Cricket bats

Next stop, Hoi An so I'm just catching up with the day's events at the airport in Ho Chi Minh City.

Now, there's two kinds of cricket I thought I wasn't a fan of but if push came to shove, I've discovered I could include the odd cricket spring roll into my diet.

We visited a cricket farm this morning where they harvest? rear? two tonnes of the little fellas per month and sell them to restaurants and as food for animals. They feed in troughs off the water hyacinth which is prolific in the rivers.  I would rather have tried the crickets before seeing the little crawlers but that wasn't to be. Nevertheless, they were good and simply added the crunch that crispy duck would to the spring roll.

Before that, we had a trip to the Cu Chi tunnels where we heard quite a levelling account of war time experiences. What struck us both was the intelligence and cunning of the Vietnamese to beat the brute force of the machinery and men from the other side. Their traps were gruesome and effective. Their network of tunnels and how they used them, extraordinary.  We ducked and crawled through 100m which had been widened for westerners but still felt cramped. In one of the tunnels that hadn't been widened and I could not imagine heading into, we peered down and accidentally discovered bats in the photo. (I was over-the-moon at that!)

The Vietnamese aren't bitter. They accept that war is and has been everywhere. The only thing they all mention that is hard to let go of is the chemicals. To be honest, I find that hard too.