An Existence Of Mud, Fish & Lake Water

I continued my journey through the floating villages on Tonle Sap, and the tin shacks and wooden houses became even more ramshackle, until there were families of 14 living in single room shelters with reed-stitched roofs. The people looked happy, but the poverty was appalling.

Children were playing in the mud, and everywhere I went there were choruses of “allo!” It was obvious they got few foreign visitors. Most of the tourists they see are the boat loads of holidaymakers who float past on organised tours of SE Asia's largest freshwater lake, which during the monsoon swells up to cover a fifth of the country.

It’s an existence of mud, fish and lake water. I passed a yard making boats, and the smell of the wood oils enveloped the air with a fresh, musky, aftershave smell that for a few seconds overpowered the relentless stench of fish rotting away in tubs to make prahoc (a delicious fermented fish condiment that has a peculiar taste of Roquefort, and is often cooked in omelettes, and served with beef lok lak).

It's a tough life - the dreadful poverty means the average age expectancy is just 54, 50% of children are malnourished, and 12% die before the age of five, according to the NGOs that raise cash for the villagers.

Some of the wooden shacks were bought for families by foreign visitors, and have their names plastered on boards outside like 'for sale' signs.

The whole economy is based on fish. And I'm glad the Cambodian government has finally announced action to restore fish stocks in Tonle Sap, also known as the Great Lake, by removing the commercial licences of fishermen who had been pouring toxic chemicals into the water to drive fish towards their nets.

The 35 lot-holders, who had been paying the government a total of $2m a year for the privilege of overfishing and poisoning the lake, will not be able to operate for at least three years to allow fish stocks to recover.

Locals will still be able to fish the lake to feed their families, however - which is lucky considering there is very little else for them to eat.

On the dusty road back to Siem Reap, a tuk tuk full of lycra-clad Russians clutching beer bottles ambled past and then stopped suddenly in front of me.

They got out and disappeared down a slope to a lotus flower farm with a 1,000 riel ($0.25) honesty box outside for visitors. They started clambering around in the middle of the flowers, taking pictures of each other.

I watched for a bit wondering whether the entrance fee would pay for the damage to the plants, and then there was lightning over the hill and soon the full strength of a monsoon.

I was drenched in seconds. The potholes and craters quickly filled with muddy, red water and it was impossible to know which would lead down into a crunching chasm, and which was older and filled with stones.

I stopped outside one of the hammock bars lining the road. An old woman welcomed me in and sat me down with a bucket of ice cold beers and a bucket of ice.

I drank the Anchors in quick succession, staring out at the lush green rice fields that would soon become a lake again. I could have been in Wales, except the rain was stronger, the heat left breath trails in the air, and there wasn’t a curried chip or a track-suit in sight.

The rain gathered strength, and poured through every hole in the roof. They moved me to a room at the back with a sturdier roof made of rusty corrugated iron, and I drank a few more beers as I waited for my Cambodian sour rice chicken soup. A steaming bowl big enough to feed a brigade of hungry soldiers arrived. There was so much there, I shared it with the family.

The chicken was the gloopy, gelatinous parts of the bird – feet and wing tips mainly – as well as offal and gizzards, and with the sourness of the tamarind, flavoured the stock brilliantly.

It came with bean sprouts, chopped spring onions greens, and a bowl of Kampot pepper. Every time the liquid level fell below five gallons, the old woman would return with a cauldron of bubbling chicken stock to top it up.

It was absolutely divine, and continues to be one of my favourite Khmer dishes. More commonly, it is flavoured with dried shrimps, sliced shiitake and straw mushrooms, chopped thorny coriander, spring onion greens, slices of onion, plenty of black pepper, and julienne strips of fresh ginger draped over the top (pic below).

The prawns add wonderful bursts of fishy flavour, and it’s so thick, it has all the smack of a good Mulligatawny. It really is a spectacular meal in a soup.

I sat in my hammock and gazed out at the paddy fields that now resembled a patched quilt with squares of brown in the afternoon haze. I looked down at the water-filled trench below and the goat and her mewing kid. The top of a reed fish trap was poking out from the water. There was movement inside and I could see a snake’s head squeezing out through the bars.

It tried one side and then the other, each time looking for a bigger gap. Finally it pushed half its body through and dangled unsteadily in mid-air. I felt slightly guilty, but did it anyway. I walked out to the front of the restaurant to tell the family they were about to lose a snake.

They had no idea what I was talking about so I got them to follow me. They squinted for a bit as I pointed. The snake had gone still all of a sudden and you could hardly tell it was there. Then it gave a final lunge and vanished into the brown water. I gestured again, but the woman just shrugged.

“You want me go and get and cook for you?” she asked.

“No, no, I not like,” I said.

They wandered back to their hammocks, and then the woman returned with a stick in her hand. Her silhouette got closer. When she was a few feet away, the stick bent upwards and I realised it was a snake.

“I cook for you?” she said.

“No, no,” I said, panicking, and wondering how I could jump out of the hammock without falling over the low banister into the snake-filled trench 20ft below.

She grinned, and I thought she was going to throw it at me. But she walked off and chucked the serpent back into a large, foul-smelling vase to rejoin its friends and live for a few more hours. I staggered to my feet, paid the bill, and got back on my bike to brave the rain.

:: Map Of Siem Reap And Tonle Sap...


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Sihanoukville: Fishiest Of All Fishy Places?

I started having doubts about Cambodian food when I arrived in Sihanoukville. The deep-water port – said to be the country’s finest and certainly most famous beach resort – is known for its seafood and Khmer cooking, among other pleasures. But sadly I’ve found few examples of good local dishes.

It’s because Costa del Cambodia is so geared towards tourists, with every menu offering cottage pie, fish and chips, spag bol, schnitzel, and of course, burgers and pizza (some are of the ‘happy’ kind (below), where they lace the top with a sprinkling of the local oregano) that the chefs have either forgotten how to cook Khmer food, or they’ve just eaten too much of the pizza. Or quite possibly both.

In an apparent afterthought, tucked away in an almost ashamed manner in the tiny Khmer section at the back of each menu, you can sometimes get what are probably the country’s two most famous dishes – amok (fish cooked in a coconut curry sauce) and beef lok lak (a highly overrated dish for my money, where beef slices are stir-fried in a soy sauce, fish sauce, vinegar, cornflour-thickened gravy).

Often these Cambodian dishes are poor at best, and are nowhere near a match for the best offerings in the capital Phnom Penh. And that’s what I mean about Sihanoukville’s chefs being too fond of their oregano, because no-one seems to know how to make either of these dishes. There is no consistency.

For instance, anything seems to be chucked into a lok lak - or is it a lac lot? - from tomato ketchup to oyster sauce to sweet chilli sauce to tinned pilchards. And it rarely comes with the traditional lime, salt and cracked pepper dip, and the beef generally varies in tenderness from the thickness of boiled leather to the tenderness of biltong soaked in water for two-and-a-half seconds.

But what Snooky lacks in food, it certainly makes up for in its laid-back beach atmosphere and thumping nightlife. It’s like Amsterdam by the sea. I do know Amsterdam is by the sea. But I mean BY THE SEA, and just the best bits. Not some filthy port filled with icy winds and cappuccinos for 28 euros a cup, but a white-sand paradise with lovely clear seas, incredibly undeveloped tropical islands a short boat ride away, and blisteringly hot weather. And there’s no shmoked eelsh or an overpriced Oranjeboom in sight.

It’s a great place, and has been compared by many to Pattaya 20 years ago, so there’s still a long time to visit before it gets completely ruined and turned into Earth’s social dustbin.

Anyway I digress. I have had some good meals here, and rather than dwell on the bad ones, and the rather unchanging face of Cambodian cuisine, I thought I’d concentrate on the good ones. My best meals have been eating with the locals. It’s such a friendly place that within days I found myself loitering in kitchens chatting to cooks and chefs, and eating what they eat rather than the stuff they knock out for the tourists.

One evening I had a splendid meal of tiny barbecued river fish with pickled cabbage (above). It was fantastic. The fish had been cooked for so long over wood, they had that delicious magical combination of wood smoke and salt. They reminded me of smoked anchovies they were so strong in flavour.

But the cabbage was the star. It was splendidly sour and sweet and the perfect accompaniment for the salty fish and ubiquitous bowl of sticky rice. My new chums were worried about me eating too much cabbage, saying my stomach wasn’t used to it.

I don’t know what they were talking about, but they kept pointing at my paunch and saying “bad”. I was starting to get quite embarrassed, and even made a mental note to make a final decision (at least consultation stage) about going back on Gary Oldman’s vodka, fish and melon diet.

Then when they started pointing back at the cabbage juice, I realised they were probably talking about the vinegar. They clearly thought the only time vinegar is used in British cooking is when a few drops of malt are sprinkled over chips, but then that was no surprise given the dishes on the menu.

There was also a pork noodle soup that was divine (above). It was filled with beautifully soft slices of belly, deep-fried tofu, and banana flowers. The pork stock had been boiling all day, with the addition of chicken feet for extra gloop. It was rich and meaty like a good Vietnamese pho.

But it was the condiments (above) that really made it – shrimp paste, tamarind fruit in water, sliced red chillies and sugar. I’d really recommend the four next time you make a noodle soup. For me, the tamarind is a better sour addition than lime, and shrimp paste (or the deliciously pungent, creamy Roquefort taste of prahoc if you’re lucky enough to be able to get it) is a richer, less harsh flavouring than fish sauce.

And then there was the amok (below) – an absolute cracker of a meal when done right. Forget all the nonsense about steaming and serving it in banana leaves, the best cooks just seem to simmer it in a pot over a charcoal burner and serve it in bowls like a conventional curry. It’s a very moreish dish, and definitely grows on you. It’s the subtleties of the flavour combinations rather than the smack-in-the-face quality you’d get in a similar dish in neighbouring Thailand or Vietnam.

It’s also quite chameleon-like. It initially has a whiff of stew about it with its flavour-soaked carrots and potatoes, but then drifts towards a creamy korma, and then you get a hint of lime leaf, like a massaman curry, but less spicy. And then it changes again, and you get the taste of the egg yolk and coconut cream that have been mixed in at the end.

Its final notes are the warmth of cracked black pepper and the buttery taste of prawns and white fish, and it suddenly changes again – this time into a chowder.

For some reason, it made me think of Moby Dick when Ishmael and Queequeg feast at the Try Pots, a rough inn famed for its chowder “plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt”.

And leaning back a moment, it started bethinking me of the fishiest of all fishy places I'd found myself in. I don’t know if it was the intensity and freshness of the fish, the sea air, or the decidedly colourful characters that live in the hazy bars on Victory Hill. But I’ve never sat down at a table before and been the only person who hasn’t been to prison.