Frogs on the menu in Phnom Penh
The river is a tributary of the Mekong and there was exotic river traffic to watch besides the bats and the diners. A large bird flew over the canopies of the Night Market. It was almost certainly an owl.
The night, as usual, was humid and the fumes of a thousand motorcycles and tuk-tuks (jaunting cars attached to motorbikes) wafted over us, along with other Asian odours. The heat, the smells and the noise were a heady mix — and yet, Phnom Penh was a very relaxed city, less ‘driven’ that Bangkok, less humid than Kuala Lumpur, whence we’d arrived earlier that day. In KL, one dripped constantly, and downpours happened every afternoon, a regular feature of February in Malaysia.
We stayed with old friends, ex-pat academics at the university, in a leafy part of town. While European cities struggle to provide basic public services, Kuala Lumpur is a boom-town of new skyscrapers and motorways, a super-modern metropolis where, alongside all the trappings of Mammon one can enjoy huge public gardens and the largest free-flying aviary in the world.
In the public park, we saw wild monitor lizards large enough to consume a small child, and birds of many exotic kinds, although they were a mere frisson of the species we would see next day, inside and outside the huge aviaries of the Bird Park.
The park sprawls over 21 acres and incorporates the world’s largest free-flight aviaries. Soaring to 70 feet, they enclose ponds and waterfalls, groves of trees and bamboos and house some 200 bird species.
A famous feature of KL is its extraordinary mix of cuisines. Restaurant food is spectacular in its diversity. Thai and Indian fare vies with Malay, Chinese and Indonesian. Yet, perhaps the finest meal we have had on our travels so far was one chosen by two friends from West Cork, met by chance on a small ‘paradise’ island off the coast of Thailand. We had last met just after Christmas on a rain-swept beach on the Seven Heads.
To dine with folk who really know their onions is an educational experience. To hear them discuss with the chef the fine points of the spices — what tamarind will do, what effect a little ginger will have — is fascinating, and when the chef invites them into his kitchen to assist with and contribute to the preparation of the dish, we knew we were in for a treat. Karen Austen and Con McLoughlin of the Lettercolum Kitchen Project in Clonakilty had come to Thailand (not for the first time) to learn more about the subtleties of Thai cooking first-hand. They will be passing on the fruits of their culinary explorations when they hold Thai cooking classes in West Cork in March.
The day we left that island paradise for further travels we waded, thigh-high, off the beach at 8am, luggage on our shoulders, to climb onto the narrow prow of the open-decked long-tail boat that would deliver us, spray-wet, to the Thai mainland two hours later.
A tuk-tuk carried us to the bus station and a six-hour bus ride brought us to Phuket, a package resort now changed utterly since we roamed its empty beaches in 1977. The flight to KL cost us $50 each on Air Asia, a Ryanair clone but a low-budget service still to be enjoyed rather than suffered.
Leaving KL, we paid the same fares to fly into Phnom Penh, a laid-back, friendly city, the Cambodian capital, which I think I could grow to love.
We’d been told that the Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC) was a good place to start out after checking into our $30 hotel overlooking the river. The oval bar at the FCC was where newspaper men from all over the world killed time, drank and swopped stories as they awaited developments during the Vietnam war.
While the FCC, with its ceiling fans, basket-work armchairs and uniformed staff might well be a set for a Graham Greene novel, its clientele was now tourists, drawn by the mythology, and your man from The Irish Examiner was, almost certainly, the only foreign correspondent at the bar.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
