Ram Bahadur Jafra and his two brothers crouch on a field, picking through blades of grass and staring at the soil. They have traveled five days by foot to a Himalayan meadow at a 4,300 meter elevation deep inside Nepal’s Dolpa district. They came, as tens of thousands do each year, to harvest a highly valuable commodity from the high-altitude soil: the Himalayan caterpillar fungus — also known as Himalayan Viagra.
Caterpillar fungus, or as it’s called in Tibetan, “yartsa gunbu,” meaning “summer grass, winter worm,” is a specimen created when a parasitic fungus infects caterpillars underground which, were they not forestalled by the fungus, would produce ghost moths.
After the fungus mummifies the caterpillar underground, it thrusts out of the soil. It’s this tiny protuberance that the harvesters spend weeks each spring searching for.
A hundred or so people crawl across the field in a mulled silence until a sole searcher lets out an excited cry. Dozens rush over to witness, Jafra is the first to arrive.
The woman who has discovered the specimen uses an ice pick to prod the earth and dig a hole about six inches in diameter. She then lifts a clump of earth up and sifts out the specimen. The crowd gossips about its value — “it’s small, only 300 rupees!” (about $3). A middle man will offer her that amount, then walk it to a market in Tibet and sell it for three times the price.
Jafra explains: “We pay attention when other people find them. This is our first time coming for the harvest. We’ve been here for nearly a week. We haven’t found anything, because we don’t know what they look like — we don’t know what we’re looking for.”
Like many others, Ram and his brothers traveled for the harvest betting on hope alone. “People in our village talked about the money to be earned, so we came,” he says.
The rumors of riches are not baseless. According to experts, the market value of yartsa gunbu has increased by 900% between 1997 and 2008.
From CNN.com
Posted by Ngo Okafor
The most downloaded black male model photo gallery and blog
