UPI Food Writer
BANGKOK, May 25 (UPI) -- The road from Siem Reap in Cambodia to the Poipet border post in Thailand is 93 miles long. The journey takes, on a good weather day, around 6 hours by bus.
To call it a road is to grant it a compliment it isn't due.
Despite massive overseas funding raised to develop an acceptable highway to the border crossing, hard standing is sporadic. The surface is no more than compacted red dirt that after any rainstorm turns quickly into a rutted field. Traffic slaloms from side to side to avoid the potholes. But punctures and ruptured crankshafts are common.
Happily, there is a flight from Siem Reap, the town from which to explore Angkor Wat, to Bangkok. It costs around $56 before taxes and surcharges, on an airline owned by a relation of the head of state. This ownership, some locals dare whisper, accounts for a lack of incentive to improve the road.
Unhappily, nearly 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, with most Cambodians earning around $290 a year. For them, transport of any kind is out of the question.
A bone-shaking ride takes the foreign traveler past villages where children, small for their age through inadequate nourishment, run about without clothes. Families have an average of 5.3. One in every eight will die before reaching their fifth birthday.
If a bus or a rare car should slow down to negotiate the massive sinks in the road, children will appear from nowhere bearing trays of snacks to sell through the windows.
The land is flat and given over to rice paddies. Women hunker down among the bright green stalks of the forthcoming crop, apparently trapping some animal in the waters to turn into a traveler's temptation grilled over tiny charcoal braziers.
By the time the meat appears on a skewer in small cooked chunks, you wouldn't be able to identify it. It is rat.
Rat does not, according to daring tourists who have sampled it, taste just like chicken. It tastes like beef -- or, for even more daring tourists who know what they are talking about -- like dog. These you see in cages along the roads and in town markets, being bred for their meat.
Spiders are another favorite, caught in holes and eaten like tiger prawns by tearing off their legs and carapace and sucking out the juicy flesh.
Once over the border, past the casinos in the No Man's Land between the two countries, everything changes. The bus finds a grip on paved road and drives from the third world into the aspiring first where the snacks become recognizable and more inviting for the wary foreigner.
There are Oreo cookies, and sacks of M&Ms, and paper cornets of humidity-softened popcorn. It's back to the land of fresh-squeezed fruit juices without anxiety over the cleanliness of the ice and water.
Cambodia's cheapest bottled water is purified by reverse osmosis, which leaves the water safe to drink but tasting vaguely of sewage.
Villagers in Cambodia generally have no source for clean drinking water. Great Ali Baba stone jars stand by stilt houses to catch the rain in the monsoon season or to hold the river or pond water, collected in plastic gallon containers and empty cans. It must be boiled before drinking.
In the jungle round Siem Reap, sporadic signs in front of rare fortunate houses announce the donation of a pump by some tourist family for the use of several neighbors. These wells provide not just good water to drink, but enough to irrigate their vegetable plots during the dry season.
But the Cambodians have a palliative for stomachs upset by bad water or food. Preserved lime, a common ingredient in Khmer cooking, is used in a refreshing drink that is also administered to soothe cramps.
-- 6 limes, scrubbed
-- 9 cups water
-- 1/4 cup salt
-- Preheat oven to 300F, place the limes on a baking tray and bake about 45 minutes.
-- Put the salt and water into a large pan over medium heat and stir to dissolve the salt, then add the limes.
--Simmer for an hour, drain, reserving the water and cool, and place the limes into a preserving jar, pressing them down with bamboo skewers cut to fit across the jar so they can be covered with the cool salt water without bobbing up.
--Bake the jar in a bain-marie in a 350F oven for 1 1/2 hours, then remove and store in the refrigerator until ready to use.
--To drink, squeeze 1 lime and add with its skin to a tall glass with 2 tablespoons sugar and stir till dissolved, then add 1 cup of seltzer water and some ice cubes and drink.
To call it a road is to grant it a compliment it isn't due.
Despite massive overseas funding raised to develop an acceptable highway to the border crossing, hard standing is sporadic. The surface is no more than compacted red dirt that after any rainstorm turns quickly into a rutted field. Traffic slaloms from side to side to avoid the potholes. But punctures and ruptured crankshafts are common.
Happily, there is a flight from Siem Reap, the town from which to explore Angkor Wat, to Bangkok. It costs around $56 before taxes and surcharges, on an airline owned by a relation of the head of state. This ownership, some locals dare whisper, accounts for a lack of incentive to improve the road.
Unhappily, nearly 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, with most Cambodians earning around $290 a year. For them, transport of any kind is out of the question.
A bone-shaking ride takes the foreign traveler past villages where children, small for their age through inadequate nourishment, run about without clothes. Families have an average of 5.3. One in every eight will die before reaching their fifth birthday.
If a bus or a rare car should slow down to negotiate the massive sinks in the road, children will appear from nowhere bearing trays of snacks to sell through the windows.
The land is flat and given over to rice paddies. Women hunker down among the bright green stalks of the forthcoming crop, apparently trapping some animal in the waters to turn into a traveler's temptation grilled over tiny charcoal braziers.
By the time the meat appears on a skewer in small cooked chunks, you wouldn't be able to identify it. It is rat.
Rat does not, according to daring tourists who have sampled it, taste just like chicken. It tastes like beef -- or, for even more daring tourists who know what they are talking about -- like dog. These you see in cages along the roads and in town markets, being bred for their meat.
Spiders are another favorite, caught in holes and eaten like tiger prawns by tearing off their legs and carapace and sucking out the juicy flesh.
Once over the border, past the casinos in the No Man's Land between the two countries, everything changes. The bus finds a grip on paved road and drives from the third world into the aspiring first where the snacks become recognizable and more inviting for the wary foreigner.
There are Oreo cookies, and sacks of M&Ms, and paper cornets of humidity-softened popcorn. It's back to the land of fresh-squeezed fruit juices without anxiety over the cleanliness of the ice and water.
Cambodia's cheapest bottled water is purified by reverse osmosis, which leaves the water safe to drink but tasting vaguely of sewage.
Villagers in Cambodia generally have no source for clean drinking water. Great Ali Baba stone jars stand by stilt houses to catch the rain in the monsoon season or to hold the river or pond water, collected in plastic gallon containers and empty cans. It must be boiled before drinking.
In the jungle round Siem Reap, sporadic signs in front of rare fortunate houses announce the donation of a pump by some tourist family for the use of several neighbors. These wells provide not just good water to drink, but enough to irrigate their vegetable plots during the dry season.
But the Cambodians have a palliative for stomachs upset by bad water or food. Preserved lime, a common ingredient in Khmer cooking, is used in a refreshing drink that is also administered to soothe cramps.
-- 6 limes, scrubbed
-- 9 cups water
-- 1/4 cup salt
-- Preheat oven to 300F, place the limes on a baking tray and bake about 45 minutes.
-- Put the salt and water into a large pan over medium heat and stir to dissolve the salt, then add the limes.
--Simmer for an hour, drain, reserving the water and cool, and place the limes into a preserving jar, pressing them down with bamboo skewers cut to fit across the jar so they can be covered with the cool salt water without bobbing up.
--Bake the jar in a bain-marie in a 350F oven for 1 1/2 hours, then remove and store in the refrigerator until ready to use.
--To drink, squeeze 1 lime and add with its skin to a tall glass with 2 tablespoons sugar and stir till dissolved, then add 1 cup of seltzer water and some ice cubes and drink.
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