Tuk Tuk Lunch Adventures

Well I am in Cambodia and so far loving every minute of it. Yesterday Phil (most of this text is lifted directly from his blog), Rachel and I spent the day with Darah, our tuk tuk driver that we hired for the day. He took us all around the city of Phnom Penh showing us all the non-touristy places. It was so cool just to hang with him and hear about his family, his job, and his life.

We wanted to go for lunch at a local, non-tourist, Cambodian place so he took us to Mekong Island. And so the adventure begins...

We thought that it was going to be totally touristy and developed by the pictures that we saw on a billboard, but it turns out that the guy who took the picture is a liar and also a ninja master at Photoshop. When we got there we hopped on the ferry (less glamorous that it sounds, imagine a rusty, diesel belching, floating hunk of scrap steel) and headed across the Mekong to the island. The island paradise was a bunch of sketchy 6 foot high bamboo huts, mostly under water with grass roofs on them. We walked along the littered beach to the huts all the while being mobbed by sweet people asking us to buy their scarfs that they made. When we got to the huts the 4 of us sat down in confusion for lunch.

People were surrounding us the whole time asking us to buy stuff and we almost fell into the Mekong as the bamboo floor we were sitting on broke through. We waited for a while for lunch (they needed to kill the chicken and catch the fish), still not knowing what was going on, but having a great time talking and hanging out with Darah, and all our new friends trying to sell us their stuff. When lunch came we were not let down.

A whole fried fish, ungutted, served with fresh chili sauce: the scrawniest, most pathetic (although organic) chicken I have ever seen, served with lime rock salt; a mango chili salad finished with fish sauce; and a huge pot a of rice. All washed down with bottled water and weak beer served over ice. We ate until we were full and also shared our food with 3 kids and a one-eyed dog wading in the river. We all agreed that this was the best Asian lunch we have EVER had, even though a few times we were seriously wondering what we were getting into. Good times in Cambodia.