Eating Cambodian style

Fantastic fresh foods everywhere we went, for so little money - this was what I found all over Cambodia. Bright red peppers spicing up veggies, cooked so lightly it was eating vegetables the way God intended. Lemongrass and greens flash cooked in oil and added to chunks of garlic and more peppers.




Amuse bouche - pickled garlic cloves and spiced peanuts, selected daintily with chopsticks. More than a few of these ended up under my chair.

Fish soup with fresh vegetables, light noodles, cilantro and peppers. Served steaming hot. The fish had plenty of bones - it was wise to eat slowly. But as it was breakfast, this was very hard to do.

Another steaming soup, this one with goat chunks and spinach, into which we tossed mung bean sprouts and red pepper jelly for spice. Hard to beat, especially when it costs about $2.00.

This is a famous frieze from Angkor Wat, called Churning the Ocean of Milk. They had to do this, in order to work off all the food they'd eaten.

Waterlogged in Cambodia

I contacted a friend-of-a-friend who lives there as soon as I arrived, and she signed me up for a bike ride with a bunch of expats. We pedaled out of the downtown Phnom Penh area past traffic that is charitably described as terrifyingly chaotic. Motorbikes are the norm there, and they dictate traffic, and they follow no rules. No. Rules. At. All. Arriving riverside (the Tonle Sap first, then the Mekong as we island-hopped on the bikes) we took a ferry ride across and immediately were on rural, muddy paths on Silk Island. We heard silk operators clanking looms behind bamboo curtains as we rode past, and every child within view of the road would shout out “hello! Hello!”

The Ferry Boat (20 cents a ride):

After three hours, we stopped for an iced coffee (Asian style – with sweetened condensed milk at the bottom) near a Wat (temple). Heading out again our bike path dropped off into a deep stream. The first bicyclist tried to ride through, and ended up swimming his bicycle back to shore. On the far side we could see a dugout canoe, so he swam across and brought the canoe over to our side. It wasn’t exactly seaworthy – one end was almost completely rotted away. The weight of a human would've sunk it. But we were able to  stack some bikes on it and one guy swam the canoe across. Then a few of us would wade in and swim ourselves. We repeated the process till everyone made it through.  

Loading the canoe:

Swimming across:

Stinky water, choked with grasses, deeper than I am tall – when we got out we even theorized it’d be a good hiding place for snakes. It wasn’t all that pleasant, but we did feel like bad-asses when we were through. There are no more pictures of me after we crossed because I was wearing white cotton pants that were as muddy as they were transparent after this escapade. I had to buy a scarf to tie around myself, so as not to show off my underwear in the fancy hotel lobby when I got home. I looked like a wet muddy rat, with a very pretty scarf tied around its waist.

Phnom Penh life. Lively.

The sun beats down here – if you’re in the shade, it’s muggy but it’s fine. But the sun is so freakin’ hot.

Motorbikes rule this city. Cars drive slowly because they’re automatically at fault if a rider gets hurt. At stoplights the bikes and motorbikes and tuktuks and ciclos and remarques swarm in between the cars, stop right in front of them in the intersection, anything for a leg up on the chance to go. Seems like absolute mayhem but it’s pretty slow paced, so it doesn’t feel quite as dangerous as it might.

They are NOT up to code on what they carry.

That tuktuk is carrying two sofas.

For the evening I took off on a boat with the new expat friends for an anchored raft on the other side of the Mekong. We sat on the comfy raft (big soft chairs, coffee tables, a full bar) and drank gin, ate olives and cheese, to watch the sunset over Phnom Penh.