Monday 11 March 2013

Tuesday 12th March


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