‘Rhino horn has the medicinal benefit of chewing your fingernails’. The phrase is meant to be off-putting, a layman’s interpretation of the results of scientific tests. It is a key statement being echoed in the West to discredit the medicinal use of rhino horn in Vietnam, but it doesn’t work. Instead demand for […]
Cage diving does good PR for great white sharks
The Great White Shark Project boat rocks heavily in the Atlantic swell. The stink of chum made of fermented tuna and anchovy oil combines with pungent wafts of excrement from the seal colony that the boat is anchored next to. Heather sits on the top deck of the 40 foot shark cat, blissfully impervious to […]
Southbound humpback whales sing along on Gold Coast
By Michael S. Smith I’d never heard anything like it. Monolithic sounds blasted and bubbled between silent spaces. Slow rhythms and themes, notes like obsidian ocean swells and the heart swallowing troughs between. The minute-long song moved me. It started with gum-leaf squeaks followed by whale oinks that sounded like […]
The Saigon Horn : Part 2
Don’t believe everything you download “Rhino horn with wine is the alcoholic drink of millionaires,” said the vietbao.com article. Anninhthudo.com said it is “like a luxury car”. Quang Trung street in HCMC’s Go Vap District is a hot, dirty, dusty, noisy continuation of Hai Ba Trung Street, the street where Vascos is in […]
The Saigon Horn : Part 1
I was having coffee at Vasco’s with Phung the husband of an English friend of mine in the quiet backbar. Live music played in the background, but it was still too early in the evening for the club in downtown Saigon’s Hai Ba Trung St to get hectic. It was January 2011 during the weeks […]