Cambodia - plants and flowers

A last few couple pictures of Cambodia - a few plants (a tree covered by vines that were consuming it on the grounds of Angkor Wat, a mango tree with green mangoes growing on it, a white flower the Chinese call 'chicken egg flower', one of those little plants whose leaves curl up when you touch them (growing wild), the vehicle the locals call 'tuk-tuk' which is different from what they call a tuk-tuk in Bangkok.  And one of the many temples we passed by but didn't visit - because hey, when you're eating from such a rich buffet, what is it to leave a few grapes on the table?

Siem Reap: highly recommended.

Cambodia - Dead Fish bar and grill

Have you ever checked into a hotel, and asked to be in room 23, and everyone at the hotel immediately looks at each other with a knowing look in their eye, and then an old guy behind the counter who you didn't notice before says in a gravelly voice "room 23 - why, that's the room that nice family was killed last year... by an axe murderer!"?  No, I haven't had that experience either.  But I would imagine if I had it would feel a lot like going to the Dead Fish bar and grill in Siem Reap.

Now, to be fair, the strange feeling was probably partly because we were the only people in the place (it was huge).  And it only half looked like it was open, despite the large amount of wait staff.  Maybe it gets busy later on in the evening?  Maybe tour buses come back from the temples and the place is hopping?  Who knows.  All I know is the servers there were all acting like there was a big dark secret they didn't want us to know - like, if we stayed much longer, we were all... DOOMED!

So we stayed for a drink (Sam had a great cocktail called an Angkor Sunrise - very well mixed and highly worthwhile if you ever find yourself there, I had an Angkor draft beer that was fresh and tasty), and then skeedaddled.  No sense in getting killed by an axe wielding maniac on our first visit to Siem Reap.

Oh, and it had a crocodile pit in the restaurant.  Sweet.

Cambodia - street vendoHOLY CRAP WHAT'S IN THAT BOTTLE!?

Homemade sealed bottles full of whiskey of unknown provenance and creepy-crawlies of various sorts.  Snakes, scorpions and god knows what else.

Not even tempted.  No thanks.  I'll eat and drink an awful lot of strange things, but dead venomous animals of unknown age and origin in a liquid purported to be whiskey that is actually lord knows what - nope.  Pass.  Not even tempted, I say.

Cambodia - beer

Saw many beers while in Cambodia.  Pretty much every beer you see pictured here is Cambodian, with the exception of the Ben Thanh (Vietnamese) and BeerLao (Laotian).

BeerLao has a reputation for being one of the best beers in Asia - it is Czech style and quite good.

My favorites were the Angkor (especially on tap) and the Klang.  The rest were pretty pedestrian, with the exception of the stouts (too strange to be drinking stouts in such heat, so hard to say how good they were) and the 'You-Beer'.  'You-Beer' must stand for: "You should not drink this Beer".   Not sure if the can of 'You-Beer' I tried was simply old or what, but it was terrible.  

Cambodia - Food VI - palm fruit, palm beer, palm wine

Palm trees are everywhere in Cambodia.  It's an important crop - much of the food we ate while there was cooked in palm oil.  Here you can see some ladies by the roadside shaping palm sugar into candy.  Shown also are the palm fruits, which are stripped and melted down into sugar.  Next to the pot doing the sugar melting you can see some bamboo tubes to cool the sugar - if you leave the sugar there for a while you get palm beer or the precursor for palm wine.

Cambodia - Food V - various meals

Here are assorted other meals we had in Siem Reap.  We found the cuisine there in general to be much less spicy than Thai food, but still very fragrant and flavorful.  Lots of rice and noodles, lots of herbal flavors.  It was excellent, though we will admit to administering a fair bit of chili sauce to meals we had - we're so used to spicy food these days we missed it a bit.

Cambodia - Food IV - packaged food

We didn't actually buy most any of what's pictured (Sam tried the kickapoo joy juice, which is Singapore's version of Mello Yello, and the soursop juice, which is a sweet/sour fruit juice).  We always like to troll through grocery stores a bit, though, to see what folks eat where we're visiting.  Love the names of the chips.  It's also great how the extreme skateboarder is set to drink all sorts of drinks you don't generally see in the US - soy bean, winter melon, lychee, grass jelly, and soursop.  Extreme!

Cambodia - Food III - Karo restaurant

One of our favorite places we ate while in Cambodia was Karo restaurant, near the Old Market in downtown Siem Reap.  A few dishes that stood out there - prawn cakes, green mango salad, and hot sour soup.  But the real barn-burner was their beef Lok Lak.  The slices of beef were cooked just right, and the dipping sauce - oh, what sauce!  How do I love thee, sauce?  Let me count the ways.

We asked how the sauce was made - there was black pepper, white pepper, ginger, lime.  We may try to reproduce it ourselves, but we're not sure it was as simple as it was made out to be.  Truly fabulous!