PUNTING WITH PUNTO AND MESSING WITH MIXTO
OK, Punto and Mixto.
We had just come up out of the lava tubes on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos and were visiting a coffee plantation near the tubes. Our guide asked the owner to tell us how to make Punto, and he did.
He showed us the pressing mill with the donkey going round and round to press the sugar cane stalks into juice. He showed us how one cane makes about two liters of juice. Then he told us how he leaves the sugar cane juice to ferment in a yellow barrel for three days before taking it to the boiling tank where it is distilled from its natural 12% alcohol into the Punto, which is 40% alcohol, or 80 proof.
For a sweeter and milder drink, you mix Punto into sugar cane juice.
You do not need any special permission to make Punto, he said, but to sell it you need a permit that shows you are making it safely and correctly.
He passed around some samples of both kinds of Punto, and Myrtle quite literally smacked her lips.
While all this was going on, I was fascinated to watch the donkey helping himself to some of the sugar cane juice, the same juice that was going to be fermented into Punto. Well, perhaps a bit of donkey slobber improved the taste?
By that time my dear little Myrtle seemed not to care who or what was drinking her sugar cane juice, so I didn’t even bother to tell her about the donkey. As we were leaving, she bought as many small bottles of Punto as could fit into that purse of hers.
Fortunately, we were scheduled to go snorkeling immediately after the coffee plantation visit, which happy serendipity ensured that the bitingly cold Pacific waters were guaranteed to get my dear Myrtle into a state more conducive to getting her safely back onto our boat. That was not the case with the Mixto in the Amazon.
Now Mixto, well, that is sort of in a class by itself.
We were hiking on a plateau above the Amazon River one day, walking on a narrow path between the river and the jungle on our way back from visiting a shaman, when our guide saw that a man she had met on previous trips was working his rum still.
She detoured us to his still for another of her famous “learning opportunities.”
The still was under a thatched roof held up by four thin tree poles and there were several large old metal barrels plus an old home-made picnic table in addition to the large pressing mill and what looked like a primitive refrigerator with a heavy cord snaking from the back of it to a muffled generator somewhere behind a nearby building.
The owner of this enterprise motioned for us to sit at the table while he went to his nearby house and brought back glasses and a ladle.
Then he proceeded to talk with our guide while he ladled liquids into glasses from the four pots on the table. One was clear, another was pale amber-colored, the third was reddish and the fourth a rich golden brown. The guide translated some of the distiller’s lecture into English, and we learned that the large distilling wheel was from Leicester, England, of all things, that it was pulled by animals, that the juices pressed from the sugarcane by that mill were left to ferment overnight in the jungle heat in a large vat, that they were then distilled over fire in the large metal barrels and then became pure colorless rum. The whole process took only one day.
We were invited to taste four samples of rum:
1. Sugar cane pure rum, 80-proof. The natives soak tree bark in this rum, bury the bark for a period, then dig up the bark and make tea for rheumatism and muscle aches.
2. Rainforest Ginger Rum, a favorite lighter drink.
3. Red Wine Rum for energy and to strengthen the bones. This is drunk like beer when mixed with soda. The natives call it Seven Roots because it has seven bases.
4. Mixto. A spoon of sugar cane juice is added to the pure rum to make it sweeter according to taste, and this Amazonian home-brewed drink, called Mixto by the natives, is believed by males to significantly increase virility.
At this point our guide cleverly called it the Amazonian Viagra, and we all dutifully chuckled. There were only five of us tourists on this jaunt and we were all female, so the Viagra joke fell just a bit flat, unfortunately. But I gave our guide kudos for trying.
While the guide talked to the distiller and I was busy admiring the gigantic breadfruit growing on a sturdy small tree nearby, Myrtle had been sampling whatever glasses of rum were left on the table, mostly Mixto and pure rum.
Later she told me that that Mixto was absolutely the most delicious rum she had ever tasted. But by that time, I was less than thrilled to hear her rum connoisseur declarations.
Most of us had been sticking to the Ginger Rum or the Red Wine Rum and were sipping slowly because we knew we still had a mile or so to hike in the jungle and then an insane number of steps to climb down from the plateau to board our river boat so we could continue our journey up the Amazon River to our camp.
Myrtle did not let these small facts deter her from her pursuit of “the best-tasting rum she had ever
had.”
There was a moment when I saw her eyes turn sort of glassy as she trained them on the distiller, and the next thing I knew she jumped him – literally. She took a flying leap, threw her arms around his neck, and pulled his head down for a passionate smacking kiss.
This was, as you can imagine, a bit of a surprise for him. But he rallied quickly.
Now, he was not tall of stature, but he had strong muscles and was able to stay on his feet despite his great astonishment at what must surely have been the strongest testament yet to the power of his particular Mixto, a fact I was sure would be put to good marketing use in the months and years to come as he retold the story of the beautiful blond Americana who leaped into his arms after she sampled his Mixto.
I’m sure my face turned fiery red at Myrtle’s blatant and egregious faux pas, but I was grateful that we were a group of women only.
We managed to disengage Myrtle from the distiller, and she promptly, after a wobbly moment, climbed up onto the table and burst into the Indian Love Call song.
We all had to admit that she did quite a stellar job on those high notes. It certainly entranced the distiller, who seemed to be gazing at her with wide-eyed adoration until he noticed that his wife had come out of the nearby house and was headed for our group.
She was bringing what looked like a cash box, and in short order she removed small, capped bottles with home-made labels from that old refrigerator and was doing a brisk business selling us rum.
We all bought some, and I managed to ensure that Myrtle did not buy any more than what would fit into her purse. Unfortunately, as you already know, that purse was like a small suitcase, and she managed to fit five bottles of Mixto into it.
By now I was mostly worried about how I would get Myrtle down all those rickety steps to the boat, and I knew the added weight of the bottles would not help.
So when we finally reached the stairs, I grabbed her wrist in a death hold with my right hand while I managed the shaky handrail with my left one, and we somehow stumbled successfully down those 65 (I counted them, dear readers!) rickety wooden steps that descended from the forest down to the Amazon River tributary, which was at low ebb right then. We needed to board our river boat for the trip to our jungle campsite.
We almost made it! As we came to the river boat, I told Myrtle to lift her leg up and over the lip of the ramp.
But she swung out instead, and with a mighty kick that a quarterback might envy, she slammed her foot into the river boat, which disengaged it from the rickety staircase. The staircase in turn started to swing wildly back and forth as those of us still on it reeled from side to side trying to keep our balance, a fruitless endeavor, as it turned out.
In impressively short order there were three of us dumped into that oh-so-muddy river spluttering and screaming bloody murder because it was just the day before that we had pulled piranhas out of that river on our fishhooks.
Luckily for us the river was only three feet deep near the shore, and we were all soon helped onto the boat dripping water, mud, and lily roots.
One great benefit, though, was that my dear Myrtle sobered up mighty fast, and I no longer had to run interference for her with our guide.
The lucky people who were first on the boat got some excellent film footage of us river rats being hauled out of the drink, and we three were grateful, for once, that internet reception for the whole trip was so bad that at least we could not go viral before we had a chance to get back home and figure out how to go incognito for the rest of our lives.
At any rate, by that time we all had so many other stories to tell that this Dip-in-the-Drink day was mostly forgotten, at least until there was another Dip-in-the-Drink day.
To be continued…