(Tiger vs Lions) vs (Ninjas vs Pirates)

 Mr Martin and I got a little philosophical at the white tiger enclosure at Singapore Zoo.

The question of the day was: who would win in an epic battle between tigers and lion?  We definitely think the tigers would win. Apart from the fact that they're bigger, tigers are tough guys. Tigers will eat you for the fun of it.

Ninjas vs pirates? No competition.  Pirates won't even see them coming.

Your votes in the comments, please!

PS:

Dear Phil - lunch in the Philippines

Our trip to the Philippines way back in May involved lunch at a tropical island.

Being the Philippines, lunch involved meat, with more meat and meat on the side.  And being an island, most of the meat came from animals that live in the sea.  (What do you mean chicken isn't a sea bird?)

Here's a shot of our conveyance:

The two little huts in the background behind me were our restaurant.  This restaurant is extra special for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, when you step off your boat you are ushered towards another hut opposite which features a live seafood market.

Don't you just love the way the gentleman in this picture is fondling his cods while talking to me?

The idea is that you go to the market and pick out the things you like, and they will barbecue them there on the spot.  We were a large group, and our organisers had arranged a set menu, so this part of the experience was really more for show so far as we were concerned. The big ticket item at the market is clearly the sea mantis.  

It looks kind of like a lobster, and probably tastes like it too - but we didn't buy one.  The sea mantises are only put out on the market table when a boat pulls in. As soon as the potential customers have moved they are put back in the water at the shore.  They're not released, though.  The fishermen use 600ml plastic soft-drink bottles to store their catch. They put a split down the length of the bottle, shove the animal in, and let the slit close around it.  Then they put the bottles in a net in the shore.  The fish can't escape, and stay alive until the next boat comes in.

A bag of bottled sea mantises under the water at the shore.

One guy at the market also had a bowl with three or four stone fish in it, which was surprising.  There are quite a lot of different varieties of stone fish, and some of them are very poisonous. I'm not sure whether these ones were poisonous or not - but I think that they are probably not what you would call a sustainable catch.  They were pretty amazing to look at up close - their skin had a mossy green texture and really resembled seaweed.   The stone fish are stored in the same manner as the sea mantises.

I was pretty glad that our set menu didn't contain any of these more exotic creatures. I'm an adventurous eater but don't really like to eat (or buy!) endangered species. Our food was really delicious.  Definitely one of the freshest most delicious barbecues of my life.

As memorable as the food was - probably the most fun part of this restaurant was the fact that it doesn't have a floor. Instead, the tables and chairs are just plonked directly into the sand - and in the high tide, that means in the water.

The waterlogged beach was like quicksand, so for the first few minutes you gradually sink until a kind of equilibrium is reached. After our meal, we just walked out into the water for a postprandial snoozy kind of swim.

Don't forget to tip your waitresses. They have families and bug problems of their own.

I used to think that I was the kind of person who was not bothered by bugs and crawly things. I'm not the kind of squealy girl that goes all stupid just because there's a moth around the lightbulb. And really, apart from slugs, I LIKE bugs (and stuff. Technically – slugs are not bugs. But you know…).

I even bit the abdomen off a fried wing'ed thing once. On purpose. You hold the wings and then just nip its belly off with your teeth. It was Thailand, 15 years ago and I was under duress but still...  that gets me points, right? (Tasted kind of like a salted peanut. Maybe a bit squishier.)

Except praying mantises. I thought I liked them.  They are kind of fascinating. They do exist in the south of New Zealand but not like in the numbers in a wet Auckland summer. And one time, I was on the bus in Auckland and I noticed a praying mantis - a big one - clinging to the back of the seat in front of me.  I tried to ignore it. Because - you know - I'm COOL with bugs. (Did you know praying mantises are carnivorous? Don't click that link if there are small children nearby. You were warned.)

It was a really FULL bus.

I had a window seat near the back of the bus and there was a young Asian student sitting in the seat next to me and his girlfriend was in the seat in front of him and the aisle was crammed with people and backpacks and that unfortunate tight feeling you get when you're in a crowd and there just can't possibly be enough air for everyone.

And then the mantis locked eyes with me. Have you ever really studied a mantis's face?  They have the steeliest gaze of any creature alive.  I tried to look away but it had me like Medusa and there was no escape. I moved  my face towards the window - my face moved but my eyes stayed locked with those evil green ovals and that is when it chose to leap.

I emitted an involuntary, visceral kind of groan - like the sounds that people make when they are having nightmares. A REALLY  LOUD involuntary, visceral groan. And the poor boy next to me proved that he was truly a hero by slapping me right on the tit and squishing the bug between his fingers. His girlfriend turned around - everybody on that bus turned around - to see what the commotion was and he held up his hand to show the green smear like some kind of awkward open-handed, snot-covered  victory fist.
I'm not an idiot. I like bugs, but I don't like bugs that might bite me. That includes mosquitos and sandflies and anything with an obvious stinger.

Oh and millipedes? I get that you're a marvel of nature, and have successfully tiptoed across the surface of the earth for a gazillion years but really - I prefer you on TV and not in my garden. I mean - have you ever picked a pebble out of the soil and then recoiled in horror as it unwound itself, all of its hundreds of little legs waving in the air? At once?

And can we please also exclude caterpillars and pretty much all creatures in their larval form? Especially those weevils that made a mass exodus that time from my pantry to my ceiling when Mr Martin was away on tour and it was night and the only defense I had was the vacuum cleaner and sometimes when you try to vaccum a crawling weevil off the ceiling it drops down  and lands in your cleavage? (And of the same era - Barney - I'm really sorry still about that time I invited you over for dinner and watched in horror as you spooned a live wriggling weevil out of the ground chilli.)

Just what is it with you insects and my cleavage anyway? Remember that time there was a shootout on the motorway and the armed offenders squad were surrounding our house and the woman was standing on her garage roof shrieking and while I was looking up at the helicopters circling overhead thinking "I should probably go inside," and that wasp came out of nowhere and stung me on the boob! I mean really.  As if there wasn't enough drama going on that day.

The other day my husband invited to come and look at the really interesting beetle that had blown up onto our balcony in one of these storms we keep on getting and was now stranded on its back and it was a FUCKING COCKROACH.

All of my memories of the Philippines are prefaced by this sentence: There was a LEECH on the bathroom floor. “What if there are leeches somewhere else? Are they in the bed? Strip the bed! I said STRIP THE FUCKING BED! Why are you laughing at me?!”

And now I am engaged in a kind of war where I am the only one fighting, and the only way I can win is if I clean up my shit because the ANTS. Who sent the goddam ants? Martha Stewart?

 
The ants don't care if they lose large numbers of troops. It doesn't bother them at all.  No matter what you clean if you leave a crumb out they will find another way to get there because as far as they are concerned that is their crumb.

I should really be celebrating the fact that the first 4 months in our apartment were almost entirely ant-free, but instead I woke up the other day having a nightmare where there was a thick trail - several ants wide - on the wall, and that when I spray’n’wiped it they scattered and pretty soon there were ants covering every surface. The walls and the bed and the cushions and there are so many of them that you can kill a million and it won’t make a dent.

(Hi Nana. There aren’t actually a million ants in my apartment. I promise they won't crawl in your ears while you're sleeping. Can't wait to see you next week!)

Does this mean that I have turned into that kind of shriek woman I am so contemptuous of? Probably. Butterflies moths and beetles are still mostly OK. The non-disease-bearing ones in their adult forms, at least. For now, though, I am cleaning as I go and my kitchen positively glistens.

Probably my mother-in-law would be proud.

Dear Phil - the okra show

At the moment I am a little bit in love with okra (not to be confused with being an expert at cooking it (understatement)).

At Mekong Delta, they had okra growing in the garden. I had never seen an okra plant before.  I don't know what I expected it to look like, but not like this.  Maybe a vine along the ground like pumpkins?

Anyway, the real okra plant kind of reminds me of this:

Not that that's a bad thing.

Mekong Lodge does little cooking classes, and one of the things they showed us how to cook was stuffed okra. I haven't got any pictures of the stuffed okra part of the cooking class, because FIRST, they showed us how to make little spring rolls, and my photographer was off 'taste-testing' the spring rolls during the okra stuffing bit.

The stuffed okra were delicious and I have successfully recreated the dish at home since.  Basically, you make a little rectangular hole down the edge of the cleaned okra, rip the guts out and fill it with whatever you want - then shallow fry.  Mekong Lodge's recipe for the filling involved minced fish meat with spices. Mine involved minced pork meat with spices.  Tonight I'm going to try stuffing with rice and egg. I have lots of leftover Indian spiced rice with peas. Waste not, want not!

But I don't think okra is an easy vegetable to cook.  I can do this stuffed okra thing now that I've been shown it - but every time I've tried to cook it as part of a stir-fry or whatever I've ended up with a gooey gluey mess.  So if you have some tips maybe you could put them in the comments? I think perhaps I'm overcooking it.

Finally - the okra here are really big, in comparison with what we can get at home. They are about 10cm long - the ones I used to see at home were closer to 5cm long. It finally makes sense why they were ever called lady fingers.

Snorks

The best part of the Philippines trip for me was the snorkeling.  On the second day, we all went out in boat for an island hopping tour. There is a common kind of tour boat you see in that region. It is not a catamaran exactly, but it has large supports on each side of the hull.  My guess is that they are designed to keep the boat as close to the surface as possible - because the waters from time to time get very shallow as the coral reefs rise beneath.

You can see the coral just beneath the surface in this photo, taken from the side of the boat. 

I am from New Zealand.  Famous for its marine wildlife.  And I am a dyed in the wool rock-pooler.  But I'm from the SOUTH ISLAND of New Zealand, which is also famous for its frigid waters and proximity to Antarctica. And when you combine that with a personality that is distinctly averse to extreme physical exploits ... I've never snorkelled before. And I was DEAD KEEN.

I was so excited that I was gearing myself up to be all disappointed . Because, you know, maybe the sea will be all murky, and all I will see is a submerged coke can and a grimy sea slug.

This is funny: a bunch of people who have never worn them before, trying to put on flippers and then climb down a ladder into the water below - wearing them. Everybody was standing on each others 'toes' and tripping one another up. We looked like a boatload of demented naked penguins.

It was great.  I saw many many fish, and jellyfish and coral. Not one coke can. I am a complete convert/devotee.  Our next long weekend away in Vietnam is going to have to include swimming with the fishes.

No internet? Look out the window.

This is post is brought to you by the wifi at Noa Cafe in the Centec Tower.  Mr Martin, formerly known as RSB (Rock Star Boyfriend) very inconveniently forgot that he band practice tonight. So, as a Good Wife I had to lug two electric guitars to his office. Much to the amusement of the xe om drivers at the end of my street.  Lucky for me they have taken it on as their vocation in life to flag down taxis for me. And now I am having lunch by myself in the cafe, but I can't say I'm that upset about it because not only does Noa have truly great coffee, but it's a chance to squeeze out another one of those posts about the Mekong Delta trip.

Apart from the ubiquitous wily sparrows that seem to own every city in the world and a few mangy pigeons (nothing like the sleek musty birds that used to rub their scent off on my grandfather's hands) I almost never see a bird in Saigon.  Bats - yes.  By the hundred every evening at dusk, but birds not so much. At actually, at the Mekong Delta the birds were not so easy to spot, either. But we could definitely, always hear them.

New Zealand birds are famously stupid when it comes to hiding from potential predators, but getting out of sight and staying out of sight is something their distant Vietnamese relatives are definitely NOT bird-brained about by comparison. The Vietnamese have been too hungry too often to leave the feathered folk alone and the birdies know better than to hang about when someone's watching.  So obviously I didn't get any pictures, but I spent a lot of time gazing out the window saying things like "Big red bird! Big red bird!" and desperately trying to get glimpses of the big blue parrots I could hear cackling in a stand of trees on the next lot.

There was something else I didn't see in Mekong that is everywhere in Saigon - cars. After stepping off the bus on the main highway there was not a car to be seen - not even taxis. We had to get xe om to the tourist pier. It gave us a glimpse of what life in Vietnam was like before cars - and not that long ago, either.  Many of the roads were very narrow - wide enough for two bikes to pass one another but that's all. And they were often in surprising good condition - smooth surfaces that had obviously been swept free of stones and other things that could pierce a thin bicycle tyre.  The local still ride bicycles a lot, and motorbikes, of course. And the ferries (of which there are many) are all designed to carry bikes as well as people.

The sky looks a bit heavy and dark in that photo and it was a bit rainy that weekend.  We had a brilliant electrical storm on the second night, with loud cracks of thunder and fork lightning striking the island across the river. The lodge where we stayed at has a sort of eco-philosophy that translated to some vegetables and fruit growing in the garden on site, wooden chopsticks and no TV or internet (or fridge, which bothered me a bit because I wanted cold water all the time) in our room.  So our options were reading books, talking to each other or staring out the window.  Somehow, staring out the window was never boring for me - especially in the storm.

Our room at night.

Mekong's next top model

He saw me coming.  His little eye watched me and he let me step closer, then closer still until finally I could get all of his implausibly long tail into the shot.

And then he was gone.