Tarantula Dinner, Angkor Wat and Songkran

One of my ultimate travelling missions is to try as much weird and unusual food as possible. Next on the menu: tarantula! I'd heard that deep fried tarantula was a common delicacy in Cambodia so my Swedish friend Lisette and I went to a restaurant called 'Bugs Cafe' so I could try the creepy crawly in style; the menu included things like tarantula doughnuts, meal worm salad and cricket fondue but I had my sights firmly set on a massive black spider (as you do). While I held the massive, fried and seasoned beastie in my hand I was convinced that it was going to crawl up my arm but I persevered and chowed down on its crispy legs and soft centre. 

Possibly the weirdest restaurant in the world.

It tasted....spidery!

Tarantula with a soft centre-bleurghhh!

Lisette left Cambodia the next morning to visit Sri Lanka and I woke up at 4am (eugh...) to visit the largest religious monument in the world - Angkor Wat. The ancient temples were originally built by a Hindu king however over the centuries the vast complex of partially restored ruins has been converted to Buddhism and as I wandered around the numerous sites at sunrise both religions were evident in the intricate stone carvings, impressive statues and awe-inspiring architecture. For six hours I walked amongst the incredible stone temples with the other people on my tour group and watched the sky transition through a rainbow of colours before the intense Cambodian heat set in. 

Sunrise over the ancient skyline created by Angkor Wat.

You may recognise the ruins from the movie 'Tomb Raider'.

Many of the towers had carved faces.

I left Cambodia the next morning and began my two day journey to Koh Samui Island in the south of Thailand to see my friend Ash for a few days. I took a bus across the border and was dropped off at a bus station in Bangkok; after asking about twenty million people I finally figured out which local bus I needed to get to the centre of Bangkok and whilst I was sitting on the 14p bus hugging my backpack a huge bucket of water was chucked through the bus window from the street! I'd arrived in Thailand in the midst of their New Year celebration called Songkran which involves mental water fights on the streets in some parts of the country; the tradition started off as a sprinkling of water over a loved ones head to wish them good luck for the upcoming year however tourists and fun loving Thais have transformed this festival into what it is today - pure and utter carnage for everyone to enjoy! I joined the street party as soon as I'd put my bags down at the hostel; I navigated my way through the rammed streets getting attacked by water guns and buckets of water and I danced at the loud and hectic rigs set up on Khao San Road...within minutes I was drenched!

Street water fight!

I smiled sweetly as Thais slapped flour and water mixtures on my face whilst they announced I was a farang (foreigner)!

As if the infamous Khao San Road needed to be more crazy...

No Tuk Tuk Today

My next stop in Cambodia was the capital, Phnom Penh. On the bus a white baby boy belonging to a French couple was being passed around by Cambodian women who were cooing over him and feeding him snacks - it's clearly not just Caucasians who find Asian babies fascinatingly adorable, it works both ways! I arrived late, headed straight for my hostel and went to sleep in the twenty person dorm I'd booked; I've been in much rowdier dorms but no matter how respectful people are, when you have twenty people sharing a room you get woken up constantly, for example, I was disturbed at 12am, 1am and 3am as people came in from nights out and then 5am, 6am and 7am as other people packed their bags and left for early buses. My main mission in Phnom Penh was to arrange a visa for Thailand at their embassy as this time I plan to stay longer than the free thirty day visa on arrival will allow me to. Once I'd got the ball rolling on this I had a few days to myself; I treated myself to a day at a swanky hotel so I could use their gym and pool - I can't describe how excited I was to work out in a fully equipped gym with air-con as I've been going for runs around the SE Asian countryside and cities in sweltering heat (although I can't complain about the views!). Asia is renowned for it's, shall we say... 'eager', tuk tuk drivers waiting around every corner asking everyone who walks by if they need a ride, oblivious to the fact that they may have just been asked twelve hundred times in the last ten seconds. This seems to be epidemic in Cambodia. These men are just trying to make a living so why is it so excruciatingly annoying?! Perhaps the monotonous repetition of pseudo-polite replies just gets frustrating when it's forty degrees and even your eyeballs are sweating.

My solution!

For $8 I was able to use the hotel's facilities for the day.

This is what sharing a room with nineteen other people looks like.

A trip to Cambodia isn't complete without properly acknowledging the country's civil turmoil at the hands of communist extremist Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Unbelievably, an estimated two million out of the eight million strong population were murdered by the dictator if they didn't fit in to the rigid ideas of his regime: city people, educated people, those who could speak another language and those perceived to be 'traitors' were tortured into confessing imaginary crimes, secretly killed in brutal ways and dumped in mass graves at one of the country's many 'killing fields'. The largest one of these 'killing fields' is in Phnom Penh and I spent the day there learning about the abominable goings on just a few decades ago. Whilst walking around the site the audio guide warned its listeners several times to watch out for tooth and bone fragments on the floor as they tend to drift up to the surface when it rains. Sometimes even victims' babies and children were murdered to prevent them growing up and taking revenge for their parents' deaths. I poignantly noted that I hadn't seen many elderly people in Cambodia.

The tree which they would smash babies heads against to kill them in order to avoid using expensive ammunition.

"Please don't walk through the mass grave" - you don't have to ask me twice!

The skulls of the murdered Cambodians - it's easy to identify how many of them died by the gaping holes in their heads.

The next morning I travelled for eight bumpy hours by bus to Siem Reap where I met Lisette, the Swedish girl who I'd spent the first few weeks in Cambodia with. Siem Reap is a big market town with stalls and stands sprawling out on to the streets - mainly at night - and it feels significantly safer and calmer than Phnom Penh. Nestled in the centre is 'Bar Street' where we found ourselves in the middle of a talcum powder fight as the locals were celebrating Khmer New Year (Khmer is the name of the main ethnicity group in Cambodia). Backpackers and Cambodians joined together for the street party, beers in one hand and powder in the other to ensure that everyone resembled drunken ghosts and geishas as they danced in the street.

They got us!

Street party.

The Khmer people certainly know how to have fun!

Rabid Rats, Bats and Dogs and Two Dead Tuk Tuk Drivers

I'm sure you're wondering what the title of this post is all about! Be patient...I'll get to that in a bit.

After the fun of the island and a day of recovery in Sihanoukville I was collected from my hostel by a lady called Shelbee and taken to her house in Otres Village on the southern coast of Cambodia. The plan was to stay at her house, which she built herself, and help her with odd jobs for a few hours a day in exchange for free accommodation and breakfast. I found Shelbee through a website called HelpX which is not unlike the WWOOFing site, through which I arranged my stint on the organic farm in Malaysia last December, however HelpX is not limited to farms and puts volunteers in touch with people who need help with anything from English teaching to bar work. It's a fantastic way to save money whilst travelling but also serves as an opportunity to be involved in a local community rather than purely sticking to all the tourist areas, sights and traps. I've been offered many bar jobs throughout my travels in SE Asia however they breed a type of mandatory, hardcore drinking culture that I'd prefer not to be forced into! We arrived at her three storey, wooden house on a peaceful road surrounded by mango trees and I thought to myself "yep, I'm going to be very happy here for the next few days", particularly after the crazy week I'd just had.

Shelbee has four dogs in total - this one is a Mexican Hairless called Bambi. I painted her by accident.

Close up of a tiny Cambodian spider and its multiple eyes!

Shortly after we'd got there one of her friends came to visit and casually asked me if I'd met Shelbee's two 'killers' yet...ummm no?! These formidable sounding beasts turned out to be her guard dog Rottweilers, Sacha and Pacha, trained to attack intruders - a security method that Shelbee assured me was essential in a Cambodian village, particularly since there had been a lot of recent robberies. For the first few days, whilst they learnt that I was a friend of Shelbee's and not to be attacked, the dogs were kept behind closed doors and slowly introduced to me. On the second day, as I was coming downstairs, the Rotweilers mistook me for an intruder and started barking ferociously, one of them came charging towards me and started to bite my leg just as Shelbee yelled at them to back off. Luckily the dog's teeth didn't pierce my skin and I was merely left with a purple and blue bruise above my knee (plus I was uncontrollably shaking all over - scary stuff!!!). I know many of you may think I was mad to stay on after that but in the end they were just doing what they're trained to do and after it happened, bizarrely, the dogs began to take a shine to me and the male dog who'd bitten me, Pacha, constantly followed me around the house and with each wiggle of his happy, stumpy tail my fear dissolved.

Pacha, the 'killer' who turned out to be my little buddy!

I was told that a dog down the road had rabies and rumour had it that it'd contracted it from a rat or a bat. As if that didn't worry me enough Shelbee said that the 'tuk tuk mafia' were in town robbing houses and apparently they are like ninjas when it comes to breaking into buildings. It sounds humorous but it wasn't. I didn't sleep a wink that night. Every sound was a potential mafia-ninja or rabid bat/rat/dog to me!! I risked stabbing myself in the face by sleeping with my open pen knife in my hand. This was definitely a T.I.A. moment (let me refer you to my previous blog post)! The next morning we heard on the grapevine that a robbery during the night had turned bloody only five doors down from us. Shelbee and I went for dinner in the village to get all the gossip; two 'mafia' members had broken into a house and stabbed the security guard, the police had been called and they shot both of the robbers dead on sight as an example to any other potential criminals. Wow...

Shelbee and I.

My view whilst going for an evening run.

Despite the hazards, believe it or not, I was very content during my six nights stay; if travelling teaches you anything it's making the most of any situation plus, after being on the road for so long, I was desperate to save some money. I had the whole top floor of the house to myself, my host would cook me a mega breakfast every morning and I'd spend 3-4 hours painting her house whilst listening to psytrance, drinking copious amounts of PG Tips and chatting about our travels - Shelbee has had a very interesting life and she told me all about her crazy times living in London, Sri Lanka and Goa. We'd be finished by lunch time and I'd spend my afternoons sprawled out on the sand or going for runs along the beach.

T.I.A.

I've been saving this blog title for a while - it stands for 'This Is Asia' - and it's something I say to myself, whilst shrugging, when things I see and experience here all get a bit too much (ok I have to confess that I may have slightly plagiarised this acronym from the film 'Blood Diamond' where it stands for 'This Is Africa'!! It still works though?!). Don't get me wrong, I'm in love with this continent - the fascinating cultures, unbeatable landscapes and scenery, heavenly food, smiling people...I could go on. However sometimes the constant power cuts, chronic lateness, dirtiness, starkly different behaviours and social norms of the people or the relaxed nature of some of the 'undeveloped' and 'developing' countries that Asia calls its own can be extremely frustrating, dangerous and occasionally even upsetting. It's all part of the fun of travelling of course, to experience other cultures.


Here are a few 'T.I.A.' moments from Koh Rong Island in Cambodia:

Wherever you go in Asia it seems as if you can never get away from dogs: stray dogs, rabid dogs, beach dogs, injured dogs, dogs being kicked by locals, dogs barking through the night, pet dogs, DOG MEAT and cuddly puppies to name a few. Our experience on Koh Rong was initially with the latter; we played with a litter of puppies in a restaurant whilst their mother dozed lazily in the corner. Later that day, whilst sitting on the communal balcony of our guesthouse desperately trying to escape our sweltering room, we saw all of the island dogs - around twenty to thirty - crowding together making a massive commotion and the mother dog we'd met in the restaurant earlier was crying out with the most heart-wrenching yelps I've ever heard. It transpires that two policemen visited the small island (due to a few recent attacks on tourists which made the police 'lose face'- a very bad thing in Khmer culture), saw that there was a new litter of puppies, stuffed them into a sack and DROWNED them further down the beach in the name of population control. I will never, never forget witnessing this and the wailing from the mother dog that continued long into the night. 

Sara with one of the puppies.

Koh Rong boat harbour.

Moving on from the puppy incident (that we all had to eventually ban ourselves from talking about as it was too sad) I'll tell you about the one and only day that we forced ourselves to get up and do something in the daytime on Koh Rong amidst a hazy seesaw of awesome nights out and filthy hangovers; we arranged a cheap boat trip around the island to primarily see bio luminescent plankton after sunset but also to snorkel, fish and visit the pure white sands of the isolated 'Long Beach'. Well, it turns out that 'cheap' on Koh Rong doesn't even buy you an adult to operate the boat...three tiny boys between the ages of about six and twelve were driving twenty odd backpackers around in the sea. No adult in sight. It was all a bit of a laugh at first as we took in the beautiful scenery, had a swim in the warm water and caught small, beautiful, iridescent, pink fish to then have them served up to us an hour later barbecued and plonked inside a polystyrene container! After a fun, sun-filled day the kids who were driving us thought it would be funny to race another boat on the way back causing us to crash into them, violently tipping our boat only millimetres short of capsizing in the middle of the choppy ocean waves at night. Not such a laugh anymore. The boys then took us thirty metres from the shore of the main strip half an hour earlier than expected, told us nonchalantly "no plankton" (the reason we had all initially bought the ticket) and then made us wade through the sea to the beach in the dark with our bags held over our heads. We tracked down the father of the boys who had been sitting around doing nothing all day making a ridiculous amount of profit from his children's work and tried to voice our concerns, particularly in respect to the boat crash, but in the end we are merely visitors in this country and we have no right no interfere. 

Catch of the day!

Teeny little lad operating the anchor.

Yes, this IS Asia and drowned puppies, day trips run by small children and much worse things unfortunately do happen; I've seen a dog eat a dead body and had a monkey wee in my face in India, been spat on in Malaysia and had a scary experience with a taxi driver in Vietnam to name a few (however let's not forget the vile things that go on in Western cultures despite how 'modern' and 'developed' we claim to be...). Despite these incidents my time on this continent has been full of gloriously unexpected ups and downs and I did actually have one of the most fun weeks of my life on Koh Rong. Julie and Lizette unfortunately had to leave halfway through but by the end of our time on the island Sara and I knew all the Khmer and western staff, had some hilarious memories, felt half dead and were ready for a week in bed to recover!

Us four girls on Long Beach.

We returned to the main land and celebrated our survival with a movie, snacks and long awaited air con ahhhhhhh.

It's All Gone Koh Rong

Whilst on the beach in Sihanoukville Lizette and I bumped into a Danish girl called Julie that we'd met the previous week in another town; we also got talking to an English girl, Sara, in our hostel and the four of us decided to go to Kong Rong island on the south coast of Cambodia together and share a room. We travelled on a two hour ferry and arrived on the main strip of bars, guesthouses and restaurants and searched for a room. Now I know where the term 'once bitten, twice shy' comes from...it must have been invented by a backpacker tentatively searching for an infestation-free room after being malled by a carnivorous tribe of mutated bed bugs. Once we had found a four person room (by 'four person' I mean a dark sauna of a room the size of a small double with three beds squeezed in and a mat on the slither of remaining floor space as the forth 'bed' - the things backpackers will endure to save a few dollars!) we interviewed the other guests to check that the rooms didn't have bed bugs. All clear. Now let me set the scene - all there is to do on Koh Rong is drink, sunbathe and...well that's about it. So that's what we did for five days and it was GREAT! However there were more than just bed bugs bites to contend with - of course there were mosquitoes like most places in Asia but the island was also a haven for nasty little sand flies and we'd been told to smother ourselves in coconut oil to keep them away which, alongside lashings of mosquito repellant, had us smelling like the love child of a Thai curry and a freshly fertilised field.

The playground in paradise for drunken backpackers.

I've been collecting girls as I travel through Cambodia!

This Thai man cooks insanely good food in three pans by himself for up to twenty people. 

Koh Rong is hot hot hot. I don't mean your regular kind of heat, I mean no air con, barely any fans and no escape from the sweaty humidity that stalks you day and night. Sara, the other English girl, and I became regulars at the numerous bars on the main strip of the island, barely got any sleep and spent our days jumping in and out of the sea to escape the intense heat of the sun. On night number three there was an open air beach party that could only be accessed by walking through a jungle however it started to rain an hour after we arrived. Cue hundreds of party people desperately retreating under the spattering of palm trees in an attempt to keep themselves dry. Have you seen how tall palm trees are? Not happening. Everyone realised it was futile at the same time and ran back to the dance floor letting out a unanimous cheer as we all succumbed to getting soaked. As a newly developed island there were daily power cuts and the nightly lightening and rain storms, due to it being the start of the rainy season, were incredible to watch but caused the WiFi on the whole island to cut out for days at a time. It's a great feeling being completely off the grid, so to speak, because the Internet, whilst being a fantastic travelling aid, removes the fun of the unknown and can glue backpackers to their iPhone screens in their masses so that a hostel can quickly resemble a zombie apocalypse.

For me, nothing beats dancing on a Cambodian beach until sunrise with like minded travellers from all around the world.

Don't ask about my tache, I'm very sensitive about it.

Out.of.this.world. burnt orange sunrise as viewed from Sky Bar where we would often see in the morning.

Return of the Bed Bugs

Lizette and I decided to travel together for a while as we were both heading for Sihanoukville, a seaside town in South Cambodia with a thriving backpacker community. We booked a ticket for a 'bus' that turned out to be an ancient tin can of a car and we were unable to sit up straight because it was so cramped. My weekly budget has gone down significantly over the past few months as overspending has been inevitable so we booked ourselves into the cheapest hostel we could find costing just $3 a night; Cambodia uses US dollars as well as Cambodian riel and both are widely accepted - usually you pay in dollars and get your change in riel which can get confusing! The hostel, called Utopia, was a hippy haven with thin mats in rows on the floor (no beds), only a tiny percentage of the lights and power sockets worked, we had to walk through a dorm of twenty people to get to our dingy, windowless room, the staff were rude, we weren't given any sheets, the air con was only on for a few hours at night (Sihanoukville is BOILING), the music from the hostel bar blasted all night and our door was broken. Buuut what can you expect for $3 a night? I'd be able to easily deal with all that if it wasn't for what happened during the night; I spent seven hours in bed having hallucinations that little critters were crawling all over me and I was driven insane by itchy mosquito bites. Except they weren't mosquito bites and I wasn't having hallucinations... when Lizette and I got out of bed it took us just seconds to realise that we had been savagely attacked by bed bugs! The place was absolutely infested with them and we later found out that the hostel was also home to lice and rats. Suffice it to say we RAN out, changed hostels and put all of our clothes in to a laundry shop whilst the little red bumps all over our bodies became increasingly red and itchy. The bed bugs I caught in Thailand last November made me want to rip my own leg off and hit myself over the head with it but these were another level all together...

I counted the marks on one part of my leg, lost count at 200 and realised that I easily had several thousand bites on each limb. 

Tuktuk drivers are getting younger and younger these days...

I don't think I'll ever get bored of beaches!

Lizette had a friend working at a hostel on a nearby beach and on our way to meet her our tuk tuk broke down and we were stranded in the middle of a road for a while. We passed the time incessantly scratching our bites. Despite feeling a little sorry for ourselves we made the most of our time in Sihanoukville by trying the local food such as amok curry (a coconut based fish dish) and lok lak (a beef salad) at the evening food market and we also went for a night out on the beach front which is lined with loud bars 'Thailand style'. Our final night in Sihanoukville at the next cheapest, infestation-free (fingers crossed), twenty four person dorm, called Easy Go, was another sleepless one due to loud music, banging doors and also the man in the bed next to me decided to bring a random, drunken girl in at 10pm that he'd just met and proceeded to have extremely loud sex with her for hours. Yes, there was a curtain round each bed but last time I checked curtains are NOT soundproof. Now I know why it was called 'Easy Go' hostel.

I ate pineapple and sweet rice cakes from the ladies selling food from baskets on the beach. 

We were followed by one of the beach dogs.

Why the long face?