28 APR 2017: I should have known something unusual was in store as we visited the bustling food market known as Tarantula Village on a tour from our AmaWaterways Mekong River cruise in Cambodia.
Tables were piled high with big platters of things many of the shoppers lined up to buy them obviously considered lunchtime delicacies. And I was game to try them—I thought.
But on closer look, the protein wasn’t on my bucket list.
There were bowls of silk worms in soy sauce, grubs with garlic and ginger, grasshoppers and crickets roasted with hot peppers. The ultimate delicacies were giant, creepy black tarantulas each the size of a cell phone– available either fried or live and ready to milk for their venom, which I’m told is great for arthritis.