Day 10 & 11

Day 10

This morning we were booked in for a cooking course at the ‘Le Tigre de Papier’, this is a restaurant run by an organization that runs cooking schools for locals, an orphanage and many other aid services for locals. We arrived at 10am to find we were in the class with 4 other women, one from Sydney, 2 young San Franciscans (one a Nurse Practitioner) and a young girl from England. We got to select what starter & main we wanted to cook and we all agreed on one dessert.

Off we went to the market to learn about the local foods. Fairly typical Asian food market, hot, smelly and crowded but the food is amazing and it all appears so fresh. I get the impression that most of it is sold each day and then restocked with fresh stuff the next morning. The one item that intrigued us was the skin, head & legs (including feathers) of a chicken, stretched over a couple of sticks so it looked like a kite. Obviously they had skinned the chicken rather than plucked it, but I am buggered if I know what they do with the skin.

Back to the restaurant after picking up some sticky rice (not sure if we can get it in Oz) and we began, after we had donned our caps & aprons.

It involved a fair bit of slicing & chopping, but basically Khmer cooking is fairly easy to make, and we ended up between Marty & I with

Prawn Cambodian Salad

Pumpkin Soup

Lok Lak

Chicken Amok

Sticky Rice with Mango.

We both agreed the pumpkin soup was the best, and cant wait to cook it at home.

The slicing etc, involved using quite an unusual peeler, that juliennes the veggies, so we bout 3 to bring home.

O course we got to eat all the food or at least as much as we could with our other fellow cooks and thoroughly enjoyed all of it, and had a great talk with the others, I even convinced the young girls to go and give blood.

As we had no other plans for the day we went for a walk around the markets and then back to our room to escape from the afternoon heat.

Day 11

Today started really early with the alarm at 4am, grabbed a quick cup of coffee and met up with Manut. We both agree that we are always very lucky when we travel OS, and today was another example of our luck. The whole time we have been here it has been either rainy or overcast (not that the weather has stopped us from doing anything) and today we were hoping for a fine day as we were off to see the sunrise over Angkor Wat. And yes you guessed it, not a cloud in the sky. We got to the temple at about 5.20 along with a number of others, who had some really serious photographic equipment, we were escorted to the edge of the pond, which apparently has the best view of the sunrise and bought 2 chairs for $2 and started taking some pics, only to find the camera was running out of battery. Wasn’t a problem though cause our little camera wasn’t really good enough to take effective photos, so we just sat back and enjoyed. The initial lightening was impressive with changes of colour of the sky and an almost revealing of the intricacies of the temple, but our luck only lasted so long, as soon as it looked like the sun was about to rise behind the temple, the clouds rolled in and obscured the sunrise. Not to worry, being part of the atmosphere with everybody else was worth it. We left at about 6.20am and there were already hundreds of people there. I must say I have never seen so many different nationalities in one country, which was fun, listening to all the different languages, and its amazing that the Cambodians can provide guides that can speak all the different languages. 

Next we were off to Banteay Srei, another single story temple, built in the 10^th Century. Being so old, it was amazing that this temple was in such good condition, with really intricate carvings. We stayed here for brekky and then on to the next part of the day.

THE CLIMB! This  is a 1.5 km climb up to a waterfall,  which has carvings in the rocks and in the riverbed. Yep, no worries, we were up for it. Yeah right, the climb had parts that were more like rock climbing and we struggled at these but we did it . worth the climb, because the carvings and the river bed was amazing. I have included pics. On the way back down we met many people coming up and of course Marty had to play the clown. When we were going down the rock climbing section, Marty told the people going up it that the climb got a lot steeper further up. You should have seen the looks on the people’s faces when he said it, we got a good giggle out of it.

We stopped at the Landmine museum and learnt about a young man who was a soldier in the Khmer Rouge regime as a teenager and then later defected to the Cambodian army. As he was an expert in land mines and realized only later what damage the land mines can do, started locating and defusing them and has been doing so for many years. He also runs an orphanage for children maimed by the mines. They believe there are still 3 – 6 million undiffused mines throughout Cambodia, even though they have defused millions already.

Next we were off to another temple, the last one fortunately. Don’t get me wrong, just being able to see these magnificent structures and being in awe of their age and how they were built is a an experience but after several of them they all start to blend and “seen one temple, seen heaps”. And we had used our 3 day pass so certainly got our monies worth.

Back to the hotel, and we said goodbye to Manut, and paid him for his 4 days of wonderful service. We got a sort of an address from him because I would like to send something over to him for his children but there appears to be no real postal service here as such, but I will try, at least I can try to sms him to see if he got what I sent.

Back at the hotel, we were both exhausted, me more so than Marty, so I had a nanny nap (only my 2^nd of the trip) and then went into town for dinner. I was still shattered so we had an early night to recover from our really big day.

There are so many people here, and so many children, very little is mechanized, and you can understand why, there are no mowers, because one mower could potentially eliminate jobs for a dozen women that slash the long grass. Bricks are made by hand, rice is grown and harvested by hand (they do have the luxury of a machine to remove the husks from the rice though). Everybody’s main aim of everyday is to get food, by any means, so they use everything, nothing is wasted, and they eat everything. There are so many beggars, some maimed by the land mines, some born with deformities and then just the poorest of poor that cant get work. We have started giving them food, when the opportunity arises, for example, if you go into a shop to buy supplies there is inevitably the mother with 2 babies, sitting our the front begging for a $1, so we buy food in the store and give it to them when we come out. Or if we are eating on the street, we give them what we cant eat, you just need to feel like you are doing something for them, but of course walk around the corner and there is another dozen waiting to ask for something.

We just don’t know how fortunate we are till we come to a country like this.

Pictures & videos  :  http://picasaweb.google.com/ruthymartyc/Day1011Cambodia#