So here we are 1 month and more into our trip and we still haven’t done a single cooking class and we both say we like cooking. We’re both not sure why as throughout our travels we have enjoyed all the food we have eaten (although we both don’t eat spicy food, we do try).

Malaysia is great as there is a combination of Malay, Chinese and Indian food.

Thai food is good but everything comes with spice….small chillies that blow your head off. We found out after going out with some new Malaysian friends that even they think it is too spicy as generally not the whole chilli is eaten in Malay cuisine.

Since being in Cambodia we thought it was time to embark on a cooking class – get some local expertise, draw upon their knowledge and talk about local food, ingredients and Khmer cuisine.

Nary’s Kitchen, Battambang.

We found Nary on Tripadvisor and it was located 3 streets from where we were staying. We rung them up to see if we could attend the afternoon class and next minute we are with Sam, who took us to the local market to pick up the ingredients that we needed. He explained to us the ingredients and what people generally eat – the older women liked to chew on the betel nut with the leaf all day long as this creates some mild euphoric effect, snails are picked up from the river and then left to cook in the sun mixed in with some chilis, the foetus egg is good as it supposedly gives the people more energy, lemongrass is cooked with a lot of things to get rid of the ‘smell’. I’m not sure Westerners have this concept but my family being Chinese, they use ginger to get rid of the ‘fishy smell’ or when it’s lamb there is a particular ‘smell’ that needs to be removed before consumption.

Next we are sitting in Toot’s (one of the owners) kitchen. Nary (his wife) is also at hand to help us. As good students we are, we learn about the cuisine, how to cut ingredients properly, different cooking methods and what substitutes we can use back in England.

Both Toot and Nary are really nice and the class is quite cheap – 4 dishes of your choice for $10. They also own a restaurant so they must know their stuff. It’s Nary’s Kitchen.

Dish 1: Beef Loc Lac – meaning ‘shaking the beef’ after it is quickly seared. It is then served in a special sauce and when eaten you dip it in a lime, salt, pepper sauce.

Dish 2: Green Mango Salad – this was something I requested. I really wanted to add a salad to add to my repertoire as salads are not a common thing in Asian cuisine – most of the vegetables are sautéed. This was unique because it uses the raw green mango instead of the ripe yellow mangos you see all too often travelling this part of the world.

Dish 3: Fish Amok – A classic Khmer dish of fish in a curry topped with coconut milk and steamed in a classic banana leaf. Simple and delicious!

Dish 4: Banana Coconut Dessert – this was so easy to make. 5 minutes to get your ingredients, 5 minutes to cook and voila dessert is served.

From now one we will be doing a cooking class in each country so that we can take some of Southeast Asia home with us after our trip.

Getting there

Kampot is a large town with plenty of road links, one direct from Battambang.  However, all the buses still go via the central hub in the capital city, Phnom Penh.  This means an hour or so wait in a hot, sticky open air bus station, we used the time to catch some lunch at a local (and air-conditioned) Chinese restaurant.

Overall the journey from Battambang to Kampot took just over 12 hours and was not enjoyable.  I don’t think the “10 and 2” position for holding a steering wheel applies in Cambodia, the drivers are totally incapable of going more than 30 seconds without honking their horn at something, multiple times.  No catnaps were had on this bus.

The bus drops you off at either Kep or Kampot and at both towns within 10 minutes walk of pretty much any hostel and less than 5 minutes walk of some very good ones.  There is no need to get a tuk-tuk or a taxi, honestly, despite what the drivers tell you.

Getting Around

Kampot is a small town, you can walk from one end to the other in 30 minutes so there’s no real need to use any forms of transport.  The main eating and tour company area is right on the river-side and all within 5 minutes walk of each other.

Kep is around 40 minutes drive from Kampot and if you don’t want to rent a motorbike you can get a local bus for $3-5 each way.  Kep town is very small also, much smaller than Kampot.

If you want to go to attractions that are outside the towns, such as the pepper farms, salt fields, Bokor hill station, then you can rent a taxi or take a tour – tuktuks are not powerful enough to get up the mountain roads to take you.

The taxis are, frankly, a very expensive option.  We were quoted $15 to just take us to the pepper farm and back to Kep, a full day tour including the pepper farm, salt fields, a local cave and country side roads was only $12 per person.  It’s one of those rare, and annoying, situations where “doing it yourself” is actually more expensive than an organised tour.

Things to do in Kampot and Kep

Kampot and Kep are great places to just relax, we ended up spending more time here than in our plan.  There’s also plenty to do and see if you move outside of the towns themselves.

Bokor Hill Station

Just north of Kampot is Bokor Hill Station, a long abandoned French settlement nestled high in the hill.  A welcome retreat from the heat down in the town, this collection of buildings and stunning views are well worth a visit.

There are many smaller buildings as well as a few larger ones, such as this old casino.

As well as this Catholic church.

You can walk all around and inside the buildings, although all the fixtures and fittings have long been removed.

Everything isn’t so perfect when you move a little away from the old abandoned town.  The entire national park has been sold to a Vietnamese company and is currently being redeveloped.  Your first glimpse of this is a huge 30m high witch statue that greats you as you come up the mountain.

Their plan is to cut down national park forest to create a multi-square mile residential and entertainment area, complete with new casinos and hundreds of houses.  They have already started building lots of houses and you can see them scattered throughout the national park.

The plans are already in place and building commenced.  Bokor National Park will not be the same in 5 years time…

Ecran Noodles and Movies

Ecran Noodles is a small restaurant that doubles as the area’s only cinema.   The food is excellent and the noodles are hand made fresh for each dish.  You can watch the chefs amazing skill as he manipulates a lump of dough into long, chewy noodles.

We choose to get dumpling soup and I would recommend that to anyone that wants to visit Ecran’s.

As I said, Ecran’s also doubles as a cinema.  There are a few private rooms with 50″ televisions that you can watch any movie you wish.  They had literally thousands of movies in their catalogue.  We chose to watch The Killing Fields, a movie about the history of Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge.  Quite a sad movie as it’s based on the true life of a Cambodian that survived the genocide of over a third of Cambodia’s entire population in the late 1970s.  I would recommend that movie if you want to learn more about the, very recent, history of Cambodia.

Kep Crab Market

If you love fresh crab then Kep is a great place to eat it.  They catch it locally and cook it in front of you.

We ordered 4 crabs, and after we had finished we wished we had ordered more.  They were delicious and the fruit bought from the market complimented the crab.

If you like any sort of seafood then I would recommend a visit to Kep Crab Market as they have it all, and cook it all.

Pepper Farm

All around the Kampot province are, supposedly, the best farms for pepper in the world.  The soil and climate are both perfect for making good pepper.

You see them all over the hills, tall bushes of pepper plants with their pods of spice.

There are four types of pepper grown – black, green, red and white.  We couldn’t see any white but we did manage to see, and taste, the other varieties.

It’s all grown and picked by hand.  Workers remove each pod manually and place them into a wicker basket before they are taken to be dried in the sun and manually sorted into colour and grade.

Salt Farms

Up in the hills around Kep are a few salt farms.  They take salt water from the sea and leave it to dry in the sun.  Once it evaporates enough you can get salt… a lot of it.  They collect it in woven baskets and leave it to dry some more before packing it and selling it locally.  A very simple operation that allows money to be made from nothing but water and sun.

Sunset River Cruise

A quick, and inexpensive ($5), cruise up the river to watch the sunset over the hills.  We were originally worried we wouldn’t see anything due to the clouds, but they actually made the sunset more beautiful.

Where Next?

Kampot is our last stop in in Cambodia. Next we are heading to the capital, Phnom Penh, to catch a bus to Ho Chi Minh City (formally Saigon), Vietnam.  Time to go to our fourth country…

Battambang: The second biggest province and the rice bowl of Cambodia. It’s famous for their rice, which is harvested 1-2 times per year. The number of rice paddies in Battambang feeds the whole population of Cambodia!

It’s a relief we were getting out of Siem Reap as we felt like we were splashing out everyday! Siem Reap is great but it’s touristy to the point everything is built for the tourist and we felt it was hard to actually find local food so we went to restaurants instead that were pricey considering this is quite a poor country. 

On our travels from Siem Reap to Battambang we saw countryside vendors selling the bamboo sticky rice. The rice from the fields are mixed with black beans, coconut milk and seasoned with salt and sugar before being roasted on a charcoal flame. Many people from different provinces come and buy them as souvenirs to take back home. Here is our guide Bun opening a bamboo sticky rice to eat.

Most people have heard of Angkot Wat, the amazing series of temples at Siem Reap in the north of Cambodia.  Only recently opened to the public and massive in scale, Angkor Wat was once the capital city of the Khmer empire.  Long abandoned it now lies ruined and restorations funded by many international organisations is seeing it slowly brought back to the splendour of its past.

Getting There

We took the bus from Bangkok, Thailand to Siem Reap, Cambodia.  A reasonably good experience, the bus took around 12 hours and we were fed twice and given a bottle of water.  It stopped a couple of times for us to stretch our legs and go to the bathroom.

The only sticking point was that the bus let on a visa tout from a company with an official looking badge who proceeded to tell everyone that they needed to get a visa before reaching the Cambodian border.  This is not true, you can get a visa as you cross the border.  People shouted to tell others that what he was saying is not true but still, unfortunately, a few people did still fall foul of this scam.

You can also fly direct to Siem Reap International Airport, Cambodia.  There are flights from lots of airports, including Bangkok, Thailand, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Getting Around Siem Reap

The town centre is actually quite small – you can walk from one end to the other in less than 3o minutes.  Of course there are still plenty of tuk tuk drivers wanting to make your journey shorter (and your pocket just a little lighter).  As long as you’re not wanting to get somewhere through the hottest part of the day, 11am – 2pm, then I would advise you just walk, you never know what you might find on the way.

Things to do in Siem Reap

I can’t help but start with the biggest reason everyone goes to Siem Reap – Angkor Wat.  It’s the only reason that Siem Reap is on anyone’s map, the town itself gets 100% of its income from the tourism industry.

Angkor Wat

It’s impressive, really.  A capital city from over 800 years ago left to ruin in a Cambodian jungle.  Dozens of temples, walls, moats and other buildings.  Entrance fee is $20 for one day or $40 for three days.

I enjoyed our day there, and our driver, Panha, was excellent (by the way here is his website and he’s also on TripAdvisor).  Although due to Angkor Wat regulations, he couldn’t join us in the temples themselves, he told us before and after about the temples and the history of the city.

At the end of the day I think we had seen enough temples for quite a while.  Although each was different they were starting to look the same to our tired eyes.

I think maybe spending a longer time there rather than trying to cram it all into one day might allow you to appreciate the dozens of buildings more.

Koh Ker and Beng Mealea

The day after we visited Angkor Wat I asked Panya to bring us to the ancient temples of Koh Ker and Beng Mealea.  I know I just said we were seen enough temples but Koh Ker captivated me as soon as I saw the photo on trip advisor.  Here we are in South East Asia and I see a temple that looks like it should be in South America, I had to see this this!

It’s just as impressive as it looks, you can stand on the top and look around at the countryside, breathtaking. The temple is so much higher than the tree tops that you can quite literally see for miles.  I think Koh Ker is my favourite temple in Cambodia.  Just don’t stray away from the marked paths, the land-mine signs are no joke, the Khmer Rouge booby trapped this place back in the 1970s.

Beng Mealea has all the scale of Angkor Wat but none of the restoration.  It’s a crumbling, broken ruin of a temple, but it has character – seeing the trees taking back their claim over the rock.  It was once the scene for an Indian Jones movie and you can see why from the pictures, very impressive.

Fish with Soy

Sorry, Soy, I couldn’t resist that little joke.  Actually we went net fishing with a guy called Soy.  A great experience if you’ve never fished before.  He talked us through the process slowly and demonstrated with obvious great skill.  We must have caught 30 small fish, most of which we returned to the water before cooking the rest for lunch.

It was much easier than I expected, but harder than I had hoped, to throw the net accurately and efficiently.  Next time I see a fisherman throw a net to catch fish I’ll think more about how much they’ve practiced that skill.

 Where next?

I’ve heard tell of a place where bamboo carriages, powered by lawn mower engines, rattle along a bent and twisted railway at dizzying speeds.  That place is called Battambang and it’s only a 6 hour bus journey away…

It seems to come down to whether you are willing to take a risk in the future or pay a little more now.

After reading about it a lot online I think I can sum it up like this:

On the border

• Cost: $30
• Length: 1 month
• Pros
  • Cheaper
  • You can use any Cambodian entry checkpoint
• Cons
  • You need to bring passport photos to the border with you
  • Potentially long, hot waits at the border and there has been some allegations of corruption and asking you to pay more
  • You may be harassed before you even get to the border with touts offering you their visa service. We even heard from one tout that you couldn’t get a visa at the border, which at that point we knew he was lying.

Visa before

• Cost: $30 + a $7 application fee
• Length: 1 month
• Pros
  • You know you have your visa in your hand
• Cons
  • More expensive
  • You have to carry around two or three copies of the visa on your backpacking trip; but you can staple one of them to your passport
  • Can only be used at main airports and sea ports (you can’t use it when entering from Laos)
  • You can only get the visa for three months in the future.  Look familiar?

In the end I decided to get it before hand, and the process was quite easy with just one little hiccup.  You need to

1. Decide who will be your primary contact. As I am dealing with all Visa applications for our trip, that’s me!
2. Fill in that person’s details on https://www.evisa.gov.kh/ContactInformation.aspx
3. You will then be asked to fill in information about each person that’s flying.
   • Some of it is required and some is optional.  Because we don’t know where we are going to be staying when we are there I couldn’t fill in that information so I just filled in our entry and exit information.  Didn’t seem to cause any problems…
4. Pay for your visa using a credit/debit card
5. Wait…
6. … and wait …
7. … and wait beyond the period they said you should wait

Okay, so they say it should get back to you before 5 working days.  10 working days later I hadn’t received anything so I chased them via email… 1 hour later I had the visas in my inbox, success!

Shame I had to chase but at least we have them.  Definitely easier and less than the Vietnam visa.  No sending my passports off in the post.

Does anyone have any experiences with getting a Cambodian visa on the border? Talk about it below.