Forest Gold
Among all the wild plants and fruits of the jungle, honey was the most sought after, and men of the indigenous tribes were masters at climbing to the roof of the forest and risking their lives for their favorite food. Immune to the stings of the agitated bees, they climb fifty meters or more in order to pull the hives from hollow tree trunks.
After months of travelling through the deserts of North Africa, and then down into the continent’s steaming jungles, Kersti and I continued our trip on the Congo River with a Greek trader whose boat was carrying a cargo of beer upriver to Kisangani in the Eastern Congo. We slogged upstream 1500 kilometers deep into the remote interior of the continent, on a river that was so wide that at times you could barely see the opposite shore, and at others, so narrow that our boat seemed like it would be swallowed by an unbroken wall of green.
We brought a little breath of the outside world to the thatched hut villages that we passed on our way upriver. We were a diversion in the unchanging life of the jungle. Villagers came out to the narrow strip of shore to watch us pass, waving and chanting. Children swam out a bit to get our attention, and fishermen paddled their dug-out canoes to intercept our boat and hitch a ride upstream, or sell whatever fish or fruit that they might have. A river peddler, while holding on to our gunwale, haggled with one of the crew over a beehive dripping with honey, complete with dead bees and their larvae.
We found a tin bowl in the galley and pressed out the honey with our hands. We picked out dead bees and bits of wax and crushed the cells between our fingers and palms so that the sugary liquid ran out.
I filled a frying pan with palm seed oil, sliced and quartered thick, green, fibery plantains and fried them golden brown over a kerosene burner, and poured the honey over them while they were still sizzling. If there was ever a review of jungle delicacies, fried bananas and fragrant rain forest honey would be at the top of any list.