Travel&Spice: S01E03

Hola foodies/travellers! Presenting Episode-03 of Travel&Spice for your dose of spicy travel, where travellers share interesting stories about their favourite meal, restaurant or food encounters.

Today, Amit Sharma from Forever Roaming The World stirs the blogosphere with his bizarre encounter with a scorpion. What happens next? Read on to find out.

Over to Amit:

From Nottingham England, I’ve been backpacking the world on the tightest of shoestring budgets since 2010 – Roaming the world is my calling in life.

Place: Koa San Road, Bangkok, Thailand

Beer and nuts?…Not in Thailand! How about Beer and Scorpion?

A part of being a backpacker or any kind of traveller in-fact, sometimes you just want to do as the locals do. You want to experience their culture the way they do, you don’t want to be that tourist that just does and orders the same as you would back home.

So when you’ve just arrived in Bangkok Thailand, and you’re sitting on the famous Koa San Road, tasting that first chilled Chang beer (which incidentally is cheaper than Chang water; go figure) you see tourists all around you, some trying their first street Pad Thai, others trying raw mango dipped in chilli and lime; you of course want to try it out.

Well the same went for me when a lady walked by offering a fried scorpion on a stick (the Chicken Satay stick was on another tray) My first thought was ‘Is that a f****** scorpion’ ….My second thought was ‘I wanna try it’ – So I ushered the lady over, we played the haggling game, two guys sitting next to me and my friend were in utter disbelief but we persuaded them to join in too.

It was only until the stick was in my hand that I realised what I was about to do…Eat a freaking Scorpion! ….We all just stared at it for a few seconds, deciding whether to go through with it or not. I couldn’t back out; after all it was my bright idea. I was ‘Billy big bollox’ over here. So inevitably after a quick pep talk in my brain I bit the bullet and crunched down on the hard shell…

Now you’re probably wondering what it tastes like and I’m pretty sure you’re hoping I don’t say it tastes like chicken because everything new tastes like chicken. Well it kinda did…more specifically like a slightly burnt chicken wing but just slightly crispier shell. It wasn’t as meaty or gooey as I was expecting it to be and there wasn’t a lasting taste to it, so it didn’t linger.

Would I try it again? Yes. Just with a better dip. That was the start of eating some weird and wonderful food all over South East Asia.

Ahem.. slow clap for the brave act, guys. Thanks to Forever Roaming The World, you now know where to quench your thirst for bizarre food experiments.

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Eat – Travel – Enjoy