Reviews Of Down And Out In South East Asia

Well, my new book Down And Out In South East Asia has been out for a week or so now, and I’ve been very pleased - not to say hugely relieved - with the reviews so far.  Even from people I didn’t pay to write them (I’m joking of course - my ‘marketing budget’ wouldn’t keep Jay Rayner in L’Oreal shampoo for a week).

It’s the sequel to my bestselling food book Down And Out In Padstow And London, and tells the story of how failed chef and hack Lennie Nash sets off to eat his way through SE Asia, with a half-baked plan to buy a restaurant.

Along the way, he encounters a host of weird characters from frazzled bar owners to Walter Mitty CIA agents to seedy sexpats to ice zombies four years over on their visa. The book is an adventure story, spiked with a heavy dose of backpacker noir, through the eateries, street food stalls, and hazy bars of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

There is an edited extract on Khmer 440 if you fancy a read - where Nash launches a doner kebab business in Cambodia with mixed results...

But anyway, here are the reviews I’ve had so far...

Chris How: “I loved this book, and it made me slightly ashamed of my own rather pedestrian gustatory experiences in Asia. This is no hippie-dippie 'how I found myself in Asia' travelogue: Alex shows us the darker, grittier side of life in another world, generously spiced with well-researched helpings of real Vietnamese and Cambodian cooking.

“I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Asian food or travel.”

Christian Williams: “Down and Out In South East Asia is a great read from start to finish. It takes you from the grim reality of 'The Hill' with its truly bizarre characters to the food markets of Vietnam and Cambodia, where some of the best eating is to be found.

“Finishing the book made me look into a holiday in South East Asia and I might just do it, but I will be giving 'The Hill' a wide berth.”

Claire: “In Down and Out, would-be chef Lennie navigates a precarious path in his quest to set up his own restaurant in a place in the sun.

“Whilst this travelogue follows the usual backpacker circuit of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia (the standard destinations for those 'doing Asia'), Down and Out stands out in that it takes you well off of the culinary beaten track and the staple dishes that feature in your Lonely Planet guide food section.

“Your taste buds tingle from the exotic flavours and street foods that Lennie seeks out with sweaty determination, tempting even the most seasoned traveller to want return to take a braver step in their digestive exploration of this part of the world.

“But as always, the longer you stay, the more you see, and Lennie has his mettle tested in this seemingly exotic idyll by its less attractive underbelly made up of a strange collection of misfits who have long since lost their grasp of reality and in some cases, their moral compass, if they ever had one.”

Chippy: “Thankfully it wasn't quite as bleak as 'London and Padstow' (which isn't to say I didn't love that one too). I'm looking forward to Lennie's next adventure.”

Down And Out In South East Asia

Well it’s finally done. The book I mean. If you enjoyed my bestselling food book Down And Out In Padstow And London, about cooking in restaurants in the UK and the larger-than-life characters that inhabit them, then hopefully you’ll like the sequel Down And Out In South East Asia.

It sees the return of failed chef and hack Lennie Nash - this time setting off to eat his way through SE Asia, with a half-baked plan to buy a restaurant. 

Along the way, Lennie encounters a host of weird characters from frazzled bar owners to Walter Mitty CIA agents to seedy sexpats to ice zombies four years over on their visa.

The book is an adventure story, spiked with a heavy dose of backpacker noir, through the eateries, street food stalls, and hazy bars of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Anyway, I’d be delighted if you read it. It’s only out as a Kindle book to start with, and costs £1.99 - about the price of half a lager in the UK now, I’m told. Go on, you’ll have a lovely warm glow inside knowing you’ve kept me in noodles for another day...CLICK HERE

All The Rubbish In The Cambodian Sea

A plastic sheet, a bottle top, a sheet of rubber, a sponge,

A plastic spoon, a thousand straws, scattered across the sand,

A lady’s shoe, a toddler’s shoe - who lost them who would know?

A toothbrush caked in sewer sludge, back from sea to land.

Another wave, this time brings, a bottle of green tea,

No preservatives, no colouring, and yet won’t rot away.

Another sheet, another sponge, wrapped in rope and weed,

Another squid lure smiling, its hook long perished away.

More yellow rope, more neon string, a coconut gleams gold,

Another lighter, a bicycle pedal, grey beneath the sand.

A sheared off lid of gasoline, a lid of Nescafe,

A bottle this time of herbal tea, made in Vietnam.

A lump of wood from a shipwrecked ship, painted toothpaste blue,

A plastic float, another shoe - this time 42.

A pineapple top, more lures and line, how many squid they catch!

A packet of durian crackers, high in iron and crap.

A measuring jug half-filled with sand, another can from Vietnam...

A brother and sister no more than 12, still in their school clothes,

Wash out a bag and walk the beach, collecting bottles and cans.

But they leave the lures, the wooden planks, the lighters, shoes and rope,

The straws, the string, the plastic spoons, the countless plastic cups,

The fishing line, the endless bags - there’s no money in any of those!

Oh what a shame that plastic, isn’t worth its weight in gold...

Bangkok: Water Spinach And War

When I land in Bangkok on my way to Cambodia, the first thing that hits me is the stifling heat and the smell of fish sauce as I emerge from my airport taxi into the warrens of Thailand’s biggest city. I sit down at a street stall on a Saturday afternoon, an hour before sunset, and order one of my favourite Asian meals of chicken noodle soup, but they haven’t got it.

“Pork!” snaps the noodle cook, jabbing a finger at her spidery-scrawled sign. She doesn’t do anything else, and nor does her husband, who’s crouched at the back, busy prepping a grimy tub of water spinach.

I perch on a stool by the roadside, my knees up to my ears. My bowl arrives in seconds. There are a few slices of pork, tandoori red around the edges, a scattering of sliced spring onion greens, a few slivers of crisped garlic, golden brown in colour, angel hair noodles, and beansprouts. The nod to vitamins is the single piece of kale that somehow found its way into my bowl on the back of a spoon.

Four pots of garnishes are thrust at me - pounded dried chillies with what looks disconcertingly like a pube sticking out, an explosive chilli vinegar, sugar, and crushed peanuts. A bottle of fish sauce, toothpicks, and a plastic drum of napkins complete the street food decor.

Except I was wrong about the lack of greenery. As I delve deeper into the last loop of noodles, a piece of water spinach appears in the bowl. For some reason, I think of a story I heard about the Vietnam War, or American War if you live in Vietnam. About how the Americans were literally hoist with their own petards when they bombed the vastly underequipped but ruthlessly cunning Viet Cong making their way from north to south through the mountain passes of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The passes were marked and American bombers flew over blowing holes in the mountainside. The men with their shoes made from old truck tyres were slowed but still they came, clearing the rubble and finding other trails. And as the monsoon rains started, the bomb craters became pools.

Messages were passed and the next group of Viet Cong brought live fish with them and stocked the pools, and the fish slowly multiplied in their new mountain home. Then they planted water spinach cuttings, which quickly spread - long, hollow stalks with a few leaves at the top, delicious when fried with garlic and fish sauce. As each unit of National Liberation Front militia arrived, they found pools full of fish and swamp cabbage to feed them.

I bite into the tube and imagine those fighters sitting around a pot, sleeping off their evening feast provided by the bombs that were meant to kill them. I sip away at my ice-cold Singh beer as the last of the light fades, the car lights come on, and Bangkok puts on its neon clothes and waits for the hustle and shrieks of night.

The noodle cook sends her young son to fetch more beer from a nearby store. Outside it is a newspaper stand packed full of today’s editions of German and British tabloids - they know their tourist market in Bangkok. At the bottom is The Sun. “Pleb And Buried” is the headline. “Cop slur minister quits at last.” London seems a long way away.

MORE: Vietnam: Remnants From A Stricken Land

Vietnamese Beef Stew (Bo Kho): A Breakfast For Champions

One thing that surprised me during the two months or so I spent in Vietnam was how dismissive many tourists were of the food. When I was in Thailand and Cambodia, people kept saying to me that Vietnam was THE place for grub in SE Asia. Most of them had travelled throughout Indochina and knew their stuff, some were chefs who’d been working out there for a while.

Perhaps it was the high expectations, but my first experiences of Vietnamese food hardly blew me away, and I kept bumping into people who said the same – that it didn’t quite live up to the hype.

I even met a rapper called DJ Shadow in Saigon, who had a bizarre theory that it was down to the fact that Vietnam had been at war for most of the 20th century, and its people had been too busy learning to fight than cook. He’d even written a rap about it.

I can’t say I agreed with him, but it made for an interesting conversation from what I scarcely recall. After all, when the French colonised Cambodia, they tended to use Vietnamese chefs rather than Khmer ones, believing they were far more skilled cooks (which is praise indeed from the French).

But I did find some very good dishes during my travels through Nam. And the best of the lot, for my money, are the breakfasts. I never thought I’d find a meal to rival the great British fry-up, but it certainly holds true for banh mi op la (fried eggs cooked on a skillet with a freshly-made tomato sauce and a garlicky, mayonnaise-like emulsion, served with a crusty baguette) and bo kho (invariably described on tourist menus as Vietnamese goulash).

And the latter is not an unfair comparison, because like a properly-made goulash, bo kho has that beautiful, meaty thickness to the broth that only comes from cooking cheaper cuts for a long time, with root vegetables in towards the end.

There’s nothing quite like mopping up a hearty stew with bread, and that’s how it comes in Vietnam – banh mi – with a lovely fresh baguette to wipe up every smear of juice. But there’s other stuff too: the ubiquitous plate of thorny coriander and basil leaves for vitamins, and usually a small saucer of Kampot pepper, sea salt, chopped chilli and a lime quarter to squeeze in and stir into a paste – which takes the dish from superb to sublime.

The meal is a sister of the famous beef noodle soup, pho bo – Vietnam’s unofficial national dish. And it shares the same secrets in the stock – onions, cloves, star anise, cinnamon, ginger, and occasionally other spices, cooked to black. This gives it a deep, slightly bitter, spicy flavour that differentiates it from the hundreds of permutations of beef daubes, stews, and goulashes you’ll find around the world from Paris to Prague to Phu Quoc.

The result after a few hours of simmering is an aromatic, velvety stew with lumps of falling-apart beef, potatoes and carrots – the sliced onions long having been dissolved into the thick broth. The best place I had it was at Cafe 333, off De Tham, in Saigon, where it is only served on the breakfast menu, topped with a garnish of sliced fresh onion and spring onion greens. It really is wonderful.

I’ve been tinkering with my version of it (I’ve even added wine, eek – so kiss my ass aficionados), and I’ve watched it being made in a few places, and I reckon it is definitely worth trying. There’s enough here for six very hungry people (at least)...

Ingredients:

1kg different cuts of stewing beef – brisket, chuck, shank etc.
4 medium onions, or two big ones, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 star anise
3 cloves
3 red chillies
2 sticks of lemon grass, bruised and roughly chopped
1 stick of cinnamon
Thumb-sized piece of ginger
Two onions, cut in half
1kg beef bones
3 potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
2 carrots, peeled and cut into chunks
2 tbsps tomato puree
½ bottle red wine
1 tbsp fish sauce
3 bay leaves
2 tsps brown sugar
Handful of flour

Method:

First make the stock by roasting the bones in a tray in the oven, scattered with the cloves, cinnamon, ginger, star anise, whole chillies, lemon grass, and a little oil and salt.

Blacken the unpeeled onion halves on the cut side directly over a hob, and add to the tray. Cook for about one hour at 170C until the bones and spices are nicely singed.

Remove from the pan and put in a saucepan. Pour in enough water to cover the bones and bring to the boil. When the water is boiling, deglaze the pan the bones were roasted in with a couple of ladles of the hot stock by putting the pan over a hob and scraping the bottom with a wooden spatula so all the juices and caramelised bits of flavour dissolve into the fiercely bubbling water.

Add to the stock, and simmer for two hours, adding more water if necessary. Then sieve the stock and reduce over a high flame – until you have about one litre of liquid.

Cut the beef into one to two-inch cubes. Put a handful of flour into a plastic bag, and throw the meat in, and shake until it is well-coated. Remove the meat from the bag, shaking off the excess flour.

Heat a little oil in a saucepan over a very hot flame and fry the diced pieces of beef, a few at a time, so as not to lose the heat from the pan, otherwise they will “stew” rather than brown. Add the chopped onions, and fry for another ten minutes, stirring all the time. Then add the tomato puree, garlic, sugar, and bay leaves, stir well, and cook for 30 seconds.

Pour in the wine and fish sauce, and bubble away. When the liquid has almost evaporated, pour in the stock, bring to the boil and simmer slowly for several hours until the meat is soft and feathery, and at the point of falling apart.

Add the potatoes and carrots about 40 minutes before the end so the veg is cooked through but still firm, adding more water if necessary. Season the stew, and serve with a fresh baguette, a plate of fresh green tops and herbs, and a side dish of Kampot pepper if you’re lucky enough to get it.

How Do You Cook A 7lb Monster Mushroom?

A giant mushroom big enough to feed 40 people has been found growing in an old brick kiln in southern Vietnam.

Truong Anh Dao found the humongous fungus, standing 50cm tall and weighing more than 3.5kg (7.7lb), near her home in Thuan An town, in Binh Duong Province.

“At first, I thought it was a conical hat poking out from the bush,” she said. "I thought a woman had left it there. Then as I went closer, I realised it was a huge mushroom.”

Scientists believe the fungus – called nam da lon (pig skin mushroom) in Vietnam - is a Macrocybe crassa.

Fungi expert Dr Gregory Mueller said: “It’s a good edible species in SE Asia, but it does not get this big in the reports of it that I have read. This is a great find - mushrooms of this size are only rarely seen.”

Truong said it took her several minutes to wrench the mushroom from its soil. She carried it home and neighbours flocked round to see it. She has planted the whopper in a pot while she decides what to do with it.

Grant Hawthorne, from the Master Chefs of Great Britain association, said: “You could comfortably serve up a healthy breakfast for 40 or more guests with a monster mushroom that size.

“A giant mushroom ‘gratin’ would make for an interesting visual spectacle - especially if used as a centre piece for a sharing banquet.”

'FUNGI FACTS' by @granthawthorne:

Most expensive: The white truffle from Alba (Lennie: pic above is a 750g whopper that sold for an obscene £130,000). It is one of life's luxuries and best eaten in the gorgeous surroundings of Italy's Piedmont wine-growing region.

Most popular: Must be the 'breakfast mushroom'. A simple button, field or chestnut mushroom grilled with butter and seasoning, to accompany that great fry-up we all crave on Sunday mornings.

Poshest: Probably the one used in the making of the famous Beef Wellington. Getting the duxelle right is the tricky part, although you can seldom identify the cultivar, as the mushroom has been finely chopped and rendered down. Sitting on a beef fillet and wrapped in puff pastry, it is wonderful (when done properly).

Drinking Daiquiris If You’re Allergic To Rum

Anyone who regularly reads this blog (hi Mum) will know I’ve got a bit of a thing about smoothies. I go through stages, but out here in Saigon I’ve been having a smoothie for breakfast most afternoons.

Vitamin C is vitally important in the tropics. I was told that by an American I met in a bar who claims to have been a Navy Seal during the Vietnam War. He’s been living in SE Asia for the past 40 years, and helps run a charity clearing land mines now. Anyway, as we drank a few beers he kept devouring lime quarters, and was horrified when I told him I hardly ate fruit.

“You gotta eat fruit buddy. You ain’t got a rat’s chance out here without the fucking fruit, man” he said. “It’s the vitamin C - you’re body can’t store it. You need to keep stocking the shit up.”

He was an ex-forces agent who wades through jungle swamps with king cobra serum in a holster on one leg, and viper serum on the other, and has “fired every Goddamn weapon on this earth”, so I wasn’t going to argue with his knowledge of vitamins, or anything else for that matter. He told me fruit was the only way to prevent getting serious stomach problems and other infections in Asia, and that lime juice and fresh coconut juice were the best.

His basis for the healing powers of the latter seemed to be based on the fact he can’t drink rum without it. He said he’d always been badly allergic to rum, but a Thai business client persuaded him to drink it with fresh coconut milk one hot afternoon, and he was able to down six daiquiris.



Ever since that conversation, I’ve been squeezing lime juice into my beer, and eating those bitter little oranges, and starting the day with what I am now convinced is the best smoothie in the world – mango and passion fruit. I was put on to it by a woman who runs a fruit stall (video above) at the end of the narrow alley that leads into the muggy catacomb where my hotel is regularly hidden.

There’s something nice about sitting on a plastic chair in the gutter, watching the world go by as you wait for your smoothie to be made. It brought back memories of Cartagena in Colombia. There are dozens of jugo sellers near the harbour, and it’s quite an event to sit at a bar and pick your fruit from big glass jars and see them whizzed into delicious shakes.

My favourite was always banana con leche, and it was so thick I didn’t need much else to eat for the rest of the day. There was always an old ship hand, dressed in rags, hanging round the stands, hustling tourists. “Banana, or...marijuana?” he’d whisper.

They make them the same way in Vietnam – blitzing fruit with ice, sugar and condensed or evaporated milk (just substitute strong coffee for fruit to make Vietnam’s famous iced coffee drink, ca phe da). But if you’re going for the passion fruit and mango you don’t need the milk and sugar – they’re creamy and sweet enough already.

To make it, peel a sweet mango by shaving the skin off away from you with a sharp knife. Then sit the fruit, so the widest part is in your palm, and make cuts downwards, then run the blade tight against the stone to remove the flesh. Cut two passion fruit in half, and using a spoon, scrape out the pips and juice. Put the fruit in the blender with crushed ice, and blitz for at least one minute to make sure it is properly smooth, then wander round hot, steamy streets and drink it through a straw. It’s the best thirst-quencher in the world after green Saigon poured over lumps of ice.

For More: Raw food smoothies
and live frog smoothies

Ho Chi Minh City: Seafood And Caramel

I got an Air Mekong flight to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and then a taxi to the backpackers’ area in District One. An old woman led me down an alley to her hotel off Pham Ngu Lao, and then I hit the streets.

It was a strange feeling. Normally I’m quite happy on my own, but after two weeks of company on Phu Quoc island, loneliness crept in liked a wounded badger.

All I could think about was heading back to Sihanoukville. I missed the cooking and wanted to get back in the kitchen, but I still had two weeks left on my visa and was determined to see some of Vietnam. And in truth, I had no idea where I would be heading next.

My mood wasn’t helped by the appalling congestion. Ho Chi Minh City is an idiotic maelstrom of chaos just like every other Asian city that views pedestrians as the bottom of the food chain. Traffic priority is based solely on the size of your vehicle, and you need 360-degree vision just to cross the road.

There are no enforced street laws - mopeds ride on the pavement, the wrong way down one-way streets, in fact the wrong way down every street. The Vietnamese clearly hate walking just as much as the Cambodians and Thais, and mopeds are seen as a status symbol. Everyone who walks wants a moped, and everyone who has a moped wants a car, and you’re left with the sad realisation that the world will never be free of its addiction to gasoline – not when it’s only a dollar a litre anyway.



It makes you appreciate capitals like London, which have embraced pedestrians and cyclists. In Ho Chi Minh City, all you see is row after row of moped drivers, their faces covered in masks. It’s like a million bank robbers have taken over the city.


View Larger Map

Sometimes it takes you ten minutes to cross a road. And even when the pedestrian lights are green, it doesn’t mean it’s safe to cross – moped drivers sail through red lights as gamely as street walkers, so the only way forward is to take your life in your hands and dodge your way across packed roads as though you’re in some weird Frogger game.

And to make matters worse, you can’t judge the width of each moped because they could be carrying anything from 50 durian fruit to a family of six in the side-saddle position. Suddenly, a moped smashed into a taxi and shed its crates of beer. I’d been standing there waiting to cross just a few moments earlier, until I got bored and decided to carry on walking up my side of the street.

But I’m glad to say the traffic, as appalling as it is, is made up for by the food. The way they do seafood, for instance, is fantastic. You pick the crabs, and scallops, snails, winkles, mussels, clams, and other assorted molluscs, and then the stallholder weighs them on fixed scales and quotes you a price, scalping you accordingly, if you’re a wide-eyed tourist.

Thankfully, they don’t cover the seafood in peanuts like they do at every fish restaurant on Phu Quoc. Instead, they simmer it in caramel sauce, which I thoroughly recommend trying (you can make the caramel sauce by simmering half a cup of sugar with a little water until the liquid is brown, then add some fish sauce and ground pepper to taste, and cool completely before using).

The stallholder fried finely diced garlic and a smattering of red chilli in vegetable oil until the garlic was lightly browned, then added cracked, cooked crab claws and raw shellfish and tossed them over a medium heat. She added a ladle of caramel sauce, and a knob of butter, and continued to toss the seafood around in the wok (above). She covered it for a minute for the molluscs to steam open, and then added some greens, and served it on a metal plate with a side dish of sea salt, Kampot pepper, chopped chilli and lime juice.

The taste was incredible. The lime cut the sweetness, and the sticky caramel coated the shells and gave them a lip-smacking, shell-sucking unctuousness that went brilliantly with green label Saigon beer poured on chunks of ice. I’ve since learned to eat crabs like the Vietnamese, and crunch up the claws, shell and all. It’s a messy business, but a brilliant way to pass an hour people watching.

Then I met a couple of Filipino girls in the street. One of them had seen the scallop shell round my neck and wanted to know all about it. We sat down at a street bar and bought some beers, and I told them about my love of cooking, and they invited me round to their home for lunch the next day, saying they would cook me a Filipino meal.

I met them at a noodle shop and we caught a taxi to their uncle’s house. He was a large man, draped in gold, and his sole conversation was money. He wanted to know just how expensive it was in the UK, and nodded enthusiastically when I told him how much a coffee costs, or how much hotels are. Then he started asking whether I had a house, and how much it was worth, and tried to fix me up with one of his nieces.

The interrogation continued as we sat down to eat mongo (above), fried fish, and prawns that you dipped in chopped garlic and vinegar (below). They said it was traditional for Filipino families to eat mongo on Fridays, and it really was a tasty dish – stewed mung beans, onion, tomato, prawns, and chunks of bitter cucumber.

It had been cooked by their aunt, who ran a restaurant in the Philippines. She told me how Filipino food is heavily influenced by Spanish food from its colonial past, and it reminded me of some of the rustic, lentil stews you get in Spanish villages.

As soon as the meal was over, the girls blitzed the washing up and then grabbed their fake Gucci bags and sunglasses and ushered me out of the house. They kept apologising for their uncle’s questions as we sat at a bar and drank coffee. Then they quizzed me about their love problems. I don’t why they were asking me – they clearly saw me as some kind of agony uncle and wanted to get a male perspective on their latest dramas. I told them men should never be trusted. What else could I say?

That night I bought a chicken doner kebab. There was grease smeared all over the plate like candle wax. I thought about complaining, but the Turkish owner was a strange man wearing sunglasses even though it was midnight. I wasn’t going to take any chances. It would be terrible to criticise a blind man’s washing up.

The next day I went for a wander through the park, and in typical Communist style, there was a list of rules and regulations. Rule three stipulated visitors should not “be drunk, play gamble, participate in fortune telling and other evils” and “not tease animals”. It was quite a list.

I sat down on a bench in the baking heat. An old woman was asleep in the shade. A police officer on a moped drove up and beeped his horn until she got up. Clearly, even sleeping wasn’t allowed. But there was nothing about motorbikes. Not even the palm-shaded sanctuary of the park was free from mopeds.

Phu Quoc: Black Pepper And Pearls

I’ve just spent a blissful two weeks living in a beachside bungalow on Vietnam’s largest island Phu Quoc, a place famed for its world-beating fish sauce, black pepper, and pearls. It all started with a late night conversation in the bar, when Rodney and Josh asked if I wanted to go there with them.

The fang-shaped island – which was briefly captured by the Khmer Rouge during the Vietnam-Cambodia war in the 70s - is only a short boat ride from Sihanoukville, or at least it should be. But because it’s owned by Vietnam (an issue still hotly contested by Cambodians, who call the island Ko Tral), you have to travel for hours overland to the border crossing at Ha Tien, and then get a ferry from there, meaning the journey takes about seven hours instead of two.


View Larger Map

They are talking about opening up a ferry route direct from Sihanoukville soon, but anything involving the foot-dragging Cambodian government often takes years to arrange. For instance, there’s an international airport already built in Sihanoukville, but due to squabbling between foreign investors and Khmer officials, it’s been standing there empty for years. It’s incredible when you think that the only plane in the city sits under a hangar in the middle of a Russian-owned nightclub, called imaginatively enough Airport.

Josh said he was hoping to persuade his wife Loung to go with us. But he’d been warned that Khmers aren’t good travellers. The vast majority of the population have never been abroad – and are deeply distrustful of foreign food. Tom told him when he took his Cambodian girlfriend to Vietnam, she’d hardly eaten anything in eight days.

You wouldn’t think the Khmers would be so picky when you see them tucking so readily into raw duck foetus, fried tarantulas, boiled snakes, and frogs stuffed with oranges. But it’s not that Vietnamese food is so different, it’s just that the Cambodians view their sworn enemy as a marauding demon race who eat pickled babies and other unspeakable meats, a view shared almost as enthusiastically by the Thais, and find absolutely everything to do with them hard to stomach.

Josh and Rodney said we’d be leaving on the Thursday, and over the next two nights I taught Akara how to make the kebabs, and the night before I left I made a new batch of chicken for her. Then we headed off on a white knuckle taxi ride to the border. I was the only one with a Vietnamese visa. The others said you didn’t need one as long as you told the immigration officers you were only going to Ha Tien. They said no-one ever checked your visa on the boat to Phu Quoc.

On the way, we almost hit a cow and two cyclists as the driver overtook on blind bends and threw his Toyota over the red dust roads with one thumb permanently fastened to the horn. We stopped in Kep-sur-Mer, a former colonial retreat for the French elite later obliterated by the Khmer Rouge, and had breakfast at the crab market.

Wooden, ramshackle restaurants were perched on the narrow beach (above). They were so near, they often flooded at high tide. Nothing had been built in Kep for years - it was definitely the water getting closer. Families were dragging crab pots like sledges over the coarse sand to position them 100 yards out for the tide change. Boys were spear fishing near the rocks as long-tailed fishing boats waited for dusk. A woman knelt over a bucket as she picked through hundreds of small crabs.

It was only 10am but the restaurant barbecues were already lit, grilling sumptuous seafood as fresh as your hat. A group of Cambodian fishermen were sharing a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and singing in one corner. They’d probably just got back from a night on the waves.

I ordered a plate of grilled prawns. They came with a side dish of sea salt and lime juice mixed with the local Kampot pepper, an incredibly aromatic spice long prized by chefs in Europe. Two years ago, it became Cambodia’s first product to be awarded Geographical Indicator (GI) status like champagne and Melton Mowbray pork pies. But just 30 years before that, the country’s pepper farms were all but destroyed by Pol Pot, who ordered his black-clad automatons to turn the palm-shaded vineyards into rice fields.

As we left town, we saw more bombed out villas and I imagined what the place must have looked like before the war. It took at least an hour going through customs. A sour-faced official kept grilling me about why I had a visa for Vietnam and my travelling companions didn’t. He clearly knew they were heading to Phu Quoc. Eventually his tone changed and he pulled out a wad of notes from his pocket and asked if I wanted to change some money.

We descended from the ferry into chaos on a long narrow pier crammed with motorbike taxis. We rented three beachside bungalows, surrounded by cashew nut, water apple and star fruit trees. It was incredible waking up and picking a mango for breakfast.

It soon turned out Josh had the whole trip planned out in irritating detail. He said that night we’d head down the coast to a pearl farm owned by a few antipodean friends of his.

“They’re big drinkers” he kept saying. “They’re definitely big drinkers.”

He said expats often converged there on Friday nights and it was traditional for everyone to bring something to barbecue. I knew what was coming next.

The market was a seething, fishy circus, and mopeds battled with pedestrians and stall holders along the narrow street. I bought 2kg of pork shoulder, tomatoes, onions, garlic, chilli, coriander and limes to make kebabs. Then Josh remembered something.

“We need a banana for the monkey,” he said. “We can’t turn up without a banana for the monkey.”

The pearl farm was a stunning place, overlooking a deserted beach. The pearl boys were as tough as Josh had described. They were enormous men with huge, barnacled hands. But then they had to be. They had hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of pearls growing in the sea, and had an armoury of shotguns and high-powered spear guns to ward off pirates.

The monkey devoured the banana in seconds, but I didn’t get too close. It looked friendly enough, but they kept it on a leash because the last one had bitten someone’s ear off. It was best friends with a small ginger cat. One of the pearl boys picked up the cat and put it next to the monkey. It immediately began cuddling the cat, and they sat there quite happily for a few minutes. The monkey had brought it up as a kitten and would carry it up trees until it got too big to lug around.



We all gathered near the oyster beds to watch the sunset (below), and then there was a power cut and I had to prep the pork kebabs under torch light. It was an almost impossible task, and it was only the bluntness of the machete that stopped me losing a finger.

They told me they had a different method for producing pearls. Normally farmers nucleate the oysters by cutting opening the hinge and inserting a piece of grit, but they inserted a small pearl to speed up the harvesting process, which can take up to five years. Some of the necklaces they had on display in the museum were priced at $15,000 (£10,000).

We dug into the kebabs, and shared a huge red snapper between us, but there were no oysters to be had. We drank from pint glasses as rum bottles were passed around the table, and soon I was sitting in a brain-fogged haze, looking out at the dark sea and wondering at the undiscovered, man-eating leviathans it contained, while being mauled to death by worryingly-large mosquitoes. Scores of squid boats were anchored in a long northerly line. There were so many out there, their lights looked like a distant motorway at night – a memory far removed from the tranquility of that mosquito-filled, island paradise.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia: An Incredible Feast Of Spring Rolls And Noodles

I have just spent my first day in Cambodia, and I’ve still got the smell of fish guts in my nostrils as I write this. Phnom Penh - a city of poverty and extreme wealth fast rising from the ashes of war and revolution - certainly is a visual and olfactory experience.

I spent the afternoon touring the Russian Market and a far less touristy food market near the Mekong River. I always find bazaars are the best place to start when looking at a country’s cuisine, and for some reason Cambodian food has always intrigued me.

For years people have been saying it would be the next new thing. There are one or two Cambodian restaurants that have started to get noticed in London, but Khmer cuisine has always been overshadowed by its neighbours Thailand and Vietnam. It's often been dismissed as Thai food without the chilli. And that’s a terrible disservice, because what I’ve seen and tasted so far is very encouraging.

Good food, of course, is nothing without the surroundings. And as far as capital cities go, Phnom Penh – which was described as the Paris of the East until it became a ghost town after the civil war in the 70s – has once again sprouted into a beautiful city. Certainly far more than the hideous, overbuilt metropolis that is Bangkok.

It’s also got a good feel to it. Thais like to tell you how dangerous the place is and how Cambodians will steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes, but you can be unlucky in any city, and I’ve met a lot of people in Thailand who I wouldn’t trust with a bag of chips.

My trip started through the dusty streets in the back of a tuk tuk to the Russian Market. And this was another pleasant surprise - the tuk tuk drivers actually take you where you want to go. You don’t end up outside a massage parlour, Asian tailors, or gem store so they can get free gasoline and kickbacks.

The market (Psar Tuol Tom Pong – and pong it certainly does) is a warren of chaos like many crowded bazaars in South East Asia. But it’s different somehow. For a start it’s covered, and instead of being housed in a single building, the stalls have spread outwards in a mass of corrugated iron and cement.

The low ceiling and throbbing heat mean when you get to the food section you are hit in the face by a putrefying mix of durian fruit and preserved fish with the full thwack of a 7ft-long Mekong catfish's tail.

If you can imagine what fish and pork smell like when they’ve been sitting in a sauna for six hours then you’re half-way there. But, strangely, it’s not a completely unpleasant aroma, and if anything can mask the sewer-like odour of durian fruit, then it’s the stench of fermenting fish a few feet away.

It really was a massive assault on the senses. All seven of them, because after an hour I was sure I’d developed three different senses of smell – death (durian and dying fish), fresh (fruit, flowers, herbs and vegetables) and heat (cooking oil and sweat).

The market got its name because Soviets liked to shop there during the Cold War. And given the legacy of Russian people’s inscrutable taste, it is filled with fake designer goods, trinkets, souvenirs and bling. But of course I was only interested in the food, and soon I was chatting to the owner of a fantastic stall, which only sold one dish - spring rolls and noodles.

I have to say it was one hell of a meal, and I did my usual thing and badgered her about the ingredients and cooking method. She made the spring rolls by rolling up shrimps, minced pork, lettuce, spring onions, crushed soya beans, basil, grated carrot, and noodles in wafer thing wrappers and deep-fried them for 20 minutes (you can see the before and after shot in the picture below...)

This made them far crispier and chewier than the sort you usually get, and for me they were all the better for it. They were absolutely delicious and almost sausage brown in colour. They were cut up like bangers, and put on top of a dish containing three types of noodles – spaghetti size, vermicelli size and big, flat shoe laces that melted in your mouth.

The dish was finished with a huge sprinkling of ground peanuts and came with a jar of chopped red chillies in lemon juice. And what a spanker of a meal it was. It was absolutely delicious, and I was soon dripping not only from the oppressive 35C heat but the delicious chilli paste.

The peanuts, lime and chillies had echoes of a Thai green papaya salad, and the chewiness of the spring rolls were the perfect accompaniment. But the best thing of all was the lack of liquid. I got bored in Thailand with endless gallons of soup and liquor with everything. There are, of course, exceptions in a cuisine as diverse as Thai, but they do love to drench their food, and the dryness of this dish gave it real character. And the freshness of the boiled noodles rather than the fried ones you’d get in a pad Thai, gave it a lovely fresh taste.

Next the driver took me to a market near the river, where the locals were buying freshwater fish, prawns, cockles, meat and vegetables for their evening meals. Everywhere stallholders were scraping away at fish scales with small machetes, and pulling out guts.

I wandered around looking at the flapping catfish that they barbecue whole in bamboo shoots. I watched as a man crushed sugar cane in a hitlerite contraption that had a pipe leading off so his wife could fill bottles with the creamy juice.

The fruit and vegetables always look incredible in Asian markets, but somehow those ones, grown in the fine silt river soil, had an even greener quality to them.

I didn’t like the look of the slabs of pork sweating in the sun - obviously every part of the animal was there including the grunt - but the preserved fish looked delicious. And what an incredible range. Little brown dried fish, smoked fish, and bowls of fish fermenting into prahoc, the backbone of Khmer cuisine.

It all looks very promising, a bit of a culinary Phnomenon if you will, and I’ve only just scratched the surface...