Day 35 Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, Cambodia

Day 35 – Hers.

A travel day – with a difference.  When we all met in the lobby at 7:30 (Rob had thought it was to be 8:30, but that’s a different story...), none of us could have had a clue about the unusual adventures awaiting us during the 10 hour journey from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap.  It is just under 200 miles between the two cities – but the state of National Route 2 (in some places still a dirt road) – means over 7 hours of driving (“With free massage,” said Limny, as the bus bumped up and down, occasionally lifting me right out of my seat...) and we stopped in several places to experience rural Cambodian life.

The rural landscape began only about 5 km outside Phnom Penh city centre – palm trees (“Very important for the Cambodian people,” said Limny, “for fruit, oil, bark, leaves and wood.”), fields that will become rice paddies at planting time, magnificent temples (nearly one for each village – sometimes two), water buffalo roaming alongside (and occasionally in) the road and adorable houses on stilts.  I spent half an hour examining the houses – and the priorities for decoration.  The poorest were shacks made of palm branches and leaves, on palmwood stilts, with a doorway and rickety steps leading down.  The next step up had palmwood walls and a couple of unglazed windows.  The ‘middle class’ homes had blue louvered shutters at the windows, ornate balustrades flanking the steps and perhaps a tiled roof, turning up at the corners.  The wealthiest people had whitewashed concrete walls enclosing the stilts, verandas, and had painted the palmwood planks of the top floor a powder blue to contrast with the deeper blue of the shutters – very picturesque indeed, but difficult to photograph from a moving bus....  The people seemed to live most of their lives outside.  We stopped at a little streetside kitchen where a woman was toasting and milling green rice into flakes (ah, that’s what the flakes were in my delicious green rice ice cream.... and Rob had an idea he mentioned to Limny and Limny got pretty exicited by it – but i’ll let him tell you about that).  When it began to rain, some people retreated to sit in their doorways, but a number of children ran through their yards, completely naked, dancing and playing – clearly enjoying the cool relief from a hot, humid, red dusty morning.

Our first longer stop was at a local market – where alongside the usual fruit, vegetables, eggs and rice, local delicacies of fried tarantula, frog and cricket were offered for sale.  Limny brought a live tarantula onto the bus and let it crawl all over him; Rob and Heidi were brave enough to hold it as well.  I am afraid that whilst I can manage a python – a tarantula? No thanks. I passed.  We then got off the bus and explored the market, surrounded by children trying to sell us bananas and pineapple. (“Just 1 dolla, sister, so I can go to school...”)  We have been told not to buy from the children – rather than helping them go to school, it gives them a good reason NOT to go – and their friends then also join in the act.

Rob bought a fried tarantula, two fried frogs and a cricket.  Heidi and I tried the tarantula legs (a bit crunchy, but quite nice) and Rob ate the tarantula’s body and one of the frogs (“Tastes like chewy chicken”, he said...). Hmmm.....  Apparently, eating these things is new to the Cambodian people – it began during the time of the Khmer Rouge when they were looking for ways not to starve to death.  It is the Thais who particularly enjoy crickets – some of the local people set cricket traps, fry them and then export them over the border into Thailand.

We stopped for lunch at a lovely restaurant overlooking a lake – and then tried a couple of the local fruits (mangosteen and rambotan) for dessert.  Another couple of hours – down a very narrow dirt track – brought us to a waterside village where we climbed gratefully out of the bus and onto a motor launch to tour a floating village and have a look at Lake Ton Le Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia.  There are, according to Limny, over 1900 floating villages in Cambodia – all around the lake.  The people use the lake for everything – fishing, bathing, washing, drinking – and toileting.  We saw several people bathing – and were lucky enough to come across a wedding party on the veranda of one of the floating homes.  The children waved and shouted – from boats, floating homes and also from the doorways of the waterside village we strolled through on our way back to the bus from the boat. (I strongly suspect the tour companies pay the villagers to be friendly – and to allow photographs.  It made me feel a little uncomfortable – a bit like treating them as zoo exhibits.)

Forty minutes of jostling bus later, we arrived in Siem Reap – THE tourist destination of Cambodia, due to its proximity to Angkor Wat.  Our hotel is near the locals’ market and the Royal Residence – on the other side of town from the main tourist traps.  This is a good thing.....

 

 

 

 

Day 35 – His.

Fascinating day. If you want to experience the real inner Cambodia then a trip down national route 2 is the way to go. Dan – my son – is a vegetarian. I was telling him about the dog farms in Vietnam and his comment was – ‘Meat Eaters! – I just don’t understand them.’ I suspect he would have even less understanding of the wide variety of things that walk, fly, run, crawl and creep that appear on the dinner table of your average Cambodian family in modern day Cambodia.

As Patti said one of our stops was at a local market selling a huge variety of insects cooked in various novel and exciting ways. Never cautious of experiencing new things I tried the crickets, spiders and frogs. They were enormously spicy. So spicy my tongue was burning.  Apart from that the overall impression was one of chewing. They were in fact a bit dry and a little crunchy – I had to keep picking bits of spider carapace and frog bones from my teeth. Still an interesting experience and as crocodile Dundee would say ‘you can live on the stuff.’ Which is why I think it entered the culinary tableau of Cambodia – but, who would want to when Heinz do baked beans so well.

We also stopped off at little roadside kitchen, as Patti mentioned, where a whole family were engaged in the production of rice flakes. They take the green rice, roast it over a charcoal flame for a few moments and chuck it into a wooden pit where it is pounded into flakes by the woman’s children jumping up and down on a huge levered wooden hammer that just fit into the wood pit. As we were looking at it I mentioned to Limny that plastics could be made from rice flakes. At first he didn’t believe me but when Heidi and Peter backed me up, he became fascinated and asked me how to do it. So I explained. I think he plans to set up a commune of plastic makers all over Cambodia. Limny is a genuine kind of guy (Where does Intrepid find them?) He loves his country and his people and he is constantly on the look out for ways of improving their lot. So, to him the idea of having an army of village workers producing the basic raw materials for bioplastics was very exciting. I have to admit I kind of got caught up in it too – so I have spent a while explaining how to make rice starch, bioplastics, biodiesel and soap from the materials that the villagers find around themselves. I think he was interested; I was and as I tend to go on when involved in such subjects, I think he may have been a bit fazed. Still, he did ask me for the recipes and I have written them up for him.

After the rice flakes incident we clambered aboard the bus and continued on our way past a line of twelve monks going to collect food, oxen drawing cartloads of hay and no end of overloaded bikes (Some ridiculously so – we saw one stacked so high with plastic crates it had, honestly, reached the dimensions of a small truck).

To be honest, I am not sure I am going to enjoy Siem Reap so much. It seems hideously touristic. It is the gateway to the temples so I guess that is understandable but Limny’s description of the place as being lots of bars that are open all night and beer is only 50 cents a pint didn’t bode well.

We went to Pub Street for dinner as a group which was very pleasant and returned via tuk tuks in the pouring rain to write the blog, shower and sleep – tomorrow we go to the temples and we are staying there to catch the sunset. So time for bed I think.