your farm. So you got to have like a whole boat so in all you have to do it, farming, fishing

hunting yeah but there's a difference between have to and like to but you don't view it that way no good, that's good I really think it comes down to like

asking a rancher if he lives in a pretty valley it's just not part of it's just like the nouveau ranchers would say so yeah no but the long family very pragmatic response like yeah it's just it just is yeah your brother whitcliffe said you have to be a hunter man, a fisherman, and a weaver man. You have to be a perfect man. To get a wife, right? Yeah. If you are not capable of doing those things, you will not get a wife. Weaving, hunting, fishing, and presumably farming.

That's my problem. So, yeah, Rick can't weave. He can juggle. So does that get to? Yeah. No, I understand. No, I mean, I know you, but I didn't know if there was a discrepancy between what you were asking and what was being answered. My question was, you have more fun sitting in the boat fishing or bow.

And I think he likes to do the bow. He can shoot birds or the fish. When was the first time that you made it all the way up to the Bamboo Falls? Bamboo in 2007. Went up there. When you got there, did you... I want to like... Yanni, do a segue. Do a segue for me. Bring us into...

This is a hosting challenge for you. On the spot segue. Bring us into Pac... I don't even know where to begin. It's so like... Bowfishing for Pacu is so extraordinary that I don't know how to get into it. Like, do you approach it through the tackle?

Do you approach it through the fish? Do you approach it through the habitat? You covered Robin's tackle. No. Not the paku tackle. Just set the scene Just the landscape It's a drop point with the string Right

No Because he has a spool of line in his hand When he's fishing Paku No It's definitely Because it washed down the waterfall And go over the rapids You never see the damn thing

Right I think the portage with the loud roaring down the waterfall and go over the rapids and never see the damn thing. Right. I think the portage with the loud roaring of the waterfall is a good way to get into it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how to even. It's so extraordinary and otherworldly. It's just very difficult for me to even.

It's just I don't know where to begin. Yanni, pick a thing and begin. Bright red fish. Okay. Go with it. There you go. That's what you're looking. What do they eat? That's what you're looking for. What do they eat? That's what you're looking for is bright red fish that are eating.

Like red like something out of a fish store. Yeah. Like if you went to Petco, which I don't think carries fish. If you went wherever they help people buy aquarium fish, and you said, I need like a six, seven-pound bright red fish bigger than a dinner plate, please. Yeah, it's very. I was actually going to relate that scene when we saw the cataback eating the flowers to like.

It was like very koi pond like. It almost had this like oriental sort of like feeling. Very rainy and flowers and bright red fish coming out of murky water. You know those Japanese paintings? They would love to paint that scene. Right. Those old-style Japanese paintings where you paint, like, a tranquil scene. Yeah.

So these, the paku, are bigger than dinner plate, I'm guessing. Very big dinner plate, like serving platter size. As tall as they are long. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, exactly. Yeah. If they were just a little bit shorter, they would be a circle And they're eating Paku weed

Yeah There's a question I don't think we ever got answered during the trip Does that plant grow When the water's lower Out of the water Or is it an aquatic plant Is it always in the water It's always on the water Or is it an aquatic plant Is it always in the water It's always on the water

And stays on the rock But it always has water Gushing over This is full balls waterfall I mean this is like Like drops that are Five feet drops Up to We better bring in a kayak expert.

Yeah, 25, 20. 20, 25 foot drops. With a lot of steps in them. Oh, yeah. Like natural fish ladder structures up these falls. When you think of like the hidden gem in the jungle rainforest like awe inspiring. That was unreal. Rainbows and shit coming off the mist.

So hard to get to. If it wasn't so hard to get to, they would build boardwalks and just charge you to take a look at it. Oh yeah. And it's throwing up the waterfalls throwing up so much mist that it's a completely different plant regime there. All the vegetation is different around there because it's like a completely different plant regime there. All the vegetation is different around there

because it's like a misty moisture in there. And it's damn warm all the time. It just creates a weird habitat. But Yanni was running with the fish. Teeth like a human being. Yes. In that they have a top row and a bottom

row of teeth. All lined up. Yeah. And they're sort of squarish, I guess. And they touch. Yeah. Like a person. Like a person. Like a person with weird pig-like teeth. Yeah.

But when I first looked at his mouth, I wasn't like, oh my gosh, you look like my wife. Relative to other fish. Or possibly humans. Yes. And the greatest name ever, like the plant they make arrows from is called arrow plant. And the plant the Paku eats is called? Pakuit. Pakuit.

Pakuit. It looks like, it kind of resembles parsley and has a watercress-y kind of vibe. And grows stuck to the rocks of a waterfall. In the waterfall. Not like in a riffle, not in a churning pool, but where the water is gushing. Falling. Yeah. Say if it was six inches deep, it's a place where there's so much velocity to the water

that if you stuck your foot into that six inches of water, it would gush up halfway up your thigh. Yeah. There's that sort of velocity moving through there. It kind of like grows on rocks, almost like under falling water. Yeah. And sometimes right in the, just like in the current.

And the Pakus hold in the current in all kinds of postures. They have fins that like, like their whole backside is like fins, like because their dorsal fin is so far back that it almost becomes like in line with the tail. And their ventral fin is huge and goes back where it almost kind of joined forces with the tail too. And they hold like

a normal fish, upright. They hold sideways sometimes depending on what they're doing. And they're in there like an aquatic mountain goat, climbing around in the falls, eating the water crest paku

plant. So when you gut them, it just looks like you could, like I was telling Corey, like when you gut him, it just looks like you could garnish, like I was telling Corey, like when you gut him, you could take it and garnish a dish with it. Yeah. With the contents of his gut. Yeah. I think something that you could point out, I can't,

I can visualize it because I saw it, but something critical of those spots that were good paku fishing or bow fishing areas was like, it's not like a river and then waterfall and like I said, a step. It's like all these weird pockets. The rock is cut in so many different depths and weird like, I don't know. Like the center of the river might plunge. The center of the river like does a real plunge.

Yeah. But the sides of the plunge have like these steps where it's like fall pool fall pool all hauling ass but it's like a monument if you were to design a waterfall from scratch you'd be like okay i'm gonna put a little step here a little step there and like very aesthetically pleasing and a big ass redfish and a big... It kind of climbs around. It kind of climbs around in the rapids. Yeah. And you walk up to the rapids, and you're like, the only thing that would make this waterfall better

is a fish that I could shoot with my bow and arrow. And lo and behold, out of the froth emerges for a second, just enough to make you think you're, like, hallucinating, this giant red fish, who then goes back underwater and then you perch up with a bow and an arrow and they're cagey and yeah you gotta sneak up on them so you sneak up into like bow range of where you saw this improbable flash of red and you perch up not at full draw because you don't know how long it's going to be but at an attentive quarter draw some of the fish

some of them are just pretty much sitting there holding but they all kind of dodge in and out and you wait and when your shot opportunity comes you're doing what every bow fisherman knows you need to aim low for refraction so it's like when you stick a stick in the water,

if you ever jab your fishing pole in the water, it looks like your fishing pole's got a bend to it, right? It's refraction. You've got to aim below the fish for refraction. But what American bow fishermen never have to do is hold up for current. I was shooting a fiberglass arrow, which cuts better than Rovan's arrow wood arrow.

There's been a jaguar killing dogs in this town, and a dog just ran by, and I'm waiting for the jaguar to come after it. But he only comes that night, huh? Oh, yeah. How many dogs has he got now

in the last couple weeks? Well, it's 24. Now he's more. 24? He's got 24 dogs? His dogs killed already. When are you guys going to kill the jaguar? Or don't you think you will?

I don't know. Are you worried about running out of dogs? No. There's a lot of dogs. Puppies. And there's no fear that that jaguar is going to grab a person. That just doesn't really happen.

That does not happen. Yeah. That rarely happens. Rarely happens. He'll just eat dogs and chickens. Dogs and chickens. He's killed 24 dogs in the last couple weeks. Yeah.

He was here since December. Oh, he's been here for a couple months. Making a good living. Getting good meal so Robin's arrow is buoyant you sometimes probably have to aim if you imagine the fish's length

how much are you leading the fish upstream well it's not much since I have the wire point to shoot the Paco. It's heavy point.

And also the drop point, it's made from 3 inch nail. So it's heavy. If I had a bullet wood or a purple hard point, it would be light, so when I shoot,

the current of the water will drift away the arrow, but I'm using a wire point, so I would aim probably four inch off the head. Okay. When I was picturing When I was shooting him I was sort of aiming at his Basically aiming at his mouth

Okay And I was hitting Most of the ones I hit were Just behind the gill cover Yeah But I was kind of picturing Like okay I aim at his mouth And then it'll drift back

And Yeah So you figure you're like Four inches off his nose Yeah and it all depends on where the fish is. And how deep. Yeah, and how deep. If the fish is in strong current, that's where I picked.

But if the fish is like behind a rock where there's not so much current hanging around there, then I aim straight to the fish. Yep. And sometimes the fish come up with their fins out of the water, and they just aim right at him. Yeah, straight on him. And when he gets hit, he starts... The fish in your arrow

just start tumbling down the waterfalls. Yeah. Which is one of the challenges of it. Well, so the drop point is tied onto the line. And the line is 80 pounds. Sometimes when you, as soon as you get a hit, it goes on the falls a little,

and then the line ties up here and can wrap around your foot, wrap your hand. That's a difficult part. Because it pulls the dart. Yeah, it pulls the dart, yeah. Pull your parent point out. Right. And it's strong. It's Because it pulls the dart. Yeah, it pulls the dart, yeah. Pull your parent point out. Right. And it's strong. It's strong, very strong fish. Yeah, so all that fish, when that fish wants to take off,

all he needs to do is turn sideways. Yeah, turn sideways. And then it's just like there's no stopping him. So Rovan's point, like I said, he makes his harpoon point from a nail, a three-inch nail, and flattens it and then cuts barbs into it. And if his line tangles up on something, the fish can't pull drag, so to speak.

So it'll pull and pop his point out. Modern, like American fish arrows can kind of withstand it the way the barbs are set up. You can kind of like stop the fish and pull them back. But it's like a pretty delicate thing because you're shooting the fish and then playing it, hand lining it.

And you got to climb your way down the rapids, climb your way down the waterfalls to try to retrieve your fish. And that's one of your favorite fish. Yeah. These are one of my favorite. They and it's it's fun shooting them too you like to shoot them yeah i sure do it's just like like i said it's like when you bow fish in america in our country you bow fish in the dankest like muddiest swamp hell holes. Generally, not always, but generally you're in like stagnant backwater kind of stuff

hunting for fish that are not the best. Let's just put it very kindly and say that they are generally not the best eating fish. Because the really good fish, the very popular fish in our country, you're not allowed to shoot with a bow. So the fact that you can bow fish for the best fish, and I think the boys here can speak to the quality table fare

of the fish in this river. I was going to say... How is that? Their meals are very... not very varietied. As guests, we had amazing food. And like, I don't know,

10 different ways catfish cooked. Or maybe 7. I don't know. A bunch of different varieties. The fishy isn't very... The fish isn't very fishy. There's no mud. It's all meaty, grouper-y.

Catfish. Yellow-eyed, rockfish-y. Really satisfying. Dense. Dense. Yeah. That Paku lunch. Oh my god, the fish are good. They're like ocean fish. They taste like ocean fish. Dense. Dense, yeah. That Paku lunch. Oh, my God, the fish are good. Yeah. They're like ocean fish.

Yeah. They taste like ocean fish. I mean, just the ecosystem, the amount of fish, the size of the fish, it's like a full-on, it's just a bit, you know, when I think of American rivers, I think of little trout or even big trout, but nothing like what's going on here. Oh, trout are cupcakes, man. Yeah. Yeah, little things.

I just realized the paku thwarts my theory about fish who... I pointed that out when you posted the theory. Paku? Being one of the... Yeah, dirt was observing that. Yeah, not theory. Tell them what you were observing. Well, big game, generally the herbivores are the tastier

animals other than the mountain lion yeah like in general sense animals that eat grass and grain yeah and then with fish species it's generally the fish that are the predatorial fish that are the tastier flakier meat yeah Yeah. I totally agree with that. I must have, yeah. But the parsley-fed paku is delicious. It's the mountain lion of fish. Yeah. I mean, this is a vegetarian piranha. It's from the family of...

All right, man. To catch the paku with a line oh that's interesting yeah you walk out of the waterfalls and get yourself a handful of paku weed and then you build like a little paku weed nugget that's uh

what is the size of like a um like maybe a fun size snickers or a little bit smaller. Fun size Snickers and you wrap it up with like a heavy braided line. Make this little packet and you basically run your hook right through it. And that's it. And you cast that out and just dead drift it in the current.

Wait for the hit. While we were bow fishing, we kind of checked out a few different falls and got five paku, big bastards. While we were bow fishing, some of the other guys were hand lining paku weed, hooks dressed in paku weed, and they caught three small ones.

Were you guys aware of that? You go off in one direction to do something and you think that you're kind of following all the evidence that goes on then you come back and say, where the hell did this thing come from? Like a bunch of fish laying in the sand.

You can't keep this morning. We wake up to go out. It's raining too hard to go. It's raining too hard to go out looking for semi-aquatic rodents. And so I go back to sleep and wake up and get word that they're out fishing and come back with like a splendid array of fish to bring home. It's hard to keep up. That's my concluding thought.

Too much life on this river. Can't keep up. That's my concluding thought. Too much life on this river. Can't keep up. Too much stuff to catch. What did you call that, Rick, in the visual sense with the drone when there's too much appeal? My buddy Reed says you're like a dog at the beach, dog beach, dog beach in it, and you just run in every direction like you're so excited about everything you don't know which way to go it happens when we're doing camera work there's something to film and there's so many things to film you just can't you don't you don't film any of them very well because you get so

you get so distracted by everything that you end up with nothing so maybe the fishing was like kind of like that here just so much going on that That's how I would, but these guys hone in and get it done. Dirt, yeah, wrap up thoughts? Yeah, actually, I knew the trip was going to be good as far, I knew it was going to be good regardless, but when we showed up to the first camp and you're committing to this, you know, seven-day trip and the stove, the modern stove we brought ends up, for technical reasons, not working. And there wasn't like a beat skipped.

And these, the boys and the cooks, these two gals cooked for 15 people for seven days over fire. Yeah, we brought down a camp chef. We brought down a camp chef stove that runs off liquid propane. But these guys get a gas. Look at that. Crazy weather happening. These guys get a gas that comes out of

Brazil. I can't tell what the hell it is. I've never seen a fitting like that. But they didn't skip a beat. No one ever is like, oh, son of a bitch, it's raining. People don't talk like this. Or like, oh, okay. No one ever is like, oh, son of a bitch, it's raining. People don't talk like this. Or like blame it. Or, oh, I got bit.

All we ever go is like, oh, son of a bitch. No, they never yell that they got bit. I'm like, do they not get bit? Of course they get bit. Very impressed with the whole experience and the culture. Yeah, I'll second that. Rovan's got a tight-run ship. It's a nice crew to be on the river with.

Well, it's a lot of his – Rovan works with his relatives, so brothers, brother-in-laws, wife. Cousin, right? Neville is your cousin. Cousin. Yeah, so that's who he travels with. Do you get along so well because you're all related or because you're all from the village? We are from the village.

So you get along that way with everybody in the village? So the way we do it is we don't want to get into so much of a problem. Family only implies this kind of rumors so we call like Rudy we call like other persons and some of my brother-in-laws in between so everybody like

have to get implied so you keep people when you're doing a river trip with clients you hire outside of your own family just to get everybody involved. Rick? I'm trying to think. There was

the work ethic was really great to see, but it's a real nice balance from all the guys that were basically working as outfitters and setting up our camp. And there was a ton of work to be done, and it would be done very quickly, efficiently, and then the guys were very quick to just hang out in a very relaxed way.

It was nice to watch this work-hangout balance that I think most people don't do a very good job at, and they just seem to handle the tasks that need to be done, and then they just had to go fish or go bathe or go just hang out. Yeah, I think it's a lifestyle that I think Americans often want to have some sort of balance like that, but can't reach it for any number of reasons. Because some people work too much and some people hang out too much. That's exactly right. That was an ongoing conversation we were having.

I was griping, when we'd have bullshit sessions, I was griping a lot about a thing that I've developed as sort of a pet subject, kind of like a pet peeve, is American relaxation culture. People who get really serious about relaxation and who think they're all set up to relax and who plan a day of just relaxing how much that aggravates me but they're not really relaxing in the end no they do spare bit relaxing well i mean they're

they got to plan it they got to go buy the stuff they got to work hard to buy the stuff yeah like we had a chair and it comes out to be like probably more work than relaxation i had a chair and it's like uh on one arm of it a camp chair and one arm was like the zippered insulated pocket and on the other arm is a cup holder thinking being you could put like two beers in the chair arm that you're ready to drink and then the one beer that you are drinking and have me you've eliminated now the need to get up you're like ha suckers i'm getting up here these people are getting up to go get a beer you know not knowing that you could get a chair designed so you don't even need to do that i was wondering if they're going to get make one

with a catheter if it had another bag that just held a urine sack, it'd be set. Then people who really are into relaxation would be even better. I bring this up because one of the things is my wife and I bought our first house not a year ago, and it has a rooftop deck, and I'm rigging the rooftop deck up

for what I imagine to be – you would, at a passing glance, think of it as a relaxation area. And I'm just – one day it struck me like when this is done, the last thing I will ever do is come up here and sit here and relax. I will lose all interest in it once it's done. Like I'm not going to be like, no, I'm going to go up there and sit. Maybe you need a little balance in your life. That's a personality thing.

Take a moment after a hard day's work and go relax. Some people relax by weeding, which is what Steve will be doing up there. I put garden boxes up there so I can go up there. That's what I'll say. I'll go up there and be like, why won't this plant grow?

I was going to comment on hammock sleeping, which I've never done. Come down here. Roven sets up a very fine hammock system. It's amazing. They set this up. There's no poles in the ground whatsoever. In an hour or less, they've got a giant tarp

over the top, giant tarp on the ground, four posts or maybe more yeah talk about the the the camp style and what it's reliant on the two things it's reliant on um soft sandy soil you can dig an eight foot deep hole in five seconds yeah and then um wood a soft wood that's strong get easily chopped with a machete or cutlass as they call them here and and no reservation about cutting said wood that's right yeah that was something we were talking about it's like when we grew up it was like you were like we were we got whooped if we were caught you know chopping at green trees we go into the woods boys and whack it dead rotten trees as much as we wanted but if we were caught chopping at green trees. We'd go into the woods, boys, and whack at dead, rotten trees as much as we wanted.

But if we were caught working over a live tree, we literally got whooped for it. And down here, there is just so much that, okay, if you had a bulldozer running through the woods, okay, you've reached an extreme. But you and a cutlass just simply cannot damage the rainforest right so no at best you can carve out like a little spot a little spot that you'll have for a little while when you come back a week later you're going to do some more carving to get it back to be your spot again but uh yeah so they run opposing poles at a little bit of an angle and then run the hammock line from that. And then the hammock is enclosed in a mosquito netting.

It's stretched out with little T-bars so that you've got plenty of room inside there. I guess the hammocks are made out of cotton. Yeah, they're made out of cotton. Yeah, cotton. Do you know how they sometimes peg their posts? Because you'll dig a hole with a machete, sink a post in it, and then take a peg and pound the peg so it fills the space, the gap, packing with dirt.

Very quick task. Yeah. I love the hammock sleeping. I thought it was going to throw my back for a loop. Yeah, that was probably one of the things I was worried about the most was going to be that I was worried about the most. I was going to, like, three days into it, be crippled from hammock sleeping.

Well, we had different experiences. Corey, you didn't do so well. A couple days was fine. Until the boat portages. Maybe it's the... I don't know. Some heavy lifting. I spent a few days on the Amazon, and I used the hammock there,

and I did all right, but I ended up sleeping on the ground in the last couple nights. Snakes. Here you did. Snakes were going to get you. Where were you on the ground? Right under my hammock. Were you getting up bitten a lot by the ants and ticks and whatnot a lot?

No, I figured out a way you put the mosquito netting underneath. That's where you were sleeping. Good thinking. The machete thing, we did chop a lot of green wood. It wasn't like... You remember that show, Name That Tune?

No. It was like a game show. There's a host. You'd come on and be like, I can name that tune in four notes. They'd play four notes. I'll name it in three. I'll name four notes. And they'd play four notes. And someone's like, I'll name it in three. Well, with that, I'll name it in two.

And they'd play two notes. And then if the guy gets it, he wins money. We had a game we played as kids called, it was based off name that tune. It was called Chop That Tree. And we would walk up to a tree with a machete, and he'd be like, Dan, I can chop that tree in five hits. And he'd be like, dan i can chop that tree in five hits and he'd be like i probably chopped that tree in four hits and i'd be like dan chop that tree and then he would have to you know and what did you win money can't remember no we didn't bet money on it but

it reminded me of like how much we were able to roam around machetes and last time i was here i brought rovin's machete home with me and got in way-ass trouble when my wife came around the corner and I was letting our three-year-old cut loose on a rotten pumpkin with that machete. And she's still kind of mad about that. And even Robin thought

that was foolish of me. Robin, you don't let your kids play with machete? No, when they're sharp They're allowed to Yeah, I catch my sharp Rick just juggles them Rick don't use them on anything besides the air

Did you guys use that hatchet or the cutlass better? That black hatchet I used it last night Is it not as good as the Cutlass for right here? It works good. It does. It's more heavier. For pounding.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and another thing, speaking of Cutlasses and whatnot, flaying, not flaying, but basically cutting fish and doing flay-type maneuvers on fish with machetes is interesting to watch. Yeah. Corey, any wrap-up thoughts wrap up let's see i was talking to rudy on the beach sand beach yesterday while we were drying out our clothes and he kept referring to the outside world and i thought that was it's

kind of neat that you guys are okay there's a place still left where they're you know people are looking outward and thinking it's an outside world like i don't i don't know and yeah like you still have the sense of there being this and then yeah and and how you guys are taking that outside world and like you know bringing people from that outside world here to the Rewa Lodge. And, but you're, you're preserving your culture through that. Like you're reaching out to the outside world. At the same time, you're preserving your culture. You know, it's a, it's a pretty special place.

And it's accessible, I might add. I mean, we did JFK to Georgetown on like,, what, a five-and-a-half-hour flight maybe? Yeah. And then Georgetown, an hour-plus, couple minutes charter flight. And it's like a single-prop Cessna Caravan. Yeah. It lands on a grass, like a dirt strip. And then Roe and his boys pick you up, and in an hour, you're at the Eco Lodge living large.

Before we go, we should ask... I get my concluder. You said you already had your concluder. Well, I thought of a different one. All right. Roven, we talked about something privately, and if you don't want to talk about it, you don't have to. But would you mind talking to a public audience

about what happened with the peccaries or is that something you don't want to discuss? Like why you're not seeing them right now? Well, well, we have a shaman. They are like the, I would said they are like the doctors nurses whatever you could call in your country but here we have the shaman they

are knowledgeable they have the power of using we call it a marine high science they can do anything to a fish to the river, to animals such as peccaries 12 approximately 12 years ago we used to have a lot of peccaries coming close to the village a white lit peccary

which would come like 100 or 200 of them at a time. They're like a hog, pig kind of. Yeah, we call them wild hogs. We have the collared peccary, which is called a javelina. This is a bigger, louder, more gregarious javelina, species

of collared, white-lipped peccary. So these hogs, wild hogs, peccaries, use the common feeding in the end of the ponds, feeding on fruit nuts, worms. And as you go travel up the river, you can bump into them, you can hear them from a distance, you can even smell them.

We used to have a lot of fun shooting, and we had meat. We can barbecue, lots of barbecues fresh meat now in order I'm ringing villages they have people that have very knowledge like you said shawmin and having a lot of food and they don't. Now there's like jealousy. If I'm jealous of Steve, Steve is accurate in shooting. I would do my high science on Steve and next time he wouldn't shoot accurate.

Anything he shoots, he's like missing. Like throw a curse on him. Yeah, like miss. So because of my, I use my high sense on him. So people are like that here. So what they do is like, they stop the picaris, they lock them up somewhere. Well, I don't know where, but somewhere between the mountains.

I have no idea. Using their high sense now to get the picares to come out from there we have to get another another shaman that could do the high sense to get the picares out from there

because they are locked up there now if we have one like that we could get the picares out now they will be all over again. Yeah. But that's how the piqueries had been stopped. How did the shaman get to that level? Well. Is there

someone training it? They learn from their parents. Their parents was like a shaman. He smoked tobacco through his nose. Like dirt? Yeah. They do tobacco through his nose. Like dirt? Yeah. They do a lot of things. They can bring down a fish spirit

by shaking the bush in the house and doing their things and stuff like that. And then they can bring down like a peccary's leader, I would call it that we know he you know job with him to call it a shot of local doing you know by spirit and then if the showman said okay rights

I wanna lock you up here for a while to treat for years on years and be dear and the call when I want to be there on steady that's how the the showman works they have like a little power the signs they are working so they are like good and bad ones yeah so I don't know if you are here and you saw the pick but um we used to have a lot of peccaries here we have a lot of myths we used to have a lot of fun but now there is no white peccaries we just have the colored ones around did the did the shaman or the other village that used the high science to lock up the peccaries did they tell you that they were doing this or did the peccaries. Did they tell you that they were doing this or

did the peccaries just disappear and then you speculated that that's why they... We know. Because for a while we didn't see any peccaries. We have our shaman in the village. He's not

perfect but at least you can get some experience or he could or he could tell you what is happening he knows what's happening he knows what happened so he said uh well there's somebody locked them up there so they're there that's they're not coming out anymore even with the fish like if somebody like do something to river, you will hardly get some fish, hardly get some turtles, otters, caimans, and so on. So that is how the shaman works. There are good ones and bad ones.

They could do anything. Yeah. I understand why someone would be jealous of rewa village because it's a beautiful village that's wonderful to visit so i understand how someone that had a bad village that wasn't this way and this friendly and such great people um i see how they would get jealous. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't think that you,

I don't think that, that that, I hope that your peccaries come back. Yeah. I hope they come back soon. Someday I'll start becoming a shaman. Bring out all the peccaries. I hope that they come back.

Robin, do you have any thoughts you'd like to, do you have anything you want to say that you didn't get a chance to talk about? Well, I just want to say like a thank you to all of you guys who come up here choosing Guyana, choosing Rewa,

and to do a little exploratory with me. And then I hope you learn something from our culture that we are keeping up. The traditional way of life we are doing. Fishing, that's what we do for a living. We fish, we hunt, we farm. We do all of that for a living. And now now traveling up the river,

it's not something that is new to us. We have been doing this for years, so we got used to it. Now imparting that to you guys, maybe someday I would go there and see how you live there. Maybe far different.

Here is like local way. So... Yeah, you know the river like how a person who's had the same garage for 10 years knows what's in their garage. Yeah. Night driving and stuff. Night driving. We have been... Yeah, a lot

of night driving. We know the rivers. Robin, how... If someone wanted to... If someone wanted to come and visit with you and hire you to do a river trip, what is the best way that they get in contact with you? You can contact me by email. Do you want to say what your email is? Yeah, robinalvin at gmail.com. So, R-O-V-I-N So R-O-V-I-N.

A-L-V-I-N. I'm sorry, from the top? R-O-V-I-N, A-L-V-I-N at gmail.com. rovinalvin at gmail.com. And you will help, if someone wants to come, you will help arrange a trip on the river. Yeah. To see how you live um i i don't know that we've ever done this on this show but it is a um i live in in constant you know i'm always a little suspicious

of uh not suspicious of guy that's not the right word i don't know if i've ever done this in this vocal of a way but if you have the time and you have the money and you want to see i don't want to say a vanishing way of life because that would i hope be wrong um i hope that it's not a vanishing way of life. If you want to see a way of life that brings a closer understanding of how we all lived when we lived in greater harmony with the natural world

and with a greater level of understanding of the natural world. If you want to have that set of experiences and really get a glimpse at an aspect of humanity that you miss and maybe long for and maybe you've always been curious about, but to do it in a way where you are kept safe and where you are taken care of and your needs are met and someone has the patience to answer your questions and doesn't leave you hanging on any questions and has the answers for the things you want to know. I cannot recommend, I can't give a higher recommendation than what I'm giving right now. It really is, I think it's something that someone would go do

and they would refer to it when they were doing their relaxing for the rest of their life. No chair has a big enough beer pocket to hold enough beer for you to tell all the stories that you will pick up when you spend a week or two on the river with Rovan. I agree. I agree 100%. Yeah.

I don't want to sound fatalistic. I would do it now. Go now. Don't wait too long because things have a way of changing around. Anyone else? Any last thing?

Go now. That was a good conclusion. Thanks, Roven. For everything, man. And the rest of the crew. For all the time you guys spent looking out for us and teaching us. Again, this is my second time down here, and it was just, you know,

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