Cambodia: Food and Drink

As is typical when I travel, I made sure to take a cooking class, and as is typical with such cooking classes, we began at the local market. This one was in Siem Reap, and was a standard Asian market, with freshly butchered meat, fresh local produce, bulk dried goods and prepared foods.


Journal: "Cooking class at Le Tigre de Papier was fun, but frankly not the best. On the other hand, for $17.25 including a mango shake, you can't expect the moon. There were six of us, including a Chinese girl and three generations from Switzerland--two sweet, well-behaved children, their mother and grandmaman. Everyone made some different dishes, so it was nice seeing the variety; however, that meant a lot of down time as other people got the instructor's attention. I made a spicy shrimp salad that wasn't spicy, and beef lam lok, with thin slices of a fairly tough cut--flank, I think. Too much oyster sauce, too."


Later on, I had lam lok at Rikitikitavi in Kampot, this time served with a traditional fried egg, as well as Kampot pepper sauce. It was better, but not amazingly so:


Quite a bit of Khmer cooking is remarkably similar to Thai cuisine, as you might expect. Here is a curry i had at one of the restaurants in the Angkor temples area:


As you might further expect in Cambodia, seafood figures strongly in the diet. Some fabulous prawns in Kep, at a restaurant recommended by Cha (probably for a kickback, but that's to be expected), and fresh grilled red snapper at the resort in Sihanoukville:


Siem Reap is basically a tourist town in support of the temples, and it has its own, rather more low-key version of Bangkok's Khaosan Road, called Pub Street.


I later learned that "Khmer traditional food" may be a code for "contains cannabis", as pot has long been an ingredient used in food here. From various people, I heard that every home is allowed to have two plants for culinary use, though I don't know this for a fact. To the best of my knowledge, none of my food was specially "treated".


Cambodia has a population of 15 million people, and a large number of local beers for such a small population. The ones you'll see most are Anchor and Angkor (note the the pull tab):


Cambodia beer is also commonly seen, though my favorite was Kingdom, which has a blonde flavor to it:


Additionally, I found a dark stout called Black Panther, Ganzberg (German brewmaster, German quality, but produced in Phnom Penh), one called Klang, and finally, Crown.

Cambodia, Kampot: Tuk-tuk Tour

I took a five-hour tour of the Kampot area with a guide named Cha, who was informative and kind. The tour cost $25 (100,000 riel) not including a tip.

I really only got interested in Kampot when talking to a French/Australian couple I shared a cab with from the airport at Sihanoukville. They wanted to go to the Kampot pepper farms. I had had some Kampot peppered ham in Siem Reap so I shortened my stay in Phnom Penh a bit to detour to Kampot.

I did due diligence in the LP, picked a hotel--frankly, in large part for its name, Rikitikitavi, one of my favorite Rudyard Kipling tales--and hired a tuk-tuk immediately upon arrival. The first stop I wanted to see was a relatively inaccessible shrine called Phnom Chhngok, which has 203 stairs, about 180 of therm going up, leading to a cave.


Dripping water has formed a stalagmite recognized as a linga. Various other rock formations and sediment stains are deemed to look like elephants, a crocodile and a pig. The elephant I can get, but t takes more imagination than I have to see the pig, even if you pump up the brightness.


There is a nice view of the countryside from atop the steps.


Speaking of the countryside, most of what we did on the tour was ride around it. And that was fine, because it was lovely, mostly rice paddies and sugar palms.


There was a time when no Parisian bistro or restaurant would open its doors for business without a supply of Kampot peppers in the larder. Sadly, the Khmer Rouge infested this area even long after their ouster (even until the late 1990s), so the peppers are only now coming back, as it takes four or five years for a plant to produce.

Journal: "I admit complete ignorance about black pepper plants, though it has been erased today: they are vines that grow very tall, and take about four years to mature into productive plants. The corns grow on strings and take about eight months to be ready to harvest, though when you harvest them determines how spicy they are: remove the skin from the green ones and you have white peppercorns. The Kampot variety is mild yet aromatic..."


The Kampot region is mainly agricultural, and a lot of our trail was alongside irrigation ditches stemming from a dammed lake called "Hidden Lake" even if it is anything but. Eventually we made our way to Kep, which is a seaside area east of Kampot. I had some nice prawns there and visited the "Crab market", where I didn't actually see any crabs--I suspect they had all been snapped up so to speak by the dozen or two restaurants down the street.


You can see that the weather was brilliant but it turned rainy in the evening. I still managed a nice bar crawl, and I think Kampot is a lovely place deserving of more time than I gave it.

Cambodia, Phnom Penh: National Museum, Royal Palace

My hotel in Phnom Penh was about a fifteen minute walk from the Cambodian National Museum, which is itself adjacent to the Royal Palace. It is a one-story square building surrounding a central quadrangle.


The collection is quite small for a national museum. Most of it seems to be from the Angkorian era, even the temples of Angkor, and includes Hindu statuary as well as Buddhas.


There are some Champa phalluses, two monkeys wrestling, and some other stuff. If you read every bit of signage, you would still be out of here within an hour.


While the Museum butts up against the Royal Palace, it's another fifteen minute walk around to the entrance. The palace is closed for lunch, but don't believe tuk-tuk drivers who tell you it's closed for the day and offer to take you for a ride--they're trying to take you for a ride.


Above is the exterior of the King's ceremonial meeting hall, Preah Tineang Tevea Vinichhay. The king is Norodom Sihamoni, son of Sihanouk. The main draw of the place, though, is probably the Emerald Buddha temple, which is much like the one in Bangkok.


Also like Bangkok's palace, this one has an outer wall decorated with murals purporting to tell the history of Cambodia. Of course, they don't really, since at no point did monkey gods ride golden carriages and lead troops into battle.


The three photos above show pretty much the best images I saw. In other words, these frescoes are in appalling condition, even though the building only dates from the 1800s. This was sad, because clearly they were once very beautiful. Today, they suffer the humiliation of being used for lumber storage.


The entrance fee for each facility was around USD 5 or 20,000 riel, as was the case at most sites I went to. I should mention that you don't need to exchange dollars for riel, as the greenback is accepted as currency literally everywhere in the country.