It is sentiments such as this which give Cambodian food a bad name. And, especially since we have just had our first (unscheduled) encounter with the dreaded fertilised eggs in Saigon, it seems a little unfair.

Since you ask, they were pretty palatable. In fact, if one could get over the internal speedbump caused not only by a European background but a childhood spent in convent school internalising pro-life propaganda, I reckon they’d be a real treat.

Anywise, herewith a round-up of good, can’t-go-wrong and handle-with-caution choices in Cambodia.

GOOD THINGS

Sour Soup
Varyingly spelt Machou Kreurng, M’jou K’reung, M’chou Krourng, etc., this comes in incarnations from a thick, golden chicken broth soured with tamarind and packed with baby aubergines through to a clear soup soured with calamondin or lime and sprinkled with spring onions and rau rom. Always good.

Make your own Soup
A big pot of broth, over a flame, into which you add your choice of ingredients. Typical ingredients are morning glory leaves, the bitter tree leaf known as sdao, beef, seafood, pork balls, rice noodles and egg noodles, but really the sky’s the limit. The broth gets thicker as you work your way through it. Z really enjoyed the experience, if not the broth, at Suki Soup in Siem Reap: it’s a conveyor belt restaurant, along the lines of those Japanese sushi bars, and you simply pick your favourites as they trundle past.

Mushrooms
Cambodia has a great range of fungi. Besides the obvious enokitake, and the delicious white mushrooms known as paddy straw mushrooms, I’ve had white oyster mushrooms, dark, chewy, meaty shiitake-style black mushrooms, plus delicious, flat, leafy shrooms of a deep, burgundy hue that look not dissimilar to liver.

Amok
This term is used on menus to mean anything from a version of a Thai red curry through to lumps of meat in a heavily sugared sauce. The authentic version, fish in a mild coconut curry steamed in a banana leaf (foil will also do) is delicate and delicious.

Pork with Pickled Greens
A market-stall favourite, this is reliably good.

Crab with Green Kampot Pepper.
Delicious combination of sweet seafood with fresh, pungent, chlorophyll peppercorns. I wrote about this <s href="https://www.escapeartistes.com//2010/02/17/kampot-pepper/"here.

Lotus Seeds
Sold everywhere at the roadside, and one of the most fun snackfoods ever. I wrote about these here.

Ratanakiri Barbecue
Fry slivers of beef, pork and slices of fresh vegetables in butter over a table-top grill. Dip in your favoured sauce. Enjoy.

Sugar Cane Juice
Pressed from fresh at markets, street-stands and the like, and served in plastic bags over ice, this is a must-try. Add lime to achieve perfection.

Shrimp Pancakes
A great street-stall choice when near the Tonle Sap lake: whole shrimps fried in a spicy batter to form a crunchy, golden pancake studded with fresh-cooked shrimps.

Bleah
Also spelt pleah, plea, and blea, this is a salad of raw meat or fish (the base ingredient doesn’t matter) “cooked” ceviche-style in lime juice, and served with fresh veg, chilli, fresh herbs and a smattering of peanuts. It’s really hard to get a good take on this anywhere where it appears in English on the menu: tends to come either with cooked meat or smothered in peanuts. We tried a great one at Ramsey Buntam in Koh Kong.

Green Mango Salad
You can’t get away from green mangos at the roadside, where they are sliced into a flower shape, kept in place with matchsticks of sugar cane, and served with a dip of salt, pepper, sugar and chilli. Less aggressive than the very under-ripe green mangos, these make an outstanding salad when shredded.

Bitter Melon with Pork Filling
Even if you don’t particularly like the bitter taste of the squash known as bitter melon, the tang of a salty, chopped pork filling combined with the smooth squash mellows the bitterness to perfection.

Steamed Buns
The Khmer take on the ubiquitous steamed white bun known as bao in China features egg in a sweet and spicy meat filling. Surprisingly moreish.

Grilled Duckling
Served whole and crispy from the grill, this is great street food with an intense dark flavour.

Lemon Grass Curry
Your choice of meat stir-fried with chilli, lemongrass and generally some herbs, including Thai basil. Delicious.

Spiced Aubergine
Grilled aubergine mixed with soy sauce or prahok (fish sauce), plus spices including chilli and lemongrass. All the smooth smokiness of baba ghanoush with a distinctly South-East Asian edge.

HANDLE WITH CARE
Pâté
The versions of this I’ve tried appear to be some ungodly cross-pollination of French pâté, Vietnamese savoury custard and, quite possibly, Spam, or the US equivalent. Z really liked a sweet type based on snake and deep-fried at the roadside.

Sausages
Very similar to the sweet, plump, fatty Chinese sausage known as xiang chang. Did I mention the sweet, fatty bit?

Coffee
Generally muddy. Almost always served with sweet milk, a sugared, condensed milk dolloped from the can to the base of the glass, where it lurks, polluting all.

Caramelised Beef
Often served with eggs, most versions of this are fairly heavy on the sugar.

Cow’s Nose
A rural delicacy, where it appears in stews. The white, gooey stuff on the inside is the best bit, apparently, so as guest of honour you will be expected to, err, dig in.

CAN’T GO WRONG
Baguettes
Sold fresh on the street every morning and one of the most positive results of French colonialism.

Fruit
The whole wealth of South-East Asian fruits is here, pretty much. Rambutans, dragon fruits, watermelon, bananas, pineapple, papaya, sapodilla, mangosteens… White Rose in Battambang has a great fruit salad menu, and a lot of street stalls will make shakes.

Corn on the Cob
Easy street food. Lighter in colour and tougher in texture than the yellow, tender version we favour in the West, but with much more flavour and sweetness thanks to its longer ageing.

Toasted Bananas
Grilled until chewy, a delicious street food.

Grilled Chicken
Nuff said.

Eggs
From songthrush eggs to hen’s eggs, these are sold hard-boiled at roadsides and in markets.

Noodle Soups
I’m going to do a proper post on these — we’re getting quite obsessive about them.

All this said, Khmer cuisine, at least on its home turf, feels a little like British cooking did fifteen or twenty years ago: so scared of its reputation, so intimidated by the phenomenal cuisine of its historic enemy Thailand (read France), that it’s quite hard to find local dishes on the menu at all, or, when you do, they are served Thai style.

In places where they have no menu, and speak no English, of course, the flavours are fantastic.

The post Cambodian Food appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Francois is a writer, two young children, separated. The brother is an artist and musician, living in Cambodia, getting by. The kids are skiing with their mother. He is in PP with a friend.

It is a little after midnight, the brother is long gone, and Francois and I are talking French on the roof terrace, as the staff sleep behind their screen.

His friend, he tells me, is déficient. He cannot read. He cannot write. He needs help to cross the road.

They are in Phnom Penh for one week. Then Bangkok for five days more. It seems a tough couple of cities for someone who struggles even in Limoges.

Francois shrugs. His friend likes it. Although the Skytrain in Bangkok makes life easier than here.

A door opens. A pretty, curvy, tiny chick in scarlet lipstick, scarlet corset, hot pants and high heels emerges.

“Bonsoir, Madame,” she says to me, definitively. Francois looks a little embarrassed as the clack of her high heels recedes down the cast-iron stairs.

A friend of your friend? I ask, politely.

Kind of, he says. We acknowledge our mutual euphemisms.

But, yes, Francois says. He did “arrange his tryst”.

Like most things, it sounds better in French. But it seems kinder, more equal, somehow, than the more aggressive transactions I have seen.

The post A Tryst Arranged appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I am grubby, gobsmacked and tired just from looking at it.

Z is incensed. “Just think how many houses they could have built on this land,” he says. “And that stupid king just goes and builds a temple to say, ‘I’m bigger than you.’ Religion is rubbish.”

But some stuff does make sense. The Khmer Rouge couldn’t have happened without the Khmer god-kings.

The insane and genocidal focus on gargantuan irrigation projects?

A millennium before, peasants excavated a 24 sq. km. reservoir using hoes. The Great Leap Forward? Small fry, Comrade Mao.

The insistence on absolute authority? The notion that a country can subsist on rice alone? The grandiose colonial ambitions? The cynical, and instant, replacement of one set of beliefs with another?

Check, check, check. And check some more.

But, my god, it’s beautiful. “How many people do you think died building this?” Z asks.

You can almost hear the whiplashes echoing off the vast, ceremonial steps that lead to the inner temple. Even with the “Wait Time 20 Minutes” sign and the queue of eager visitors.

We retreat, trek through the outer galleries and reach the eastern gate. Where a gang of temple monkeys are doing their hoodlum thing.

Z and temple monkeys have history. In Sri Lanka, one unzipped his bag, stole his sweets, then hopped near effortlessly from tree to tree, stuffing sweeties in her mouth and staring at him, chewing meditatively with her cheeks stuffed full, as if to say, “Catch me if you can.”

He was three. I have never seen a crosser child.

So our bags were firmly zipped, even before a trio of them, acting in concert, mugged a Japanese couple.

One scaled her waist, with an almost kittenish “aren’t I adorable?” face, then raided her bumbag for dollars.

Two others took her boyfriend. One climbed cutely onto his head, a second onto his shoulders. While he was endeavouring to dislodge the first, his accomplice raided his rucksack for green mango.

The execution was outstanding.

Laugh? We almost cried.

Back in Siem Reap, we sit pavement-side at one of those places that boasts “authentic Cambodian food” yet has not one Khmer-speaker dining in it.

Kids swamp us. I give a little girl the bracelet that Cheung’s friend had given me that morning.

A tourist policeman patrols on his motorbike, at a suitably child-friendly pace. They scatter, giggling, into the alleyways like urchins out of Oliver!

The cop and I make, “Kids, eh?” faces at each other, and grin.

And then the disabled boy appears, selling books. I want to buy a book.

“Eight dollars,” he says. (In general, the haggling maths worths roughly as follows: they start at two and a half times the default price. I halve it. We to and fro. We end up at half.)

We start to haggle. He takes it out, “You see?” he says. “Big book. Very heavy.”

His big toe is splayed fantastically wide as he supports his body and his box of books on one crutch and one foot.

It brings to mind the films we watched in the Landmine Museum yesterday. Several million tons of ordinance and mines, still live, still waiting, still crippling kids.

It is a very good book, he says.

You like it? I ask.

He is in first grade, he says. He can’t read yet. He only started work quite recently. He is fifteen years old.

I offer four dollars.

“No profit at that price,” he says. “Bad day. No tourists. No one buying.”

We settle at six. I hand over a twenty dollar bill. He pulls fistfuls of dollars out of his bag to make change. I laugh. “Not such a bad day, then?”

He laughs. So do the other kids.

“I can’t see any Cambodians in this “Cambodian food” place, can you?” says Z.

He is, of course, correct.

We cross the road to the tourist market, the Psar Chaa, where I finally find my T-shirt. I hold it up. The salesgirl smiles. “It’s your size,” she says. “Small.”

The GAP factory whose offcuts this outlet is taking is sized for Americans, not Europeans, but it’s better than XXL.

It says, “I (heart) Cambodia.” And, yes, I really do.

Read Part 1 here
Read Part 2 here

The post I Heart Cambodia – Part 3 appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

But Battambang’s Bamboo Train, which leaps and rattles a few inches above rails so warped that they wobble into the distance like a child’s first attempt at perspective, is officially “quite scary”.

Cambodia’s railways are in about the state you’d expect after decades of civil war and a peace dominated by the endemic corruption known in the old days as bonjour. No passenger services. The very occasional freight train.

And one of the world’s great train rides in the form of the Bamboo Train.

Train is, technically, a misnomer. Less locomotive, more glorified bed frame, the Bamboo Train is a platform of bamboo slats placed onto two sets of wheels, powered by yer multipurpose belt-drive motor and, generally, adolescent boys.

It goes like the clappers, through paddy fields, over rivers, across dirt roads. On stretches where the boys have learnt, hopefully not from experience, that the “train” might jump the “rails”, it slows a little.

But, honestly, not much.

When you meet something coming the other way? You simply take the frame off the wheels, the wheels off the rails, and stand by the side of the track until the other train has passed.

Boys being boys, one does not slow down until the very last minute.

Early prototypes of the Bamboo Train were powered not by petrol but by teams of men using bamboo poles to, effectively, punt the platform along the tracks. It evolved into an essential route for villagers taking wares to market, and as an access route for jungle villages where there are still no roads.

And now? Much of the time, it’s simply used by tourists.

In typical Cambodian style, the villagers at the other end of the track have turned their local brick “factory” into an attraction, of a sort.

Factory, in this context, means three domed kilns, a clay pit, a metal press which extrudes perforated clay for slicing with a giant cheesewire, and quantities of low-paid labour.

Adults for the heaviest stuff. Children for the low, nimble stuff, like lugging bricks into the kilns.

It leaves, as often, a funny taste. A great awareness of the disparity between rich and poor. And a sense of quite how spoilt one is, coming from the developed world, and how pampered our children are.

I posted before that the per capita income here is $2000. A typical moto driver makes in the region of $4 a day.

The post Best Train Journey Ever? #1: The Bamboo Train appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

In the meantime, though, we stopped in Kratie on our way back from Ban Lung, Ratanakiri, to see the Irrawaddy dolphins on the Mekong, and avoid a repetition of our experience on the way up.

The Kratie pod cluster around 15km upriver from the town itself. We took a sampan out to see them from the riverside there, the driver paddling the boat so quietly that the huffs and snorts and squeaks of the dolphins echoed across the water.

The freshwater Irrawaddy dolphin is an endangered species, but this pod was full of life. They surfaced, puffed and played in groups of two or three, one pair arcing so close to the boat that we could see the expressions on their faces.

For Z, in all honesty, the rapids were more exciting. During the dry season, a band of rapids stretch across the Mekong, less than a kilometre from the dolphins, and serve the town and surrounding villages as a type of public swimming pool.

Low reed islands and eddies of slow water slow their force remarkably. And a network of wooden walkways and bamboo-shaded platforms reach out across the water so families can watch their kids at play.

But they do have force, though. When Z ventured out, hanging dutifully onto the wires that had been suspended there for support, all 27 kilos of him was knocked off his feet.

I had anticipated something of this kind, so effected a not-entirely-impromptu rescue from the bridge. Helped, praise the lord, by a couple of passers-by.

The local kids standing in the calmer waters a few metres further out watched with a curiosity only matched a few minutes later when he achieved the largest splinter ever seen.

Still I can’t think of a better place to watch our first Mekong sunset, with sampans rocking on the water, low islands in the distance, and sheets of gold running across the vast expanse of river and turning slowly into pink as the trees on the far bank shade from green to black.

The post Dolphins on the Mekong appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Z and a child hawker take time out, Ta Prohm, Cambodia

It’s still uncomfortably early when we debike and hit some blessed calm at Kbal Spean, the River of a Thousand Lingas.

The mile-long path to the top of the hill has been swept clean as a village yard, and cheeutal roots form an elegant latticework, almost like natural stairs.

Ascents of grey, slabby rocks feel almost landscaped, and looping vines create natural swings and hammocks.

Z is in his element. I am in the throes of wondering at the marvels of travel and the joy of life — more specifically, I am pointing out a promising Tarzan vine — when my flip-flopped foot meets a rock and it all goes a bit Keystone Kops.

My toe opens up. Blood squelches in the sole of my impractical footwear and sullies the pristine sand. Z swings as if at a playground.

Having been fending off child labour all morning — it is still only 8am — it seems, well, worse than childish to make a fuss of a stubbed toe. I start to walk. It hurts. My foot slides around in my shoe.

Obviously, I have brought nothing so practical as plasters, or even loo-roll. But I do, thanks to the children, have a nylon Khmer scarf (krohom).

I try to rip off an end to improvise a bandage. The nylon border is remarkably resilient.

I gesture in sign language to a guy who is clearing underbrush. “I have hurt my toe,” I try to communicate. “Can you help me cut the scarf?”

He looks at me as though I am mad, but fetches his hatchet. We saw off the end. I tie it tightly. The bleeding slows and the padding means it no longer hurts to walk.

It is only later that I realise what has confused him. I have squandered a valuable piece of cloth on a centimetre-long cut which would have stopped bleeding in a matter of minutes.

Shortly afterwards, Z decides he needs a poo.

It is a moment of almost unutterable glamour, only capped when a guy from Shanghai stops to offer me “clean cotton for your foot”.

“It is only a surgical mask,” he says. “But maybe it is better?”

I look at the surgical mask in its plastic, his sparkling white T-shirt, and the filty red and white fringed check around my almost equally filthy foot. We stare helplessly at each other.

“No, really,” I say. “Thank you. But I have bandages at my hotel.”

The carvings, almost a thousand years old and still vital, inscribed in the basalt rockface down which a little waterfall runs, are pretty special.

But not, for Z, as special as the pondskaters on the rockpool and a close encounter with a scorpion. (Insects here aren’t fatal, unlike the snakes.)

At the base of the trail, competition is hotting up. “Your driver wait here!” “Come here! Your driver waiting for you!” “You wan’ col’ drink?” “You wan’ buy water?”

“Excuse me,” bellows our very incensed hostess. “Your driver is right here!” Thom is snoozing in her hammock. I envy him.

We fend off a man with some photocopied books, some small girls with bangles and a smattering of flautists. Then along comes a very persistent teenager brandishing what is really quite the largest t-shirt, in every dimension, that I have ever seen. Even High and Mighty might reject it as a tough sell.

“You buy for your husband,” she says. Clearly, it would be a difficult shirt to sell direct to a chap, even if he did have the height of a basketball player and the body of a sumo. “I make you good price! One dollar.”

“It very hard today,” she says. “No tourists. I need money to eat.” Prudishly, I notice she is wearing lipstick and sparkly shoes.

And then I notice the junkie darkness around her eyes. She has all the persistence of a London crackhead and it is a relief to be on the road to Ta Prohm.

Ta Prohm is an enormous twelfth-century temple, surrounded by relatively manicured jungle, and locked in a titanic struggle with some almost equally gargantuan trees.

Roots like dinosaur limbs clamber over tower roofs, younger saplings send tendrils down over delicate carvings. In places, it is hard to tell which is supporting which, the forest or the rock.

Ta Prohm is also where the tour buses and minibuses go to greet the dawn. We step off the bike and into a storm of hawkers.

I keep moving, chanting, “No thank you. I do not want to buy anything,” like a mantra, dragging Z in my wake.

It is Cambodia writ very, very large. The grandeur of the Khmer kings, grinding poverty, good humour, and, in some of the children, the emotion kum, the slow-burning resentment which means that a neighbour might trim your tree inadvertently, only for you to knife him in the back, five years of polite pleasantries later.

It is also, emotionally, quite hard to take. We stop on a causeway, surrounded by thick vines, opposite an orchestra of landmine victims, their artificial limbs propped casually against a tree, playing traditional music.

The drummer seems particularly lost in his music. Then I realise his face seems especially unfocused because he does not have any eyes.

Z finds a natural swing and sits in silence a few branches away from a little girl about his age, skiving either school or hawking, I cannot tell which.

I am missing the solitude we achieved the day before, on the outskirts of Beng Mealea, where we found a half-dry river and sat in the shade watching dragonflies in lilac, turquoise, cerise, royal blue and scarlet chasing purple and orange butterflies through the green leaves.

We troop along causeways, through ruined galleries, past mountains of faced blocks, past roots the height of a man, shellshocked by the scale. It would take weeks, if not months, to even begin to get a handle on these sites, a single temple as large as a walled medieval city, with an architecture, art and iconography that is all its own.

The other side is a maelstrom of food stalls, and hollers of “Your driver wait here.”

Two girls in their late teens or early twenties approach with menus. “I make you discount! Everything two dollars!” “I make discount. One dollar and a half!” “Remember, I see you first! You eat at my place.”

We eat elsewhere, for the same deal. Children flock to our table. They have a new line. “Ten dollars go away! Buy something one dollar! Ten dollar, we go away.”

The boy has a new range of postcards and a sad look in his face. Clearly, it is easier to sell if you are pretty, slight and female. “You have postcards? You don’t have these postcards,” he says. “You buy these postcards.”

The little girl is tiny and pretty. I would say he is heading into his teens and she is a year or two younger. The first shift of school is not over yet, so they will have been here since dawn.

Teenage boys, even the well-nourished version we have in the West, need a lot of sleep, especially in the mornings. God only knows how he copes.

We talk about school. What are they learning? “I learn read and write,” he says. But they know their capital cities.

“The capital of France is Paris,” they chant, in a way they could only have learnt at school, pride writ large on their faces. “The capital of England is London. The capital of Russia is Moshkva.”

In prime position, front left of the food stall, a short, pudgy guy in his twenties in a hoodie is surveying all around, in particular the children. The boy goes over to him and a child’s toy appears on the table. He hands over his postcards. No money changes hands.

He is their supplier.

I ask the boy, “Do you work for him?”

“No, no,” he says, panic in his eyes. “He is, he is, my brother.”

Thom goes to join Fagin and the cafe owner at their table. I spark up a cigarette. The boy leaves, and returns with him an ashtray. I tip him some riel. “Thank you very much,” I say. “That was really thoughtful. Here’s a tip.”

He unleashes a broad and genuine grin.

Z has oscillated between irritation and sympathy all day, and is avoiding anyone his own age on principle.

“What I don’t understand,” he says, after some thought, “Is what their parents think they are doing. Why don’t they just get a job and make some money and pay their children’s school fees so their children don’t have to go out to work?”

Because, I explain, there are no jobs. “Remember the families we saw bashing rocks into gravel at the roadside, because they had no work now the rice harvest is done,” I say. “How much do you think they earned each day?”

“Maybe ten dollars,” he says. “Forty thousand riel? Maybe fifty thousand?”

I ask Thom. “I don’t know,” he says. “Two dollars, maybe. Two and a half?”

As we embark for Angkor Wat, the icon of Khmer national pride, one of the wonders of the world, the behemoth which feeds a thousand hawkers, I ask Thom about the children.

“Do they really go to school?” I ask.

“Yes, yes, they go to school,” he says. He knows that I have seen his friend supplying them, but we leave it unspoken.

“Do they keep the money they earn?”

“Some of it goes to the children, and they give some to the family too,” he says.

That makes sense. It is the family who makes the arrangement with the Fagin once they decide their children should go into business. “Cambodian families have many, many children,” he says. “And sometimes they cannot pay for all of them to go to school.”

I suppose I have doubted that these children go to school because I am patterning their desires and spending patterns on Western families. I am assuming that behind them is a family destroyed by addiction, parents spending on drugs and alcohol, kids spending on junk, and fizzy drink. Where school is a precious luxury and your only chance of escape from absolute poverty, children don’t skive off.

“Is it better or worse than life in the countryside?” I ask.

“For these children, it is very hard,” he says. “In the countryside, they grow rice, so they can pay for school.”

I think of the vast mass of brand new scooters, custom painted in fancy colours, that clog the playground of the USA International School in Battambang, the smart young mall rats in Phnom Penh, the candy-coloured wedding cake villas in provincial towns side by side with bamboo and corrugated iron shacks.

And I think of the little girl in Siem Reap, her hurt feelings because I bought postcards from another child instead of her. “I see you first!” she said. “I see you first! You no want to buy from me? Why you buy from her? You make me cry.”

The tone, which grated on me, was the whine of a rejected child. Which is, of course, exactly what she was, learning early and on a daily basis the lesson that life is easier for pretty girls. And, maybe, it really does make her cry.

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 3 here.

The post I Heart Cambodia – Part 2 appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Tourist lore dictates that, when experiencing the grandeur of the Khmer god-kings, and the Angkor sights, one sees a sunrise. Holding to the belief that sunrises are best experienced without busloads of fellow travellers, I have picked Banteay Kdei as being less crowded than Ta Prohm.

“You wan’ buy flute?” asks a boy, who is probably in his early teens, for perhaps the fifteenth time.

“No, thank you,” I say, for probably the thirteenth time. “I do not want to buy a flute. I no want flute. Thank you.”

The per capita income in Cambodia is around $2000. When you take the elite out of the equation, it means most people earn very much less than that.

“I make you good price! One dollar!!! For your baby!”

Z, who hates being called a baby, and wants a bamboo whistle about as much as I do, is huddled inside his T-shirt against the breeze from the lake, doing his damnedest to get back to sleep with his head on my thigh.

In fact, could I curl up in the foetal position and make the kiddie hustlers go away and focus on someone else, I would be doing exactly what he is doing.

“You wan’ buy book? I have many books. Fren’, Engli’, German. Take a look,” says Cheung’s bookseller friend, who is fourteen. “I make you good price. Remember, you buy from me only. I see you first!”

Fluteboy is not making great progress, so Twangyboy enters the bidding. Twangy is selling little bamboo instruments with a vibrating end that you hold in your mouth and, well, twang.

I do not want these either.

The trouble began with Cheung.

Due partly to the early morning fug, partly to the backache induced by riding pillion on a motorcycle with one arm securing the nodding child in front of you and the other clinging to the side saddle rails, and partly by sheer horror that children Z’s age or size are up at 5am to hustle to tourists, Cheung’s sales technique had me from hello.

Cheung’s a really bright, sweet kid. They are, in fact, all bright, nice, sweet kids. Kids, basically. Just kids who earn their living by getting right in your face until you spurt some of your incomprehensibly vast supply of greenbacks their way.

She is twelve years old with one of those faces so beautifully defined it looks as though she is wearing mascara and lipstick all the time. She’s tiny — up to Z’s chin — gorgeous, and latched onto us the second we climbed off the bike.

Through her genius sales technique, we (well, I: Z is saying nowt) have agreed to have breakfast at the stall that pays her commission. I have also agreed that we will look at the goods on the stall that pays her friend commission, and buy books only from her other friend.

I have, further, accepted the bamboo bracelets the girls have thrust onto my arm during the walk in darkness from bike to lake.

And, yes, I am well aware that it is this kind of reaction which encourages the exploitation of child labour. But there are worse ways these girls and boys could earn their living.

“Really, thank you, I don’t want to buy a book.” I say.

This is untrue. I would like to buy several books. If her Fagin shares the same supplier of photocopied books as the other Fagins in Siem Reap, she will have at least two in the big box she is carrying around her neck.

When, Christ Almighty, she should be in bed, getting a good night’s sleep before she goes to school. They all should.

The eastern corner of the lake is starting to lighten. I point this out to Z, in my best This-Is-Very-Exciting-And-I-Am-Excited-Too voice. He is underwhelmed.

I chose to watch sunrise at the lake rather than join the hundreds of busloads jostling, football match stylee, for position at Ta Prohm, since sunrise and sunset, like the best thunderstorms and snowstorms, are best experienced in a very, very select group.

It has, however, been clear for some time that this large, quadrilateral body of water, though a wondrous tribute to the craft of millennium-dead Khmer engineers, not to mention the vigour of their overseers, will emerge into daylight as, well, a lake at sunrise, with a small temple in the distance and some sugar palms.

Anyway, we are there, so we wait. The sun duly appears, hovering over the sugar palms like a, well, young, pink, translucent sun, and illuminating the water, if not transforming it to molten whateverness.

Fluteboy disappears round the corner and hands the flutes to another kid, who returns with the same lines and the same crappy whistles in patterned cases. I still do not want the flutes. Or the postcards. Or the books. Or any bangles, no matter whether my dollar buys me one or eight.

On the plus side, I am committed to viewing only one souvenir stall, and I do want to buy a T-shirt, since Z has persuaded me to throw out the “crop top” which was a vest when I was thinner.

I ask the kids about school. Their faces light up with genuine pride. They all go to school.

Cheung is in fourth grade. “You talk to her! She in big grade!” she says. Her fourteen-year-old friend is in eighth grade. She has either been working longer than Cheung or her family has only recently fallen on hard times.

Children here complete grades when their parents have the money to fund them through the year and they reach the required standard. So it’s not unusual to have teenagers and teeny-tinies in the same class.

Some children study in the mornings, others in the afternoons, to ease the pressure on teachers and buildings and, I guess, to allow the less privileged students time to earn their fees.

When it is clear that the sun has done its stuff until it reaches the west, we go for breakfast.

I have coffee. Z has a pancake. The prices are (in a Cambodian context) ludicrous. But I don’t want to haggle with a child.

Then I look at the t-shirts. I even touch one. Big mistake.

Cheung’s friend hands me down the vest top I have touched. It is sized XL. I hold it against me, show it to Z. He looks up from his food, shakes his head.

“That’s going to look like a crop top on you, mum,” he says. He is right.

I glance briefly at some tiny, pretty, draped, cotton-lycra shorts. “You like?” says Cheung’s friend. “Very good price. Five dollars. I make for you.”

“No, thank you,” I say. I tap my backside. “I am too big for these shorts.”

“No, no!” she says, and winches them apart to a size that might just encompass my hips. “They stretch!”

It is the stretch that I am worried about.

A crowd is beginning to gather. The commission-payer, whose naked toddler is peeking out from behind the curtain, pulls down an XXL vest in a vivid, neon orange, with Angkor Wat, Cambodia on it, loud and proud. Without going into the fine points of the cut, it is, quite possibly, the least flattering item I have ever seen.

“I need go school soon,” Cheung’s friend says.

Panic is beginning to rise. I am now feeling duty-bound to purchase something, anything, yet also would rather like to buy something I can actually wear, rather than carry for thousands of miles until I find someone to give it to.

Each time my eyes fall on anything for more than a nanosecond, Cambodian BOGOFs come flying my way. “You like bag? Buy bag and t-shirt. Eight dollars for two.”

I like neither the bag nor the t-shirt.

Aha! I think. Z needs a t-shirt.

I thrust one at him. The kids follow up with more. He shakes his head, mute.

“Buy these two t-shirts for your baby. I make you discount. Five dollars for two! Good price!”

My baby is having none of it. This is incomprehensible to them. It is not as if they have a choice in what to wear, or not to wear.

I cast my eyes over long-sleeved black muslin tops, of a type, if not a size, that I would like to own. Cheung’s friend rips them from the rail. “You try, you try.”

I can tell from a hundred paces that these aren’t going to fit over my shoulders, let alone my upper arms.

I try a pretty, floaty sequined top, with smocking below the breasts, over the top of my t-shirt. The smocking comes down to my nipples.

The girls, with all the aplomb of Selfridges salesgirls, declare that it looks lovely, very nice, is perfect for me. Cheung’s friend compliments my hair. “You wearing two t-shirts,” Cheung says knowledgeably. “That why.”

Angst over child labour, tiredness, irritation and Bridget Jones type neuroses blend into an unpleasant sump. I want nothing more than to get the hell out of there.

I ask for our bill. Cheung’s friend panics.

“OK,” she says, in desperation. “You buy scarf. I make you good price. One dollar.”

I hand over a dollar for my nylon Khmer chequered scarf. Cheung’s friend heads off for school.

Cheung will hustle foreigners till noon, cycle for an hour to school, study until five, cycle home, then fit in chores and homework before bed. Or sleep, at least.

These kids must hate us. They really must.

Read Part 2 here.

Read Part 3 here.

The post I Heart Cambodia – Part 1 appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Yet, while a banner boasting “the most frozen margaritas sold in Siem Reap” does not exactly entice one to imbibe, the constant offers of tuktuks pall rapidly, there really is a street called Bar Street and the central market really does sell landmine T-shirts, it is a beautiful thing to have a cashpoint on every corner in the 200 square yard action zone and to know that the pharmacy will stock more than iodine and gauze.

End result? We did the doctor fish thing. It was Z’s idea.

Doctor fish are freshwater fish, between an inch and three inches in length. Ours came in a range of patterns of hues which suggest a) that the folk who collect them aren’t fussy about species and b) that most freshwater fish aren’t actually that fussy either.

Doctor fish feed on dead skin cells, and only dead skin. And so, like maggots — which have yet to take off in the beauty world, but give them time — they offer an entirely natural pedicure.

In Siem Reap, the fish come either in glass boxes with built-in wooden seating, or in transparent Disney-knockoff paddling pools surrounded by neon plastic stools. Do it properly, I am told, and you can dunk your feet in a bona fide river, although I’m not sure it would entirely vaut le voyage.

So, the doctor fish massage/pedicure/exfoliation goes like this. You haggle with the vendor. Dunk your feet in a tank of fish. They swim up, latch on, and nibble away till a) your tootsies are baby soft b) you realise you will be there all night before they’ve even dented the hard stuff on the heels and are fed up of serving as street theatre and donating your mangy toes to strangers’ holiday snaps or c) you are completely grossed out and scream like a girl.

We fell under b).

Obviously.

The experience? Once you get through the initial gross-out tickle, which took Z some time, and the evolutionarily sound (and sensibly negative) brain stem reaction to seeing and feeling fish, quite literally, eating your feet, the fishy feet treatment is surprisingly pleasant.

There is, of course, the embarrassment factor of an entire shoal settling into dine.

This is considerable. While I would like to think that my feet drew a larger crowd of fishies not only than Z’s but than the guy beside us because, err, Z was wriggling, and the guy was, err, a really dab hand with the old pumice, I think not.

On balance, though, as exfoliation goes, the butt and nibble of tiny heads and mouths is far, far better than someone in a Vietnamese nailbar going at your feet with a glorified grater. And, actually, not noticeably more embarrassing.

The sensation, once you have eliminated the evolutionary grossout, is positively pleasant. Rather like a cross between a massage with tiny jets of water, a tingling electric shock — kind of like a Tens machine, I guess — and someone with very small fingers tickling your feet.

And, yes, it really works.

Had we stayed for another two hours, my feet would have been pristine. As it was, they were much improved.

And if my motorcycle elbow doesn’t clear within a week or so, I’ll be offering that up to Neptune and his merry minnows, too.

The post Doctor Fish appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

He has five planes waiting to go, two in Thailand, two en route, one awaiting release in Sihanoukville. So he spends most days in the guesthouse restaurant, one hand on his mobile, the other on his laptop, waiting for the results of his bakhsheesh to kick in.

“I’ve put plenty of oil in the machine,” he says. “I’ve put enough oil into the machine to send it into hyperdrive. It’s just making sure you oil the right wheels.”

When the right wheels are fully oiled, and Chinese New Year is through, he’s hoping to have a fleet of Microlights, taking tourists over Angkor Wat and the other great buildings around Siem Reap, one-on-one in a fragile plane, 30-minute flights at 100mph, just you, the pilot, the elements and Jayurvarman VII’s immortal follies, at $45 a pop.

“I used to fly Cessnas,” he says. “But I’ve always been into convertible cars, the view, the visibility, the breeze in your face. And, like a lot of people, I thought Microlights were lawnmowers with a glider stuck on top. Then, one day at an airfield near Bury St. Edmunds, a guy brought his Microlight into land.”

“He could see me looking at him the way that Cessna pilots look at Microlight pilots. So he said, basically, ‘Fancy a quick spin in a lawnmower?'” he recalls. “We were a hundred feet off the ground, and I was hooked. You could see everything. It’s all about the visibility.”

David has everything ready to go. He’s bought the land, the laterite for the runway, the steel and corrugated iron for the hangar. He’s sourced bulldozers, motivated workmen and, of course, the planes. Oh, and in his downtime he’s been knocking up houses for the deserving poor.

The problem is the insurance. They don’t have travel insurance in Cambodia, let alone aviation insurance. “It was all going swimmingly to start off with,” he says. “I had a meeting with the right people. I explained to them that we wouldn’t fly directly over the temples, that we’d keep our noise down over populated areas, then ran through the plans for the airfield.”

The powers-that-be nodded and smiled encouragingly. Great, said David, in effect. Now please can I have my aviation operator’s license?

The authorities looked a little confused.

In Cambodia, there is no such thing as an aviation operator’s license. There are, quite literally, neither rules nor regulations which govern who can put a plane up in the air — or who can’t — no routine safety standards, let alone persons to police them, while pilots’ licenses are as redundant and pointless as driving licenses on the richly populated, yet mercifully slow-paced roads.

One would think that for an entrepreneur like David, this would be a jolly good thing.

Except, as an aviation operator, particularly one transporting the precious bodies of wealthy tourists, one requires insurance. And insurers won’t touch someone without due certification proving they meet the legal standards of their country of operation.

In Cambodia, there are no legal standards. Ergo, no insurance.

So David has spent the last three months “adapting” the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s rules and having them translated into Khmer by his Oxford-educated assistant.

The wheels duly oiled, he is awaiting signatures to transform the rules to law, then further signatures, and perhaps a custom stamp, to transform the law into certificates, the country’s very first.

And awaiting. And awaiting.

And waiting a bit more.

David had a big meeting in Phnom Penh the other day, woken at ten from an acute hangover by the office of a high-up in the ruling party, and apparently things are finally starting to move.

“Mum!” says Z, who has torn himself away from computer games (we are having a day of downtime, our initial plan of cycling 30k or so to and round the temples having been kiboshed by some tummy stuff). “Can I fly a plane when I’m grown up?”

“Well,” I say. “You’ll need a very good job. Or to be something like a rockstar, or a film director.”

“Then again,” says David, whose wife and he have nine children (a first family each, then a second between the two). “If you work very, very hard at school, you can come and pilot Microlights for me.”

The post Rules and Regulations appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

It’s a lovely sunny day in Phnom Penh, and we are encamped in the bar-restaurant opposite our guesthouse, using their internet, swigging lemon juice and sweating.

“So what is the next step?,” I say, with weary patience. He makes cow-eyes at me.

“We need to work out the tens now,” I say, in my best I-Am-A-Very-Nice-Patient-Person-And-Excellent-Mother-Who-In-No-Way-Needs-A-Large-Gin-And-Tonic falsetto. 

He stares at me, drops his head to the table. There is a pause. “I’ve got something in my eye,” he says.

The playlist, which runs from Under a Blood Red Sky through Beat It to Hotel California and Eye of the Tiger (yes, I know, I’m sorry), with nary a Bob Marley track in sight, is distracting both of us. In between rocking out, Z is sneaking glances at Madagascar Two, playing in Chinese with Khmer subtitles on the telly behind his head.

I am wishing I was at the market. Or at least addressing our mountain of laundry.

In Ratanakiri, the red dust roads are so friable that the banana trees and convolvulus at the road side turn an orange more neon than autumnal back to a depth of 10 metres or so. It’s like the forest has had a henna job and neglected to retouch its roots.

It’s also a real bugger to get out of your clothes. Takes two goes with soap even to get it off your skin.

“Remember what we did with the hundreds?” I say. I am pretty sure by now that he won’t, but hope springs eternal.

There is a pause. I check my Facebook. He stares into space.

“Are you Googling child murder again, mum?” he asks.

Hey-ho.

On the plus side, we have nearly killed times tables. With only two of you, old-school singsong chanting just feels ridiculous. Timing his speed on my mobile only worked for a short while.

In the end, we turned to Flash games.

Even here, the road to salvation was not an easy one.

We started with Space Racer X, where you have to steer a space ship away from asteroids by practicing multiplication.

I thought he kept dying because he couldn’t multiply. This was accurate up to a point.

Then I tried it myself. It rapidly became clear that you need the reflexes of a competitive X-Boxer to move the spaceship more than one place at a time.

Balloon Invaders looked promising. Essentially, you have to pop a wall of balloons containing answers to multiplication questions, which descend following an increasingly unpredictable path.

By the time we got to the four times table, however, the path was so unpredictable he might as well have been shooting randomly, and frustration was really setting in.

So we settled with the duller options.
Hit The Button is about as exciting as chanting, but worked equally well.

Hopefully the makers of Multiply Tunnel will not be branching out into Spell or Grammaring Tunnels. But it’s a relatively fun shooting game and worked well for revision.

But back to long division…

It didn’t help that the method I taught him is slightly different from that in the Snork who coaches you through the steps in long division, generating wild applause at every step.

And there I honestly thought — and he did too — that we had it cracked.

Yet Snork only goes up to three figures and doesn’t cover remainders. Confidence shattered. Peace broken. The end of a wonderful day…

We call it Death by Long Division. You can read Z’s take on it here.

And how we finally got it sorted, here.

The post Our Maths Hell appeared first on EscapeArtistes.