Tuesday 12th
March
Last
night at dinner Pete and I discovered, to our great amusement, that one of our
friends, who is now comfortable enough in life to have nice food all the time –
mostly roasts, cooked most deliciously on his Weber BBQ – was grindingly poor
in his student days. He lived, with some
equally cash-strapped friends in a ghastly derelict house in Bathurst Street,
which is now, of course, a bijou residence worth many hundreds of thousands. Food was scarce, and they set up an
arrangement with the local fish & chippery to enable them to buy fish
fingers…one at a time…
Too
sad!
Limules – Vietnam 2008
We
were ferried back in to Binh Bao on a big flat wooden dinghy, and we found, to
our great pleasure, that our rooms were still available at our little guest
house overlooking the bay. I was able at
this stage to change my clothes, and take stock of my battered and bruised
legs… Hoicking ourselves up onto the top deck from the lower deck of Junk was
quite difficult and impossible for someone Rina’s or my height to do without
battering knees or shins. Never mind;
bruises fade! We were happy to be back
in our puce and lime rooms. My notes
say, with many exclamation marks, Shower!!!
Toilet!!!! After availing ourselves
of these pleasures, Pete and I caught rides on motorbikes back in to Cat
Ba. I wanted to take a photo of some
very odd sea life we had seen swimming sadly around in restaurant aquariums in
the main drag. They looked like big
hermit crabs with a helmet-shaped shell and a long tail… Very weird. Patrick had told me about them; he said they
are called limules in France, and
that there is an institute in Paris entirely devoted to the study of these very
strange creatures. He said they are
endangered; this would NOT stop them being on the menu wherever possible in
Vietnam… I have looked on Google, and discovered, to my relief, that they
aren’t really endangered in this part of the world. But…I am glad I didn’t eat one…
The limule or horseshoe crab is a 'living fossil': forms almost identical
to this species were present during the Triassic period 230 million years ago,
and similar species were present in the Devonian, a staggering 400 million
years ago. Despite their common name, they are not crabs but are related to
arachnids (spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites), and are presumably the closest
living relatives of the now extinct trilobites.
No comments:
Post a Comment