Speaker 1: To get to Vulcan Lehman's compound in the Amazon kept
Speaker 1: really want together there. For me, that involved a red
Speaker 1: eye from Miami to Santa Cruz, Olivia's biggest city, then
Speaker 1: a puddle jumper to a town called Trinidad, a sweaty
Speaker 1: night there, and then nine grueling hours in a collectivo
Speaker 1: taxi squeeze between farm hands and crying babies, hammering over
Speaker 1: washboard rows at thirty miles per hour, which is about
Speaker 1: twenty miles per hour too fast. At last, I got
Speaker 1: dropped off at Vulkar's place. Hello. Hello, it's changed since
Speaker 1: my visit twelve years ago. For our river trip. Folcus
Speaker 1: built himself a crazy new house, all screen, no walls.
Speaker 1: A few feet away, there's an out house with tree
Speaker 1: frogs in the toilet, a workshop with a generator, and
Speaker 1: a big greenhouse for fermenting cacao. There's papayetrees and bananas,
Speaker 1: and a tiny white local chili called goose anita. It
Speaker 1: looks like little worms. They're brutally hot. The vulgar munches
Speaker 1: them like popcorn. Surrounding it all, of course, are the cocaudries,
Speaker 1: acres of them. Poker calls the place tranquila DoD. It
Speaker 1: means tranquility in Spanish, and most of the time the
Speaker 1: name fits most of the time. So um, if you can,
Speaker 1: you runt down all the things to watch out for.
Speaker 1: I'm wandering around. I always tell the people when they come,
Speaker 1: please don't touch anything. I think National Geographic and all
Speaker 1: Animal planet they give a false perspective. There are people,
Speaker 1: you know, gripping crocodiles and snakes and whatnot, and so
Speaker 1: don't touch the crocodiles or the snakes. Is in general,
Speaker 1: there's actually a lot of crocodiles, not a touch. The
Speaker 1: place is filled with them. Technically, the ones in the
Speaker 1: Amazon are called caymans, not crocodiles, but I know a
Speaker 1: crocodile smile when I see one. The big ones in
Speaker 1: Bolivia can be more than twelve ft long, and Folkers
Speaker 1: says to stay away from them because they like to
Speaker 1: charge people. But the smaller ones, well, he's caught a
Speaker 1: five footer in honor of our reunion, and now he's
Speaker 1: prepping it for dinner. We have like rips and tail.
Speaker 1: The tail will eat raw with lime juice like svich.
Speaker 1: The ribs get fried not too long, so it stays
Speaker 1: juicy inside, its wanderful. When you're talking about wild chocolate.
Speaker 1: This is ground zero. Tranquilidad is where the movement was born.
Speaker 1: The beans from these trees produced the first run of
Speaker 1: Cruise Savage and set off the gold rush to find
Speaker 1: more last ca cow with wicked new flavors. I've come
Speaker 1: to work the harvest, to learn the arts of picking
Speaker 1: and fermenting, to understand on a deeper level, where great
Speaker 1: chocolate comes from. The Last time I was here a
Speaker 1: dozen years ago, the trip had gone from bad to absurd,
Speaker 1: but it ended well. Volker lined up lots of new
Speaker 1: sources of cacao. Cruise Evage was a hit, and Volker
Speaker 1: became a legend in the fine chocolate community. And then
Speaker 1: something went terribly wrong. I've only heard the details from
Speaker 1: a distance, but just like those golden pods, were cursed. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I had no intention to dig into this jungle. Actually,
Speaker 1: I I fell into the trap. It was just looking
Speaker 1: for some stupid kaka in the forest. I wasn't even
Speaker 1: planning on this. Yeah, well you'll see what happened. For
Speaker 1: thirty years, has been chasing that grail, always believing it
Speaker 1: was one step away, always believing that with just a
Speaker 1: little more organization, the Amazon would fall into place. And
Speaker 1: of course he was just the latest in a long
Speaker 1: line of outsiders to believe that he could make sense
Speaker 1: of the chaos, from the Spanish gold hunters and the Jesuits,
Speaker 1: to the rubber barons of the eight hundreds and they
Speaker 1: explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in Still Seeking the Lost
Speaker 1: City of z And to the characters in Werner Herzog's
Speaker 1: Amazon films, and even Herzog himself, who seems to have
Speaker 1: gone at least partially insane trying to make those movies.
Speaker 1: What are your plans when this movie is all over?
Speaker 1: What are you gonna be doing? I shouldn't make movies anymore.
Speaker 1: Should go to a lunatic asylum right away. These dreamers
Speaker 1: always think they're close, and every time the same thing
Speaker 1: happens there, attempts to make it work on their terms fail.
Speaker 1: From Kaleidoscope and I Heeart podcasts. This is Obsessions, Wild Chocolate.
Speaker 1: I'm Roman Jacobson, Chapter two, Olivia for Dummies. Long before
Speaker 1: he ever saw a cowpot, Volker Lehman was a little
Speaker 1: boy in Berlin with a green thumb. His father was
Speaker 1: an army veteran and a coal miner battling exhaustion and PTSD.
Speaker 1: So he came from work and then he went for
Speaker 1: one or two hours into the garden. Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: helped him also to maybe forget a little about about
Speaker 1: the harsh conditions in the coal mine. By the time
Speaker 1: he was five, Folker was gardening right alongside him. I
Speaker 1: had to pull out the weeds and well, sometimes I
Speaker 1: missed and put on the carrots. Education, but he never
Speaker 1: much liked the German climate. After high school, he took
Speaker 1: a trip to Latin America and compared to the gray
Speaker 1: horizons of post war Germany, it was like stepping into
Speaker 1: a technicolor wonderland. I was intrigued by the climb, at
Speaker 1: the music, the food. It's like you feel friendly. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't just the culture around farming. Volka was amazed
Speaker 1: by the power of tropical plants, the way they grew
Speaker 1: so ferociously, and the incredible amount of food and medicine
Speaker 1: they could produce. One he decided to devote his life
Speaker 1: to them. He knocked around the tropics for a few
Speaker 1: years doing development work, and by the nineties he'd found
Speaker 1: his way to Bolivia. The German government had a program
Speaker 1: to try to get Bolivia's farmers to switch from coca
Speaker 1: to less controversial crops, and Vulgar's job was to teach
Speaker 1: the farmers how to work with the new ones. Bolivians
Speaker 1: consider coca their most sacred plant. The leaves are chewed
Speaker 1: daily for stamina and stimulation, but they're also the source
Speaker 1: of cocaine. And the ninety nineties Olivia was awash and
Speaker 1: the stuff. Folker told me about those strange days as
Speaker 1: we sat in his jungle home. No, but Santa Cruz
Speaker 1: was like Carnival in real seven actually on Bolivia, and
Speaker 1: Santa Cruz was the expansion project from the Colombians because
Speaker 1: they needed more for you, you know that is you
Speaker 1: being meat being America. They needed more cocaine to feed
Speaker 1: our insatiable appetite, more than they could produce in Columbia, right, right,
Speaker 1: So first they moved into Peru, and then that wasn't enough.
Speaker 1: Then they moved over and to to Bolivia. People are
Speaker 1: coming from Columbia by plane, small planes, bringing even their
Speaker 1: bands with bringing the band. Yeah, yes, you heard that right.
Speaker 1: If you're a Colombian drug hiller on the Bolivian range,
Speaker 1: how do you party without your local tunes. There was
Speaker 1: a small town, Santa Ananda, Yukuma, which was then the
Speaker 1: hot spot. And did you ever have to worry about
Speaker 1: crossing those guys? So sometimes you sit next to one
Speaker 1: and he would not he would invite you. Oh you're American,
Speaker 1: you know where you come from. He wants to know
Speaker 1: where we are if you're not from d A right right,
Speaker 1: And then he he puts a bottle of whiskey into you.
Speaker 1: And then you start singing, you know, and and then
Speaker 1: he he says, oh, this this guy is harmless. So
Speaker 1: as Volker continued his work, he found himself caught between
Speaker 1: his new friends, the farmers and the d e a.
Speaker 1: Santa ana was known as a ranching town, but it
Speaker 1: was also the heart of Olivia's cocaine network, because, as
Speaker 1: it turned out, the ranchers and the traffickers could be
Speaker 1: one and the same. Because when you have a farm,
Speaker 1: when you have a farm here, you don't have a plane,
Speaker 1: yeah normally and now to over watch anty hectares and
Speaker 1: and you have to travel no roads. The natural thing
Speaker 1: is to buy yourself as cessna. Then the pilot can
Speaker 1: transport some some packages. You know what means, you know,
Speaker 1: makes some side business, and of course that side business
Speaker 1: turned out to be a lot more lucrative than cattle.
Speaker 1: Soon Bolivia's ranchers were saddle deep in the drug business,
Speaker 1: and everyone knew it. On the night of June, the
Speaker 1: d e A took action. Dozens of helicopters carrying hundreds
Speaker 1: of anti drug agents from Bolivia and the United States
Speaker 1: swooped down on Santana. According to the d e A,
Speaker 1: agents destroyed fifteen cocaine labs hidden in the little town
Speaker 1: and confiscated dozens of planes along with hundreds of kilos
Speaker 1: of coke. But they met stiff resistance from the townspeople,
Speaker 1: who stormed the airport and surrounded the helicopters, chanting kill
Speaker 1: the Yankees, leaving no uncertainty as to where their loyalties lay.
Speaker 1: Vulgar tried hard to persuade farmers to switch crops, but
Speaker 1: eventually he burned out bananas, pineapple, hearts of palm. None
Speaker 1: of the alternative crops could ever compete with cocamine. He
Speaker 1: felt useless, so he went back to his original obsession,
Speaker 1: studying the local plants, and before long he was searching
Speaker 1: the rainforest for the next big thing, a plant with
Speaker 1: global appeal, Like a vegetal talent scout. He needed a
Speaker 1: buzzy new client, and he found one. But it wasn't cocao,
Speaker 1: not yet. It was brazil nuts, one of the great
Speaker 1: treats of the Amazon. The territory of Bolivia was always
Speaker 1: the main source of the main spot of the brazil nuts.
Speaker 1: Always because Brazil chopped theres down or even before no,
Speaker 1: it's yeah and um. The nuts were always sold through
Speaker 1: Brazil and this is why they called brazil nuts. But
Speaker 1: they always came from Bolivia. Bolivia nuts really yeah. Brazil
Speaker 1: Nut trees are these giants of the rainforest, towering over
Speaker 1: the rest of the canopy. They have these little coconuts
Speaker 1: the size of bocci balls clinging to their trunks, and
Speaker 1: each one is filled with delicious nuts. The trees are
Speaker 1: kind of perfect for developing a rainforest economy, wild, sustainable, delicious,
Speaker 1: but on their own they aren't exactly a big ticket item.
Speaker 1: Bulker needed a sex air product, and he thought he
Speaker 1: might have the perfect candidate, a lady from the Chimana tribe.
Speaker 1: She showed me in the wild cacao. A few years earlier.
Speaker 1: Bulker had been exploring the jungle for valuable new plants.
Speaker 1: The natural people to ask where the Shimani, a group
Speaker 1: of hunter gatherers who still lived off the wild, and
Speaker 1: one old Shimani woman in particular, was known for her expertise.
Speaker 1: That friend introduced me. Ah, he said, I I know
Speaker 1: Chimana and they have some cacaw that might be of
Speaker 1: your interest. Let's go, and not just any cacao, wild cacao,
Speaker 1: something Vulka had never come across in his development work.
Speaker 1: So they went to the forest and found the old woman.
Speaker 1: She lived in intent made from sticks and palm thatch,
Speaker 1: and she knew all the useful plants in the forest.
Speaker 1: They still can see her, you know, she was really tiny.
Speaker 1: They asked if she could show them the wild cocow
Speaker 1: and she said sure, and she led them down a
Speaker 1: footpath into the forest. So we were walking and I
Speaker 1: was behind her sawing. I saw her hair like a nest,
Speaker 1: and her hair was a little monkey. It was a
Speaker 1: little pet monkey. And Falker could not stop looking at it.
Speaker 1: There are tiny monkeys her right, and she got one,
Speaker 1: and I was following her and looking at the monkey
Speaker 1: all the time, and all of a sudden, she she
Speaker 1: stopped and showed me a cow tree. And here it
Speaker 1: is the argent moment of the man who's going to
Speaker 1: make wild chocolate famous. In the Hollywood version of this tale,
Speaker 1: the wise woman hands him the yellow pod and he
Speaker 1: stares transfixed, like Indiana Jones gazing at the golden idol.
Speaker 1: Here is the answer. He seeks, the thing that is
Speaker 1: going to bring sustainable agriculture to the Amazon and transform
Speaker 1: the world of chocolate. Does he break open the pod,
Speaker 1: sniff the fragrant seeds, and hold it up like the
Speaker 1: Holy Grail. I wasn't really interested in the tree much, really,
Speaker 1: so oh, yeah, I see colcohol. Okay, Nope. All he
Speaker 1: could think about was the monkey. And then my friend said, yeah,
Speaker 1: do you think this is something? I said, I have
Speaker 1: no idea, But he tucked the experience away in the
Speaker 1: back of his mind, and when he was searching for
Speaker 1: a sexy partner to inrobe his Brazilian nuts, he unpacked it.
Speaker 1: And we will too after the break, Welcome back to
Speaker 1: wild Chocolate. So we we put this Oh what oh
Speaker 1: you call this? What's what's greater? Greater? Yeah? In La
Speaker 1: Paz and Santa Cruz and the other cities of Bolivia.
Speaker 1: You see rustic chocolate for sale in the markets, grainy
Speaker 1: brown patties shaped my hand, just like he'saly in Mexico.
Speaker 1: It's an old tradition in Bolivia, and they used stone
Speaker 1: on stone blinders. Yeah, so that's how it's still done here.
Speaker 1: This is the same, maybe fifty years ago. Amazing. But
Speaker 1: if you bite into one of these patties by itself,
Speaker 1: you're in for a bad time. Some of it tastes burnt,
Speaker 1: some tastes like blue cheese, and it all crumbles like dirt.
Speaker 1: For the locals, that doesn't really matter because it all
Speaker 1: gets drunk. Is hot chocolate with enough sugar to cover
Speaker 1: up any off flavors. For Vulcan, though, this chocolate wouldn't
Speaker 1: cut it. There was no way he could cut his
Speaker 1: precious brazil nuts and this stuff and pass it off
Speaker 1: as a gourmet item. He needed better chocolate, but he
Speaker 1: couldn't find any. He considered giving up on the whole idea,
Speaker 1: but then he found a tiny, run down chocolate shop
Speaker 1: in a back alley of Lapase. The proprietor was an
Speaker 1: eighty five year old Jewish man who could escape the
Speaker 1: Warsaw Ghetto during World War two. And he he was
Speaker 1: like a very traditional chocolate lover and had a small
Speaker 1: um choco factory. Jewish artisans have been at the heart
Speaker 1: of Europ's chocolate making tradition since the days of the
Speaker 1: Spanish court, and this old guy knew the traditional well.
Speaker 1: When Vulgar tasted his chocolate, he could not believe his
Speaker 1: daste buds. It was not terrible, but why Vulker put
Speaker 1: the questions to him, and it turned out the guy
Speaker 1: was doing what European chocolate makers have always done when
Speaker 1: stuck with funky beans. They beat the warm coco mass
Speaker 1: for hour after hour in a machine to blow off
Speaker 1: as much of the off flavors as possible. It wasn't perfect,
Speaker 1: but it was enough for Vulca to get his first
Speaker 1: real sense of the beans behind the funk, and he
Speaker 1: liked what he sensed. Behind the char and the cheese,
Speaker 1: there was something beautiful at heart. Vulcan is an engineer.
Speaker 1: When he sees a system, he thinks he's running poorly,
Speaker 1: that could be so much better with just a few tweaks.
Speaker 1: He can't resist. So now he couldn't help wonder if
Speaker 1: the funk was built into the beans, or if there
Speaker 1: was a way to get the beauty without the beast,
Speaker 1: And there was only one way to answer that. He
Speaker 1: had to go to the source, and that meant a
Speaker 1: scruffy town called Trinidad, where everything the jungle produced, from
Speaker 1: cocaw to cocaine could be found for sale. Tread is
Speaker 1: Uh is the center of trade, and then people running
Speaker 1: up and down the river with and and doing batta
Speaker 1: batta business. Traders would spend weeks in the jungle and
Speaker 1: then paddle into Trinidad to so other goods like the
Speaker 1: rice and and everything you need because there's no there's
Speaker 1: no money system. No, it was easier. It was easier
Speaker 1: than you know. Give me, would give me bananas, give
Speaker 1: me cocoa and and or whatever you have, and what
Speaker 1: the market accepts then turn into money. Cacao is money basically.
Speaker 1: So Volka flew to Trinidad. He started hanging out, getting
Speaker 1: another locals asking questions, but how do you how do
Speaker 1: you even do that? No, you just ask around. I
Speaker 1: was talking to more elderly people because they were telling
Speaker 1: me better the story. So I was sitting with them
Speaker 1: having tea and chats. Yeah, and then a little by
Speaker 1: little I got the picture. Most of the cacao was
Speaker 1: coming from a town called Ballets. Barrets was truly at
Speaker 1: the end of the earth, days from Trinidad by river,
Speaker 1: but of course, like every other town in the Cocaine
Speaker 1: So lowlands, it had an airstrip. So Volka hired a
Speaker 1: plane and headed for it, never guessing how much his
Speaker 1: life was about to change. There was no route, no electricity, nothing, no, no,
Speaker 1: not even for nothing. We were talking on on on
Speaker 1: shortwave radio. As he got to do the people in Bowrets,
Speaker 1: the picture got even clearer. And that picture, well, he
Speaker 1: almost had to pinch himself. The cocat was coming from
Speaker 1: islands of high grounds scattered across the wetlands, natural terraces
Speaker 1: that didn't get drowned during the four months rainy seasons.
Speaker 1: The locals called these forest islands Chocolatales. It was always
Speaker 1: harvested and used for local chocolate in Yeah, but on
Speaker 1: a very very low price, and during the wet season
Speaker 1: when the cacao was ripe, families would travel to the
Speaker 1: chocolate tales by canoe. The journey alone could take days.
Speaker 1: Then they camp in the forest for months, picking the pods,
Speaker 1: opening them and drawing the beans on mats in the sun.
Speaker 1: Then they'd sell the beans back in town, But the
Speaker 1: tradition was dying in Bolivious cities. People were switching over
Speaker 1: to powdered cocoa mix, which was easier to use. Prices
Speaker 1: for the wild cacao were too low to justify the work.
Speaker 1: The kids were less interested, so the people were starting
Speaker 1: to give up on the yearly trips. Many of the
Speaker 1: chocolate tallies had been abandoned, a few had been cut
Speaker 1: down for cattle grazing. It didn't take long for Volker
Speaker 1: to understand why the quality was bad. Two essential steps
Speaker 1: to making great beans are pretty darn hard to do
Speaker 1: in the Amazon. Drawing beans in the rainforest without a
Speaker 1: shelter of any kind is impossible. Many of the beans
Speaker 1: were moldy, and even the ones that weren't moldy had
Speaker 1: very little chocolate flavor. Fresh cacao beans are naturally bitter
Speaker 1: and a stringer. They have to be heaped together with
Speaker 1: their sugary pulp for days and fermented to transform those
Speaker 1: nasty flavors into chocolate ones. Unfortunately, most of the people
Speaker 1: in the world harvest in cacao don't have the time, expertise,
Speaker 1: or facilities to do it. Properly, and that was the
Speaker 1: case in Bolivia, and that spoke to Vulcar's engineer Soul.
Speaker 1: A little training and infrastructure, a micro dose of good
Speaker 1: old German organization could make all the difference. All he
Speaker 1: needed was to see just how much cacao was out
Speaker 1: there and if it was at all feasible to improve
Speaker 1: the fermenting and drying. But getting around the roadless jungle
Speaker 1: was brutal. There were certain islands I wanted to go to,
Speaker 1: so I had to find a horse and a guide.
Speaker 1: Set on the horse. After two hours, I couldn't I
Speaker 1: couldn't feel my legs anymore. And and after six hours
Speaker 1: I couldn't feel anything anymore. You know, I was like
Speaker 1: I was in full pain. Days on the range in
Speaker 1: the sun, battling heat and bugs the horses they attract
Speaker 1: also all kinds of flies that sting and suck your blood,
Speaker 1: and so you're fighting with the horse together. You're no
Speaker 1: not not to leave too much blood every day, you know,
Speaker 1: when you're there, I were seeing all kinds of things
Speaker 1: on the horizon from from the heat. What kind of
Speaker 1: things do you say when you look at the horizon,
Speaker 1: Then you see water? And then I saw all kinds
Speaker 1: of animals, and there wasn't anything. But finally they made
Speaker 1: it to the forest island and the shade of the
Speaker 1: chocolate all we went forward with the machetta and in
Speaker 1: the inner part it lifted up, and it was like
Speaker 1: the trees were standing in a nice distance to each
Speaker 1: other and in harmony somehow, at which point he was like,
Speaker 1: fuck the brazil nuts. I want to make this cacao famous.
Speaker 1: He wondered if he was staring at the greatest development
Speaker 1: opportunity of his career. If the international market got excited
Speaker 1: about wild cacao, the beans would command much more money,
Speaker 1: the pickers could make a living, the tradition would survive,
Speaker 1: and the chocolate tales could be preserved. He couldn't quite
Speaker 1: see how the numbers were going to work, but he
Speaker 1: knew it was an hour never. As Volker continued to
Speaker 1: explore the region by foot, boat and horseback, he fell
Speaker 1: under its spell. Vast wetlands with hundred mile views, lush
Speaker 1: rain for us, more wildlife than he'd ever seen, McCaw's cappa,
Speaker 1: bara's weaver birds, jaguars, and tons of cacao just waiting
Speaker 1: to be properly fermented. And then came the moment that
Speaker 1: whipped the trajectory of his life in a new and
Speaker 1: unexpected direction. Somebody said, hey, there's a place on say
Speaker 1: are you interested? Actually, it hit a long term wish
Speaker 1: you not to by by peaceful land. Yeah, to have
Speaker 1: my own farm maybe and in and maybe have a
Speaker 1: succure place when the world goes to hell. You know,
Speaker 1: well it didn't go to hell, but eventually it will tranquility.
Speaker 1: After the break, I want to taste of some of
Speaker 1: this god level chocolate we got you covered. Kaleidoscope has
Speaker 1: joined forces with Louise Abram and Statler's Chocolate to make
Speaker 1: a special box to go along with the very podcast.
Speaker 1: Now you could sample of flavors from the banks of
Speaker 1: the Amazon without having to fight off jaguars and Anagonda's.
Speaker 1: Just visit www. Dot Stetler Dash Chocolate dot com to
Speaker 1: order your Wild Chocolate today. Check the link in the
Speaker 1: show notes. You're listening to Wild Chocolate. I think that's it.
Speaker 1: That's yeah. We stopped because we can get lost. Bulker
Speaker 1: and I are walking in tranquily Dot in the chocolate
Speaker 1: hall he bought all those years ago. It's shady and
Speaker 1: warm and still the ground is smooth with waxy leaves.
Speaker 1: The trunks of the co cow trees are spaced evenly apart,
Speaker 1: like the columns of some temple. There's one, two, three, four,
Speaker 1: five or whatever. Yeah, amazing, Yeah, and spacing. It looks
Speaker 1: like that somebody you know measured the spacing. You could
Speaker 1: actually think about, Hey, somebody planted these trees. You know
Speaker 1: they are in a room. No, it's just just a
Speaker 1: natural pattern. So not planted, but maybe not entirely natural,
Speaker 1: depending on how you define natural. Bulker has a theory.
Speaker 1: I say there was a hunter and he had a
Speaker 1: coco pot, and he was sucking on the beans, and
Speaker 1: every ten steps he spit out the beans and sucks
Speaker 1: a dam. And ten steps later and he sucked and
Speaker 1: he spit out the dam. This is what you always
Speaker 1: do when you walk through a chocolate holl You absolut
Speaker 1: mindedly grab a pod, split it open, and scoop a
Speaker 1: goopy handful of white palpon's ease into your mouth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as you walk, you suck the juice off the sea eats.
Speaker 1: The flavor is sweet and tart, deliciously refreshing in the
Speaker 1: heat of the jungle. Then you spit out the seeds
Speaker 1: and grab another pod, and your walk gets a little
Speaker 1: bit nicer. People have been making that beautiful sound for
Speaker 1: ten thousand years, and wherever you hear it, a baby
Speaker 1: cocou try is born. No bulker paid a visit to
Speaker 1: the chocolates hall that was for sale. It was huge, magical.
Speaker 1: He followed footpaths through the woods where generations of people
Speaker 1: had picked cocao. He opened a pod and tasted the juice.
Speaker 1: Monkeys chattered at him from the trees. The ground was
Speaker 1: nice and high, unlikely to flood. He knew if he
Speaker 1: didn't buy it, the next buyer would probably clear the forest.
Speaker 1: And something tugged at him. So he came up with
Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars and bought it on the spot. And
Speaker 1: then it was time to test his theory of these
Speaker 1: beans really make great chocolate. He picks some pods for
Speaker 1: many of the beans as well as he knew how,
Speaker 1: and made them into chocolate. It has almost no bitterness.
Speaker 1: It's it has a sweetness um somehow between floral and
Speaker 1: and dark dark of fruits and and it and it
Speaker 1: goes back and forth. There's nothing really that compares the
Speaker 1: the overall flavors and the spectrum of different flavors during
Speaker 1: the time you have it in your mouth. There's nothing
Speaker 1: you know that, there's nothing like this. The rest seemed simple.
Speaker 1: He'd make the world's most beautiful beans and bring the
Speaker 1: chocolate industry to Bolivia's doorstep. And you live right here.
Speaker 1: And here's where things get a little bit cosmic. As
Speaker 1: he cleared a patch of ground to build a house
Speaker 1: out of the red earth, gave a clay pot, and
Speaker 1: then another and another. They were beautiful, with fluted necks
Speaker 1: and intricate etched patterns, and they were a thousand years old.
Speaker 1: As Bulker kept digging, the treasures kept coming. One day
Speaker 1: at tranquiladd he showed them to me. They saw, volunteer,
Speaker 1: there's an X, two different xes. That's a beauty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they have strings attached, and then we're hanging. This is
Speaker 1: actually a toy. It was a doll, probably for a
Speaker 1: kid to play with. Amazing. The artifacts were the remnants
Speaker 1: of an ancient settlement. Soon archaeologists visited. Chocolatelles were part
Speaker 1: of a massive network of earthen platforms, terraces, pyramids, causeways
Speaker 1: and canals. This network stretched across thousands of square aisles.
Speaker 1: So this part of the Amazon wasn't just primorial wilderness.
Speaker 1: It was the overgrown orchards and plazas and streets of
Speaker 1: a sophisticated culture known as the Casarabe, and a thousand
Speaker 1: years ago their civilization was hopping, probably a couple of
Speaker 1: million people living here um pre Columbia. I think the
Speaker 1: largest community of native people in the Amazon were in
Speaker 1: this part of Olivia and Brazil. This may have been
Speaker 1: the source of rumors about the lost city of z
Speaker 1: The Casarabe civilization disappeared around the year four for unknown reasons,
Speaker 1: but one thing we know about them is that they
Speaker 1: loved cacao. The reason Tranquilidad and the other chocolate till
Speaker 1: lives are filled with coco trees is because for hundreds
Speaker 1: of years the people who lived there were eating cacao
Speaker 1: and spitting out the seats. Some of the trees today
Speaker 1: are the same tree as the Casarabe used. Jean Kiladad was,
Speaker 1: in a sense a ghost island of ancient beings for
Speaker 1: the entire ecosystem. It's it's a very very valuable tree.
Speaker 1: It doesn't die, it survives droughts, flooding, and on top
Speaker 1: of it brings us the foot of the gods. H
Speaker 1: He set up the artifacts on a little altar in
Speaker 1: the corner of his house, and he began thinking of
Speaker 1: himself as just a small part of a larger story.
Speaker 1: The place was talent. He basically, I see it not
Speaker 1: as an owner. I see it as a piece of
Speaker 1: land that nature gives it to me for a certain
Speaker 1: certain amount of time. But I would leave it as
Speaker 1: as fast as a cat. Vulker needed the partner with
Speaker 1: a chocolate maker, so he began taking the beans to
Speaker 1: trade shows. But every buyer he met looked at him
Speaker 1: like he was crazy. I said, I have wild cocol
Speaker 1: and they said, there's not such a thing. And I said,
Speaker 1: there is wild coco in the Amazon. No, no coco
Speaker 1: comes from Micador. Okay. And they were not alone, right,
Speaker 1: I assume no that everybody. Everybody was ignorant. Everybody. He
Speaker 1: finally got the attention of felsh Lean, a famous old
Speaker 1: Swiss chocolate house. Felsh Len was competing with the top
Speaker 1: French companies in the gourmet chocolate world, and it was
Speaker 1: always on the hunt for something that would set it
Speaker 1: apart from its rivals. The buyer asked for a sample
Speaker 1: of the beans to test in their lab in Switzerland.
Speaker 1: So Volcas sent off the beans right away, that thing
Speaker 1: he'd been chasing for years. He could almost taste it.
Speaker 1: But what if he was wrong? What if the beans
Speaker 1: weren't a special at He thought, No on that point,
Speaker 1: he drushed it himself and he was right. Soon felsh
Speaker 1: Lean asked for another four d key Lows so they
Speaker 1: could run some test batches on the big equipment. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: as he said, no problem, absolutely. Then he walked outside
Speaker 1: and stared into his chocolates hall and wondered how the
Speaker 1: hell he was going to do that. He spent two
Speaker 1: sweaty months in the jungle, picking by hand. He worked
Speaker 1: on the dusk until he personally harvested a ton of
Speaker 1: fresh decao. Then he fermented it and dried it as
Speaker 1: best he could and sent it to Switzerland. Then he
Speaker 1: crossed his fingers and waited and waited, and finally the
Speaker 1: call came, could he please come to Switzerland for a meeting.
Speaker 1: So he cleaned himself up and crossed the Atlantic and
Speaker 1: they were like, yeah, we want this. It was smooth
Speaker 1: and rich and it's very distinct. And this is also
Speaker 1: something fresh Lean told told me. The chocolate is clearly
Speaker 1: distinct and this is what we are interested, don't know.
Speaker 1: And then came the big question, how many talks and
Speaker 1: and then I was like, um, I don't know. He
Speaker 1: really didn't know. He had no clue how much he
Speaker 1: could get his hands on and ferment properly but fecially,
Speaker 1: and said, get us as much as you can. We
Speaker 1: want it all. They had big plans for this Cacao.
Speaker 1: They wanted to make a whole new bar, unlike any
Speaker 1: that had been made before the world's first wild bar.
Speaker 1: They already had a name for it, Crew Savage. That
Speaker 1: bar was going to blow the staid world of chocolate
Speaker 1: wide open, and it would take Vulgar Layman on a
Speaker 1: wild ride. It would make him famous, but it would
Speaker 1: also nearly destroy him. That's still to come. I'll always
Speaker 1: remember something Vulgar said to me when he was recounting
Speaker 1: the parade of dreamers who had marched into the Amazon
Speaker 1: over the centuries seeking gold and glory. There's no Olivia
Speaker 1: for dummies, he said, many people will have lost their
Speaker 1: fortunes here. Well, he couldn't have known when he said
Speaker 1: it was that he was going to be next. Look
Speaker 1: on the phase of your wife saying there's no money.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by there's no money? There was
Speaker 1: the oldest money, yeah, but now there's no more money. Man.
Speaker 1: You must have been furious at a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah No with a gun in my hand that would
Speaker 1: have killed some people. Maybe, yeah. Yeah. On the next
Speaker 1: episode of Wild Chocolate, I could feel myself falling down
Speaker 1: Mr rabbit Hole. Sometimes I talked about chocolate like music
Speaker 1: and this was like you classic symphony orchestra, justst beautiful,
Speaker 1: the Vatican of Chocolate. I got five fifty bars on
Speaker 1: the shelf modeling. These young Italians show up and we've
Speaker 1: heard all sorts of things that you know, somebody got
Speaker 1: shot over this and d Wild Chock It is a
Speaker 1: Kaleidoscope production with I Heart Podcasts, hosted and reported by
Speaker 1: me Rowan Jacobson and produced by Shane McKeon at Nice
Speaker 1: Mormaint Media, Edited by Kate Osborne and mangesh Hada Kudor,
Speaker 1: Sound design and mixing by Soundboard. Original music composition by
Speaker 1: Spencer Stevenson, a k. A. Botany production help from Baheeny
Speaker 1: Shorty from My Heart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norvell
Speaker 1: and Nikki Etor. Special thanks to Laura Mayor, Costaslinos Oswalash
Speaker 1: and Aaron Coffman, Will Pearson, codel Burn, Bob Pittman, Daria
Speaker 1: Daniel and the team at Stetler who are helping us
Speaker 1: make a very special chocolate of our own. That's right,
Speaker 1: We're working with Louisa at others to protect the rainforest
Speaker 1: and make delicious Amazonian chocolate. Visit www dot Stetler dash
Speaker 1: Chocolate dot com to taste it for yourself. That's www
Speaker 1: dot Stetler dash Chocolate dot com. And if you want
Speaker 1: to hear more of this type of content, nothing is
Speaker 1: more important to the creators here a Kaleidoscope than subscriber
Speaker 1: ratings and reviews. Please spread the lave wherever you listen.
Speaker 1: M