Cambodia Lures Tourists: Catch And Eat A Tarantula

12.07.2010
Tourism-Review.com

Cambodia has a new attraction for tourists - a tarantula hunt. No tour operator has offered the strange activity yet, however locals do invite tourists for the hunt on their own.

Cambodians from around the city of Sukon offer a new attraction to tourists - an extraordinary hunt where the prey is a spider, a tarantula to be precise. Tourists who love extreme experience first hunt down the spider and then eat it. Some foreigners actually enjoy joining locals when looking for the spiders. They hunt tarantulas in their nests and then prepare them with soya sauce or fry them with salt and garlic.

According to news.com.au, the hunting is easy. You go to the jungle or to cashew nut plantations and poke in tarantula's nests. The terrified venomous spiders run out right into your hands. Because tarantula is a night animal, the hunting usually takes place during daylight. You are likely to catch more spiders then.

No tour operator has offered the experience yet. However, the Cambodians from the cities of Sukon and Kampong Cham who eat the spiders most often offer tourists to participate in the hunts.

As lidovky.cz reported, tarantulas are considered a delicacy in Cambodia. They were first eaten and sold for food in the 70s when people flee into the jungle to escape the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge. In order to survive, they ate spiders and other insects. However, people grew fond of eating tarantulas so they started with culinary experiments.

Many Cambodians even believe that tarantulas can help with certain health problems. They are said to cure backache or respiratory diseases. The spiders can heal the best when soused in rice wine.

How tarantualas and tourists helped street children

Spider is one of the local delicacies served up by former street children

Thursday, 18 March 2010
By Beth Jones
Alvin's Guide To Good Business, BBC News, Cambodia

There are 20,000 children living rough or working on the streets of the Cambodian capital. But how can serving up spiders to tourists help them?

In the corner of one of Phnom Penh's busiest restaurants, a group of tourists is tucking into tarantula. Crushed, then fried and dipped in lime and pepper sauce, the dish is considered a delicacy in Khmer cuisine.

"Tastes just like liver," one of them pronounces, washing his mouthful of crispy arachnid down with a large gulp of pineapple daiquiri.

Spider is just one of the local dishes on offer at this restaurant, Romdeng, one of two restaurants run by the social enterprise Friends International.

Its aim is to help young people off the streets and into employment and education.

The restaurants, just like the shops, beauty salons and barbers which Friends also run in Phnom Penh, are staffed almost entirely by former street children.

At Romdeng they have trained as chefs, kitchen staff and waiters. But this is not just charity. Their efforts bring in hundreds of diners, and thousands of dollars, every month. Every penny of profit is ploughed back into the organisation.

Humble beginnings

CAMBODIA FACTS

• More than 50% of the population is under 21
• An estimated 20,000 children live or work on the streets of Cambodia
• 35% of population below the poverty line

Source: Friends International, CIA Factbook

Friends was started in 1994 when Frenchman Sebastien Marot was visiting Cambodia on his way to starting a job in Japan. The sight of the hundreds of children he saw on the streets of Phnom Penh affected him so deeply that he never made it any further east.

"I found the situation completely unacceptable," Mr Marot says. "I couldn't not help."

It is impossible not to notice Cambodia's street children.

As you watch them scavenge through piles of roadside garbage for their next meal, it is easy to see why Marot was so affected.

It is estimated that there are 20,000 children currently living and working rough on the streets of Cambodia. Three quarters of them turn to regular substance abuse.

Teenager Dara, who doesn't wish to be identified by his real name, was one of them.

He is now training as a chef in the Friends restaurants but had previously turned to drugs when violence split his family up.

"I want to complete this course and get a good job. Once I have money, I will rent a house for my mother and help my sister so she can have a good future too" - Dara, former drug user

"We had family problems. My stepfather beat my mum, so I didn't want to stay," he says.

"When I first arrived on the streets it was tough. There were lots of street gangsters who'd beat me. I started sniffing glue to make me feel good. It made me happy and all the stress and suffering would go away."

Dara is just one of the 16,000 vulnerable young people who Friends reaches out to annually.

They work with all age groups, from babies to young adults. It provides emotional support, basic education and, for those who need it, transitional care homes.

But its main focus is vocational training - enabling children to earn their way off the streets for good. From cooking to hairdressing, mechanics to manicuring, the children are taught skills which will stay with them for life.

Mr Marot says that his organisation's main aim is to let the children decide how they should be helped.

"When I first came here they told me clearly that they wanted education," he explains.

"But coming from the West I thought that meant teachers and classrooms. Within two weeks all the kids had left and I realised that by education they meant learning a way to make money - vocational training, not schooling".

'Inspiring'

Turning training centres into self-sustaining businesses is one of the ways in which Friends funds its social mission. As well as restaurants, it also runs a barbers, a beauty salon and three shops all of which are staffed by Friends trainees.

FRIENDS INTERNATIONAL

• 500 staff in seven countries
• Spends $5.5m a year helping 50,000 vulnerable young people
• Raised $1.6m in 2009

Source: Friends International

They tap into Cambodia's bustling tourist trade of two million visitors each year.

The shops, which sell products made by the trainees, such as bags, scarves and jewellery, contribute almost a quarter of the revenue generated by Friends in Cambodia, providing both the trainees and the organisation with an income.

Financial consultant and presenter Alvin Hall, who advised Friends as part the BBC World business series Alvin's Guide to Good Business, says: "The business model created by Sebastien and his team is inspiring.

"It's impressive that they have so many ideas and it's clear from his financial statements that Sebastien stretches the money he has to ultimate cost-effectiveness."

Dream come true

But while garnering awards, grants and celebrity friends, Friends has remained focused on those who really matter - the street children.

Dara, the trainee chef, credits Friends with changing his life. And he isn't the only member of his family to have been helped.

His younger sister attends the free education classes there and his mother has been trained as a seamstress and sells her products in the Friends shops. "Working, where possible, with the entire family is one of Friend's main aims," Mr Marot states.

It's an holistic approach which has given Dara every chance of a better life.

"I want to complete this course and get a good job. Once I have money, I will rent a house for my mother and help my sister so she can have a good future too," he says.

Thanks to Friends, his dreams look likely to become a reality. But in the meantime, he is hard at work in the Friends restaurant kitchen preparing spiders to be served up to the hungry lunchtime crowd.

Tarantulas, tourists and former street children - it's an unlikely mix, but one from which Friends has created an enviable recipe for success.

Alvin's Guide To Good Business, will be transmitted on BBC World on 20 and 21 March.

Cambodia at the coalface

AWE-INSPIRING SIGHT: Sunset on Tonle Sap River, Phnom Penh. (DENISE MACNABB/Independent Financial Review)
TASTY SNACK: A woman balances a tray of tarantulas - they were a food source to stave off starvation during the Pol Pot era. (DENISE MACNABB/Independent Financial Review)

Wednesday, 19 March 2008
By DENISE MCNABB
Independent Financial Review

Temperatures sizzle in the mid- 30s, baking the bitumen on Highway 7 and causing rivers of sweat on our way to Skuon.

What is a ‘‘highway'' in Cambodia is actually little more than a spatula of grey on a dusty, horizontal landscape. That the Mekong River cuts a swathe through the interior saves it from being just a drab colour palate.

The river's vital water nurtures a landscape of lime rice paddies where nimble workers toil under their wide-brimmed, cream conical hats. Buddhist temples and pagodas (wats) with their cheeky monkey residents and orange-robed monks are another country staple.

Tiered in gold and white, the temples glisten under ultramarine skies behind majestic gates. Rickety roadside villages are a sharp contrast. Large extended families live in one-room, wooden houses built on stilts to weather the monsoons.

We peer into front yards where towering coconut palms provide shade for tidy vegetable plots, tethered cows and near naked sun-baked children who run freely with scrawny hens (in contrast to wellpreened cocks kept in cages or on leashes ready for their next fight). We know who the pig owners are - their sties ooze a malodorous stench.

Poverty and tragedy riddle the lives of rural Cambodians but as we fleetingly pass by they never fail to look up, and smile and wave. The horrific legacy of despotic Pol Pot and his sadistic henchman who committed genocide on two million

Cambodians only 25 years ago still pervades this country. But the Khmers, with their Buddhist inner calm, show remarkable resilience - to we outsiders anyway. We are a group of 13 cyclists who have gathered from around the world to experience Cambodia at the coalface.

Memorials to the dead, blood-spattered torture scenes and mass graves are left as they were during that five-year reign of terror from 1975-79. Wrenching tales of how family members survived with extraordinary ingenuity and cunning or were tortured and murdered leave us in no doubt about the brutality of this period and the fragile existence of the country today.

Cambodia's friendly people are the country's jewels. The big advantage of cycling, as in neighbouring Vietnam and Laos, is that much of the daily activity takes place on and to the side of the roads. Caramel husks containing rice dry on raffia and plastic sheets on verges and soldier rows of tapped rubber trees are common.

Transporting goods takes on dizzying dimensions. Bikes, bullocks and carts, motor scooters and rattletrap buses shoot by, stacked to the gunnels with everything imaginable, from double beds and scooters to precarious loads of passengers on van rooftops.

Each day ramshackle stalls are set up on the roadside to slaughter animals. Bloodied carcasses hang for sale and slabs of meat sit in the heat. At one stall we stop to check a large, grey sow trussed and straddled over the back of a small scooter that has just pulled up. We call her Doris. She makes a racket, squealing and grunting as if her life depended on it.

There's no chance of a reprieve. A bloodied rib cage of a former pen mate is hanging nearby. Her owner grins with pride as he poses for the camera. Poor Doris. At lunchtime school children returning home for their midday break become our cycling companions.

The older ones have remarkable stamina, pedalling furiously on their basic bikes as they keep up with our geared mountain models.

They are on a mission, shouting their signature repertoire: ‘‘What's your name, where are you from, how old are you'', in a bid to hone their English skills.

It's four days since we crossed the Vietnamese border at Bavet and we've cycled from Kompong Cham, north of the capital Phnom Penh. Our guide, Punloau, an intelligent, highly-educated 25-year-old has an appetite for silly joke telling. He's one of eight children.

His mother had him late after she lost two sons to Pol Pot. One was a general. His family's story is sad. He tells it with compassion but Punloau, born after the fall of Pol Pot, also laughs a lot and plans optimistically for his future.

We wonder what the outcome of his arranged marriage will be, given his predilection for talking about how women boss men around. He calls them tigers which starts him laughing raucously. He laughs again when he tells us we're having spiders for lunch.

Skuon is little more than a layover for lorry and bus drivers. It's smattered with ablution blocks, stalls and a sprawling open-air restaurant with large round tables in concrete booths and plastic chairs. Cooking stations in the middle permeate the air with a deep-fried odour.

The spiders are neither a joke nor a laughing matter. Skuon's creepy fare has earned it the westernised nickname of Spiderville.

It's definitely a place to be avoided if you're anacrophobic. No sooner are we off our bikes than village women start hawking furry, black tarantulas, called ‘‘a-ping''.

Each is the size of a large hand. They've piled these cooked arachnids on flat, wicker trays balanced on their heads. From a short distance they look like a wriggly mass of seaweed or licorice.

Close up their bulbous backsides, big heads and eight long, furry legs are not a pretty sight. We're told they're best eaten deep fried with a dash of garlic and salt. Fat chance.

Our fill of adventurous eating stopped firmly at deep-fried frogs that we'd tried at a roadside stall two days earlier. We pay 300 riel (US8c) to the hawker for a spider when our bike mechanic says he'll devour one so we can take photographs.

This stop is one of his favourites as he's developed quite a taste for this local delicacy. He eats the spiders' legs first.

They have no meat so they're a crunchy appetiser. The head and body apparently tastes somewhere between chicken and crab depending on who you talk to, but the abdomen is another story.

The big, hard shell, full of brown sludgy goo, needs to be cracked first, and then peeled. We never did get a good taste description for this part of the spider's anatomy.

A smarty in our group diverts our attention by flinging a live spider into the middle of our table, assuring us the venom has been drained from its fangs.

I opt quickly for noodles after looking at other food options, roasted ducks and fish that were broiling under the sun at open stalls.

Over lunch we learn the spiders are coaxed out of holes in the surrounding countryside by farmers who gather more than 100 in a day, earning themselves the equivalent of a few US dollars. This is considered a good living when most rural dwellers earn less than $US1 a day.

That these giant spiders are an income earning enterprise is good for Skuon's people but their origin, like so many others in Cambodia, is born out of tragedy.

They were a food source to stave off starvation after Pol Pot forced intellectuals (including the entire population of Phnom Penh) out of the cities and into the countryside as he tried to create a Maoist agrarian society.

If it wasn't murder that took these people's lives it was starvation. They turned to spiders and other insects, such as crickets, as a dietary necessity. Eventually they acquired the taste for spiders.

We hear about residents of Phnom Penh who drive up to the road to Skuon especially to sate their need for a serving of spider.

The capital's restaurants also import them from the village for special billing on menus. After Skuon, Phnom Penh is a momentary assault on the senses.

Sitting at the confluence of the Bassac, Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers the city is big and thriving and pretty westernised, which is no surprise given it was deserted for many years after Pol Pot forced the residents out into the countryside.

It's as if you've entered another world that is trying desperately to bury the ghosts of its recent violent past

Denise McNabb travelled to Cambodia with help from Singapore Airlines and World Expeditions.

The world's wildest delicacies

Photo: Matt Rudd

September 23, 2007
The Sunday Times (UK)

Matt Rudd checks out tarantula, puffer fish and puffin, and asks you to tell us your most adventurous foodie tales

Tell us about your most horrifying or delectable food experiences from around the world for a chance to win a gourmet hamper that includes chocolate-covered giants ants and cricket crisps. Use the comment form at the end of the article to enter your tale

Joe Staton, formerly of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, spent an unhealthily long time studying whether everything really does taste of chicken. He concluded that taste is, in large part, to do with the evolutionary origin of an animal. So, birds all taste like chicken, and so does crocodile, since dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds too. But why do tarantulas taste like chicken? And is fugu worth the risk?

Here are seven of the world’s more exotic delicacies, what they actually taste like – and where you can try, or avoid, them.

TARANTULA, Cambodia

If you’re an arachnophobe, you can get your own back in Cambodia by eating the hairy eight-legged monsters. What do you mean, it doesn’t work like that?

These aren’t incey-wincey house spiders, they’re stuff-of-nightmares tarantulas. The last correspondent we sent to try one described it thus: “The legs are the size and colour of a Cadbury chocolate finger, though if your chocolate finger was as hirsute as this, you’d definitely take it back to the shop. They’re cooked whole, which is particularly repellent – eyes, fangs, the lot. Pulling the legs off without squeezing the pus out of the abdomen is tricky.” Off you all race to Cambodia.

Tastes like: scrawny chicken wings coated in especially sweet plum sauce. With hairs on. There is some debate as to whether you should eat the abdomen. Some gourmets say it’s the sweetest part, with the texture of a soft goat’s eyeball and tasting just like cold duck.

Mmm, I want some: available from kids in the streets of Skuon, as you pass through by car to more notable places. They cost a few pence each – which is less than a penny a leg.

Click here to read the entire article.