So, we hired this pilot to fly us in and drop us off on the edge of the river because

there's these landing strips cut through this whole part of Bolivia because this is also

where all the cocaine is trafficked from the Andes to Brazil.

So we're like, oh great, we'll just use one of those landing strips.

So we barely hit the landing because everything was flooded, so half of our runway was flooded,

and we survived that, hopped out of the plane, and of course, the landing strip we happened

to choose was occupied by, you know, for narco traffickers.

These guys had guns, they weren't pulling the guns at us, but they definitely had guns,

and there was this very tense negotiation in Spanish about like, what do white dudes

just appear on one of these landing strips?

It usually means they're GEA, so like, we had to explain that we're not GEA, we're actually

like looking for cacao, and cacao, and that cacao, source of constant confusion because

yeah, they're both, they're both right there, cacao, no cacao, really cacao, don't you

mean cacao?

No, we really mean cacao.

I'm Dylan Thuras, and this is Alice Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible

and wondrous places.

Today, we're going to be talking with Rowan Jacobson.

Rowan is a food journalist, and he's the host of a podcast called Wild Chocolate, and

that's what we're here to talk to him about, because that show follows his multi-year

quest into the Amazon, all in pursuit of a mythical bar of chocolate, all to find the

origins, to learn about its dark history, and its potential to save parts of the rainforest.

...