Budget Dining in Pattaya - Stretching the your Baht

How to eat for free, Isaan style.

As we hunt for the more unusual news stories here in Pattaya, we would like to introduce you to a team of construction workers who have come to work in Pattaya from Nong Khai Province in the North-East of Thailand. They were shocked to discover the cost of food and on a daily wage of 160 Baht, they decided to fend for themselves and let Mother Nature feed them for free. Every evening when they finish work they go hunting for their evening meal which consists of Chameleons, chiliтАЩs and Lemongrass along with sugar and a small amount of MSG to give it a nice consistency. The completed concoction is eaten with sticky rice and they claim the taste is a bit sour and a bit spicy but very delicious. We were not brave enough to sample the food ourselves to confirm their report.


www.pattayacitynews.net/news_17_02_49_3.htm (http://www.pattayacitynews.net/news_17_02_49_3.htm)

Chameleon & gecko tastes a lot like rattlesnake, which tastes a lot like....CHICKEN!...clean and without the flu...with texture like lobster.

Num caught a lizzard that was sleeping on the ceiling one morning. He gave it to me..."Breakfast you." I love the Thai sense of humor--But then he flipped his Bic....

Many moons ago when the world was young, and I was already a troll, I spent four months in Honduras working with a theatre troupe.

One day the maintenance man caught a large Iguana outside the theatre and told me that it would be good eating. I was dubious, and was promptly rewarded with an invite for lunch the next day.

His wife prepared the beast in a stew with coconut milk and yucca and, lucky me, it had been a female iguana who had been in the family way.

So, they proudly presented me with a large bowl of stew containing, in addition to the iguana meat - which was delicious in a chickeny sort of way - at least five hard-boiled iguana eggs.

I figured I might as well try to space them out throughout the meal and attacked the first one quickly. I stabbed at the rubbery shell with my fork several times until they informed me that the only way to get at the creamy center was to bite a hole in the shell, and squeeze out the egg.

Putting aside the fact that I don't like eating with my fingers, I followed the instructions and was "rewarded" with what looked like a hard-boiled egg, though a bit nubbly. My big mistake was biting off half of the egg and then looking at the other half.

If anyone has ever done this with a fried oyster you may understand my feeling at the time.

Instead of the nice, round yolk, like one finds in an unfertilized chicken egg, this yolk was dispersed throughout the albumen, and suddenly it struck me how close this was to having been a baby iguana...

By the time I finished I had even lost appreciation for the delicious stew itself because I had to continuously fortify myself for the next of a seemingly endless supply of eggs. I had finally resorted to treating them like sliders (raw oysters) and trying to swallow them whole.

So, would I eat Iguana again? Yes - but I want to see it's penis first!