We have been out of Mars bars for about two weeks now, and it’s beginning to show, with the ever-tactful Tak’s mum telling me I’m thin and don’t look good anymore.
(Incidentally, VSO has recently moved to new a office but my postal address – VSO Cambodia, PO Box 912, Phnom Penh, Cambodia – remains the same. Just in case anyone’s interested.)
So until somebody is kind enough to send more, I’ve been embracing Cambodian snacks. These are mostly insects which Cambodians developed a taste for during the desperate Khmer Rouge years when people would eat whatever they could to avoid starvation. They are also mostly disgusting.
I’d already had deep-fried crickets, which mercifully taste much more of deep-fried than they do of crickets, and silkworms, which are sloppy and revolting, as well as the famous pon tea kone – a boiled duck egg with a half-formed and slightly hairy foetus. And last weekend in Phnom Penh I was drunk enough to find myself eating ants cooked with garlic and chilli. Worse was to come, though: at one of the stops on the bus ride back with Tak and his mum, I bought pineapple and water, and they came back with tarantulas. The legs were fine, tasting a bit like twiglets, but the body nearly made me sick.
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Still, I felt satisfied that Cambodian cuisine had nothing more it could throw at me, saying to Tak that the only thing I still hadn’t eaten was a cow’s penis.
He looked knowingly at me, smiled and said, ‘Oh yes you have.’
