Cambodian BBQ

After hopping out of the pick-up truck, we made our way to the eastern side of the river to Siem Reap’s less touristy, but still somewhat touristy neighborhoods. With our conspicuous backpacks, we were constantly approached with offers of “cheap room”. We obviously looked like budget was our main concern rather than comfort. We were looking for a particular place, but didn’t want to look lost either. It’s tough to walk with purpose in confidence when in reality you really are lost. We never found the place, as it probably has shut down, but we found something that was probably even better. Siem Reap has such a wealth of hotels that among those not listed in the Lonely Planet, there is serious competition, making it a luxurious buyer’s market.

This room will probably go down in my travel history as possibly the greatest bargain of all time. After a little bit of negotiation, we got a price of $4 for the room ($2 each!). Not only did it have a private bathroom with hot water, it was clean and well presented. It felt on par with a midrange hotel in America. I had rarely, if ever, stayed in a third world hotel of this quality, and it was such a bargain. Later, of course, we would find out that the fan was too weak to be refreshing, the water pressure too poor for a decent shower, and that the definition of “hot water” is pretty flexible. But still, it looked nice!

Our first mission in town was to go out in search of some lunch. We needed to get away from the touristy area and find something cheap and local. When we felt sufficiently departed from the area advertising their “continental breakfasts”, banana pancakes and “western food”, we started to look at some menus. The food still seemed far pricier than we would have expected, and we started to become skeptical that they were set up with “foreigner menus” in English. At a certain point in our walk, we had reached an area that seemed a world away from the quaint and relatively developed area we had come from. Instead of the river having grassy, park-lined banks, there were stilt houses made from scraps of wood and corrugated metal, built with entrances facing the road, back doors hanging over the river, which was exceptionally filthy at this point. Opposite the river, we found a casual-looking place that served some soup. It had a rich curry flavor, with noodles, vegetables, bits of pork organs, and some mysterious purplish cubes. The cubes had the texture of soft, raw tofu…but they were a brownish purple. Tofu wouldn’t have been surprising in Malaysia, but we hadn’t seen any in Cambodia. Purple tofu would have been exceptionally surprising anywhere though. We considered it could be some sort of organ, but we couldn’t think of an animal with an organ that appeared so uniformly. It was bizarre to eat something that you couldn’t tell whether it was an animal product or not. Over our weeks in Cambodia, this cube would turn up in our soup from time to time. We would always eat it apprehensively, wondering what it was. Eventually I just went ahead and did some google searching, to find out that it was blood cake. Congealed pork blood formed into big slabs that were then cut up into cubes for certain dishes. I think I would probably enjoy them more having known what they were, rather than getting through them with such mystery in our mouths.

The rains came heavily that night as we were on the prowl for our dinner. We had found the food in Cambodia to be more expensive than in Thailand, which seemed interesting since everything else was cheaper in Cambodia. We figured it had something to do with adjusting prices for foreigners and this also being such a touristy place. While this is still a possibility, I later came to learn why food prices in Cambodia are generally much higher than elsewhere in the region. First of all, the country is still recovering from civil war, and this has led to huge areas of the country with under-utilized farm land. Their farming technology and techniques are worlds behind neighbors Vietnam and Thailand. In fact, they import a lot of their staples since they don’t grow enough domestically to support themselves. Even rice, the country’s largest staple and biggest area of agriculture is imported. Because Cambodia does not have enough (perhaps any) processing plants for rice, the raw product is usually exported to Thailand, processed, and then re-sold at higher prices in Cambodia. It is an unfortunate situation for a country that is already struggling.

At some point during the day, we stopped at a bar that advertised pitchers of beer for 5,800 Riel ($1.40). We shared a couple of pitchers, but when the bill came, they charged us 6,000 Riel per pitcher, a difference of a total of 20 cents. We asked why we were being charged more than the advertised price, but the server couldn’t answer us. She went and got the manager, a well-dressed, but a little too slick-looking, dude. After a bit of cordial arguing, he admitted that the price was different for foreigners. We are against this in principle, and tried to argue against the policy. He seemed apologetic, and seemed to feel bad, but he still would not relent. True, we came off as stingy, but 20 cents or 20 dollars, we don’t like to get ripped off, and if something is advertised for a certain price, we expect to pay that price regardless of nationality or race. We vowed to boycott this place, even though they had cheaper beer (foreigner or otherwise) than anywhere else we could find. Our boycott lasted only two days, and when we went in there, tail between legs, the manager reminded us we had to pay the foreigner prices, and we agreed to. He was still an extremely kind and friendly man, who deep down felt at least a little bit bad about this double standard pricing scheme.

Because of the high food prices, we decided to just splurge on something that was a little more expensive than we were used to, but seemed worth it for the experience. I wish I could remember the name of it, but it is a Cambodian style of eating, similar to Korean bbq, or some of those grill your own food restaurants. Basically, for $3 each, we got a small bbq at our table and free reign over the buffet tables of raw meat, seafood, noodles, salad, soup, and a world of condiments. We weren’t really sure about the proper protocol of the grilling. The grill was a circular piece of metal with a dome. It seemed that maybe we should put some soup broth in the flat part along the edges to cook the noodles, while the meat would sit on top of the dome. We only saw one other foreigner in the place and he was sitting at a table full of Cambodians. As we brought our plates of cookables to the table, we saw that everyone in the restaurant was staring at us. We already felt out of place with this new style of eating, but now everyone wanted to see how we approached it. I saw a documentary once about Sudanese refugees moving to America. On the plane one of them, confused about the ketchup packet with his in-flight meal, opened it and squeezed it into his mouth. Later, they were seen pounding potato chips in a bowl with a thick wooden rod, like they might pound some of their staple foods back home. These instances were funny to me, and I imagined we were about to provide similar entertainment to the local Cambodians. I have no idea how far off we were from how the rest of the people were preparing their food, but we carried on nonetheless, as the stares continued.

Although we had scored a great room, we had to check out in the morning. We had included Siem Reap, actually Cambodia, in our trip to visit, Julie a friend of Lise from her university in Paris. She had given us rough directions to her house, which was a few miles out of town. We took some time to negotiate our fare with one of the dozens of tuk-tuk drivers hanging out on the strip next to the river. The price was slightly higher than Julie said it would be, but not too bad. Although he acted like he knew where we were going, he wasn’t quite sure. We got to a local school, our first landmark, but he was lost from there. We asked around and eventually got set back on our way. We continued down a rough, pot-holed and puddled dirt road. We passed by a cow, with its ankle tied to a post. Somehow we ran over the rope, cutting it. The cow didn’t seem to notice, and we hoped we hadn’t lost some man his cow. The ride turned out to be farther than the driver had anticipated, so we were surprised that he didn’t ask for more money when we arrived. We appreciated his kindness, and give him a tip.

Julie lives in a large, beautiful house in a gorgeously green setting that gave it a rural feel, without being too far from town. Her parents are NGO workers who have lived in Cambodia for years. Although Julie spent the first few years of her life in Burkina Faso, where her parents worked at the time, she spent a good portion of the rest of her life in Cambodia. When I had talked to her about it in France, she seemed modest about her ability to speak Khmer (the language spoken in Cambodia), I quickly found out that she was pretty fluent. They were renting this house from a Cambodian man who was now living out of the country. As part of the rental agreement, they were to employ the previous maid and her husband, who worked as a gardener. They had a second maid, as well, who spoke French. Julie spoke to all of them in Khmer, while Lise and I could speak to the one in French.

We spent some time hanging out with Julie, but they were having some friends over for dinner, so we decided we didn’t want to get in the way and decided to go to visit the temples of Angkor for a while. Julie helped us negotiate prices for bike rental from a nearby hotel. Before we parted ways, though, Julie bought us a bag of fresh-squeezed sugar cane juice, one of her favorite local treats.

Angkor Wat, one of the world’s most impressive historical sites, is just a few km from Siem Reap. Although it costs $20/day, if you go at 5 PM, your ticket will work for the next day as well. This was our game plan.

We got about an hour to explore Angkor Wat, the largest and most famous temple of the area. I probably shouldn’t try too hard to do justice in explaining how impressive these old structures are. So just a few basics. It was built after the death of Suyavarman II, one of the kings of the ancient city of Angkor, who died in 1152 AD. It honors the Hindu deity (the Khmers used to be Hindu, not Buddhist) Vishnu, and it is the world’s largest religious structure.

I didn’t bring my camera for a few reasons, but mostly I wanted to experience the temples without distraction. I wanted to be in the moment, without feeling like I had to capture the memories. This place has been photographed enough, and I didn’t feel like I had much to add in my hour there. Upon crossing the bridge that went over the moat around the temple, it seemed, as predicted, incredibly touristy. We wandered among the groups of tourists, trying to drown out the noise and focus on this incredible structure. Within ten minutes of wandering, though, we had left behind the masses and gotten lost in the obscure corners of the temple. It was surprising how easy it was to find spots within that left us completely alone. The temple is still in the process of restoration, so certain parts were off limits, and a big portion of the front was obscured by an unsightly green tarp. Regardless, the insides were atmospheric and peaceful, and we wished we could have just sat in there longer and soaked it all in for hours. Unfortunately, it was closing at sunset, so we had to be on our way before we were ready.

On the bicycle ride back to town, as the evening descended into darkness, we kept hearing a loud noise coming from the adjacent forest that sounded like a buzz saw. We were confused about what could be making that loud noise. We were sure it wasn’t a buzz saw, but it seemed far too loud to be an animal. We found out later that it was actually some sort of bug. It was the second most impressive thing all day.

Later in the evening, we went to buy a snack from a local shop. One of the guys hanging out at a table in front of the next shop called out to us. It was the tuk-tuk driver from earlier in the day. He invited us to sit down with him and his friends. They were casually knocking back beers and shots of rice liquor. He offered us a drink of some pinkish-red “wine” from hell. It was rough brew, but they were delighted that we appeared to like it. Next he poured us shots of the rice liquor, which we subdued our grimaces for as it seared our throats. We hung out with this group of jolly, and slightly boisterous tuk-tuk drivers, enjoying pretty interesting conversation. As I’m sure I’ve said before, taxi/tuk-tuk/rickshaw/etc. drivers are some of my least favorite people to deal with while traveling. These men, however, just seemed like kind, fun people, who happened to drive around tourists during the day. I had expected Cambodia to be dodgy and full of hustlers, based on some of the stories that I’ve heard. So far, though, it was turning out to be disarmingly pleasant. In some places I would have expected these men to only be interested in talking to us because they thought they could benefit from it somehow, but they never mentioned tuk-tuk rides, tours, or selling any sort of trinkets or artifacts. I was quickly starting to warm up to this country.

Later in the evening, after Julie’s family’s friends left, Julie, Lise and I decided to take a dip in their pool. It was a luxury we didn’t think we would utilize, but we were glad when we did. The night was calm, but warm, and the pool was pleasantly refreshing.