Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 31 - Thursday June 9th 2016 - Siem Reap, Cambodia

So after such a magical, amazing, inspiring day yesterday there was always going to be a come down and today there absolutely was (well for the daytime at least).

So you can’t go travelling for what has now been a month and not end up without needing to do chores every now and again and today was one of those days (well for Jonathan at least).

After breakfast we walked up to the main road and the laundry and handed in the best part of 6kg for washing and ironing. It’s not cheap here for that kind of thing for some reason, but needs must and as we are getting back on the ship in three days we need to get sorted.

On our return to the hotel we asked for an iron and ironing board to

be sent to our room and that was Jonathan for pretty much the whole of the day.

The ironing board that they sent was actually quite comical, it was so short that you had to sit down and iron the mountain of shirts that needed pressing as they have been in the cases all this time since getting off the ship. After all we do need to look a little respectable when we get back on-board The Ovation especially as we have sent the suits back (they have arrived in England already).

Trev went off for a swim and a bit of a sunbathe, its boiling out there again today and we have seen no more rain since the day that we arrived.

Jonathan took a lunch break away from the pygmy ironing board and we went off for coffee and cake and a snack in the hotel’s lobby, the only food and drink we have actually paid for whilst staying here.

With the ironing complete, washing collected from the shop just outside the hotel it was time for our evening excursion, a street food tasting experience……nervous much??

Now the literature about this trip was terrifying but us being us, we were curious. It told us that we would be out there tasting the local dishes and snacks from red ants, locusts, tarantulas, durain fruit, well all sorts of fruits that we had never heard of. It just all sounded like a taste nightmare rather than a sensation…. time would tell.

Our guide picked us up with a tuc tuc driver. We were told that the group could be made up of up to 12 people but we were the only crazy two fools to go out on the excursion this evening. The guide was charming and we instantly warmed to him even if he did seem to laugh at everything for no reason.

He was studying at college for a year to become a member of a housekeeping team at a hotel, raising two kids and doing this to earn a little money on the side. Life is hard for some Cambodians but they are lovely people, really warm and kind, at least that’s our impression.

We headed off on the tuc tuc past Siem Reap and back to where the new flash ticket office was where we bought our tickets to gain access to the Angkor temples. It was an area known buy the locals as the 60 crossways, I have no idea why but this is where the locals come for dinner, to the rows of stall holders selling everything from fruits, bbq’s, dried and deep fried insects, clothes, shoes, you get it everything…they then lay their raffia mats out on the side of a busy road and as a family sit down and eat, a kind of picnic. There was even a funfair down here for the kids and we really did stand out. I won’t say that we were the only westerners here but we were certainly the only ones that we saw, a few Korean tourists here and there but we were rare and starred at quite a lot with people laughing at us (just a little) as they watched us taste their foods, their diet and squirm our faces just a few times!

So our first taste was the of the Durain fruit, It’s about the size of a melon but covered in fleshy spikes, it’s really architectural and untouched quite beautiful, the sort of thing you would like to see in your fruit bowl just for the look (or is that just me?).

Anyway this thing stinks, so much so that hotels ban them but the locals don’t seem to be able to get enough of them based on how many people are selling them. The flesh inside the armadillo type shell is wet, soggy, sweaty and it really does hum…. like a rotten cabbage and to be honest that’s kind of what it tasted like. After two bites we gave in and handed back our uneaten sections. The guide bagged it all up and moved us on…. this was going to be a treat for his kids later.

We moved onto another fruit stall, fly’s buzzing over everything and tried some lychee, some weird coconut really fleshy soft gooey thing, a fruit that looked like it was a new potato but it grew in bunches like grapes. Most of these were fine, very sweet and quite palatable, especially after the Durain.

Now it was time for some savoury!! Deep fried locust anyone. They sell them in massive bowls all sticky and crusty, some with chillies and small onions in the bowl with them. Once you get past the fact of what it is, an insect its actually not that bad at all. Think of it like a protein crisp and that’s really what it is. It did not have a lot of flavour more texture and a mental barrier to get over…. our I’m a celebrity moment was over…we completed that bush tucker trial (followed by glugs of water to get the bits out of between our teeth!).

Trevor went on to try a whole frog, deep fried on a stick whilst I went for a water beetle, again, little taste but texture. There were actually no red ants to try or tarantula (that we saw anyway) but many many stalls on the market were selling what we were eating. They catch them by using UV light, the sort of thing you have in kitchens to keep bugs away from food then net them all up, it must be a very long process to catch the bowl full on offer here.

Next we moved onto something sweet that were all variations on rice cakes. Really sticky rice with fruit flavourings mashed into them then turned into squares or rolls wrapped in banana leaves. All of these were fine, especially the banana rice cake that was actually really yummy. The flies certainly seemed to love them!

Once again we changed food type and headed off to the BBQ stalls. So as `I am sure you can imagine there were a few birds on the BBQ. They look very different though as they have all been squashed flat, really flat like a spatchcock but flatter, real road kill look. They had meat on skewers, chicken and quail, snake head fish (not going anywhere near that) all sorts. Our guide ordered us some quail and some beef on skewers that’s what they said it was) and we went and took a table on the side of the road with a local beer being stared at all the time.

We chatted to the guide about Cambodia, how much it has changed since the war. The area that we were in now became a market due to the government moving out all the locals from around the temples of Angkor Wat. They used to eat down there, the picnics etc. but now they are not allowed and this major road has become the markets home but they don’t know for how much longer. Our guide told us that the government wanted to move them again and that they don’t know where to go next, the price of change.

We ate our beef with a really great yet simple sauce. It was just white pepper, salt and lime juice mixed up in a bowl, really tasty and really simple. The quail was like chicken, there’s actually not a lot of meat on a quail and the cold veg that the meat came with we passed on after a few sprigs of this and that. The veg was served in an ice tray so you got that real hot food cold veg thing but it was not salad….bit weird.

We walked some more of the market but that was the end of the street food for the evening, we were now being taken to a restaurant on the town for a main course so they knew we had been fed!

As we left the market we walked through a funfair, a few simple rides, a version of bumper cars, a carousel and trampolines, things like that. It was lovely seeing the Cambodian families out with smiles on their faces, away from the tourists (apart from us) living their normal lives. We were spectators into a life a million miles away from ours but they looked so happy. We stopped invading their space, jumped back in the tuc tuc and headed for town and a main course.

They chose a lovely if not deserted restaurant for our main course. Trevor had a local river fish in a peanut sauce. It was beautifully presented. It had a love heart of finely sliced cucumber right around the outside, really pretty although Trev said he was not sure on the flavour combination of peanut satay with fish. I went for another curry but not an Amok like we had last night (the steam curry) this was more of a traditional slow cooked curry with coconut and potatoes. It was served inside a green coconut, again ten out of ten for presentation. The only odd thing was being stared at again. As there were only four people in this restaurant then many staff did not seem to know what to do with themselves so they just seemed to stand there and stare at us eating….it was no big deal but a little odd to say the least.

After dinner we had the choice of being dropped off in Pub Street again or back at the hotel. We opted for the later and the free drinks and the air conditioning of the Club Lounge. It had been a great night out and our guide had been excellent, really keen to please and informative. We were joined in our tuc tuc from the restaurant to the hotel by the tuc tuc driver’s son. He was about six years old and his spoken English was remarkable. To be honest he did not look 100% Cambodian and had a bit of a western look about him, his skin colour, eye shape etc. When we got dropped off we tipped the guide and the river and the little boy too.... he was uber cute.

After a few gins in the club lounge we went off to bed. The evening had been fantastic despite our initial reservation about going in this trip we were both so glad that we did.

Let’s just hope that our bellies hold up and we don’t wake up in the middle of the night regretting crunching down on those locusts or the beetle…. but if we are ill I’m blaming the Durain fruit….it was disgusting!