Playing Food Lotto in Phnom Penh

Hi all,

I landed in Phnom Penh and had organised a pickup from the house I was going to stay at. I was envisioning being one of those business travelers who arrive at Tullamarine ans get whisked away to their limosine. Here was my limo: 

This looks like something Tone and Aidan created using stolen work-supplies and  rope. 

A few minutes later this family passed us. Four people on a motorbike is no bigy, but the mum is holding a saline drip attached to a wooden pole which is going down into her daughter's arm!  The next time I hear some talkback caller complaining to Jon Faine about Australia's third-world standards of health-care I will email in this photo. 

I stayed for a week in a house completely outside the tourist area. No-one spoke English, it was chaotic and dusty, and I played food lotto all week because I had no idea how to order food or what the dishes were. I do know that they eat an an awful lot of offal here -- as depicted here in this delicious intestine and cubed congelated blood curry. 

To make things just a tiny bit more difficult, they use two currencies here, the US$ and the Cambodian riel. How it works it that you pay in dollars and get riel back. But, you don't just pay, for example $2 and get 1 riel back... You pay $2 and get 12,000 riel back. Siobhan and Brett probably would have worked out a way to make money from this exchange, but I think I ended up paying $10 for a deep-fried banana.

Ate these every night and have no idea what they are.

As well as losing about a million riel in fried-banana and intestine curry  transactions, I went to the dentist three times in a week. For some reason, they have a lot of good dentists here, and Cambodia is starting to build up an international reputation for dental tourism. I absolutely earnt back my airfare just through the one filling I had (compared to what it would have cost in Australia). 

One thing I noticed straight away in Cambodia is how young the population is. The Khmer Rouge came into power about 40 years ago and killed anyone who was a professional, educated, artistic, or even wore glasses. Essentially, anyone who had skills beyond farming was lucky to survive. So you see a lot of people under 35 here, but not so many people over the age of 50. 

  

The dentist I went to was in his 30's and his father, who is a doctor, survived the Khmer Rouge. He talked to me a bit about it and said that though it was 40 years ago, you can still see the impact of those five years the Khmer Rouge was in power. They basically cut the country off at the knees, because they killed people with a whole range of skills in a very short time, and then left the country with hardly any teachers, artists or university professors who could pass on their skills to the next generation. 

Now I am off down south, to the coast. Hopefully it will be little less dusty! 

Bye-bye Phnom Penh!