Thanks, Newport Boy and Charley. A random irrelevant story thread is a good idea. (Much more entertaining than random irrelevant comments on other threads.)
Charley, I can tell you first hand, you are correct in your impression of what the whale rendering smells like. When I lived in Iceland in the 1970s, we visited the active whaling plant there. It was impressive to see the enormous vertebrae, the masses of blubber, the spinal cord which had been removed for who knows what purpose, but we had a vantage point on a hill looking down at the activity and the miasma seemed potentially lethal even at that remove, so* we could not stomach the thought of approaching nearer.
The 'could have been an adventure' feeling is a curiously stimulating one, isn't it? In northeast Costa Rica, I spent a night in a rain forest, more or less in the middle of nowhere (thoroughly shocking my native host family who placed boards over all the windows of their little house and fastened chains and let some ugly, untamed dogs out each night), not camping, just sitting with my camera on a tripod, no lights, just to see what might happen. Aside from fascinating sounds, shoebill storks and tiger storks and lots of random rustling, and a good deal of traffic in the canopy above me, mostly small animals, opossum types, not much happened, but there was the constant feeling something dramatic was about to happen.