While in Papua New Guinea, I had the distinct "pleasure" of joining the locals in a little betelnut chewing. Betelnut comes from the nut of the betel palm, and is common throughout the South Pacific and South East Asia.
If you see someone with red stained teeth and rotting gums, who appears to be spitting blood on the sidewalk, odds are pretty good they are chewing betelnut. In New Guinea, literally everyone was chewing the stuff -- men, women, children, and even your cab driver as he hurtles through the barbed-wire fenced city that is Port Moresby.
We stopped at a roadside stand to pick a "fresh" betelnut, and we handed a packet of white powder and a stalk of some kind of plant to compliment out little treat. The stalk ended up being from a mustard plant, and the white powder was lime -- you know, the stuff you sprinkle on your lawn (and on bodies to help them decompose).
Apparently, you need to use all three ingredients in combination to make the betelnut potent; who managed to figure this out (and how much time he had on his hands) is really quite an amusing notion. "Hey, put these three nasty tasting shit into your mouth and chew! Yum!" In some other parts of the pacific rim, they substitute other types of ingredients for the mustard stalk, but as far as I know, lime is always used in conjunction with the mix.
I'd tried a number of things before, including chewing tobacco, so I figured I'd give a whole betelnut a shot, despite the locals insisting that I might want to try just "half a nut" for my first time.
Ah, the wonderful, sexy smile of a betelnut chewer I bet dentists make a fortune in PNG | 
The women like to get into the act, too (as well as the children) |
So I bit the betelnut open from its semi-tough shell, and proceeded to chew the white meaty pulp inside into a mush. It tastes incredibly bitter; sort of like the coca leaves I had in Peru. Next up, while attempting not to spit out the bitter cud I'd chewed in my mouth, I wetted the tip of the mustard stalk, and dipped it into the lime packet, and then chewed the whole mess in with the betelnut.
I stood smiling at the locals, while spitting out a little blood-red mixture onto the ground. Nothing -- this stuff isn't so strong, I grinned. Then wham! It hit me like I'd just taken a dose of nitrous oxide -- I got dizzy, and my whole head from the neck up started getting very warm.
I wavered a bit, looking a little uncomfortable, then promptly fell over, drooling the stuff out of my mouth, while the locals who were chewing the stuff looked on with a mixture of concern and amusement at my predicament. Big tough white American goes down for the count! They laughed a bit as I spit the crap out, and offered me some water.
"I think maybe you should have tried half a nut" one of them said. Indeed. Also scared me senseless to see people driving me around town while they were flying high on the stuff...
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Other strange adventures, stories, and pictures can be found here. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at: andrew@AmbrosiaSW.com
Andrew Welch / el Presidente / Ambrosia Software, Inc.