Travels with Hayley

After my epic nap I felt refreshed enough to join my next tour at 5pm! This was a street food tour and I got picked up in another tuk tuk. We raced around the city in a convey of 3, picking up the others that were coming, 9 of us in all. First in my tuk tuk was Juliet, after a couple of minutes chatting we realised we are both are on the same Intrepid 2 week tour starting tomorrow, how much of a coincidence is that! Good job she’s nice haha!

We whizzed through the streets, waving at all the kids in tuk tuks who blew kisses back 😍 and chatted to our guide Jackson who was a young guy with a backwards baseball cap and a great enthusiasm. For some reason he got talking to Amanda (21, from Singapore) about the red light district and she very innocently asked if we were going there as part of this tour – that’s a whole other kind of tour love haha! As Jackson said ‘only big fat Americans go there, I don’t think you need to!’

We got to our first stop, a large, very – functional – space and sat down to try our first 2 dishes – fish and lemongrass soup with lily root (known as Grandmother’s favourite) and a coconut based soup with chicken and a kind of black pudding, both with rice noodles (mum, seems like absolutely everything here is made with rice flour, you’d be in heaven!) Lots of fresh herbs on the table to add to the soup as well as all the chilli oils, soy sauce, sugar etc that are everywhere for you to tweak your dish to your own particular requirements.

To my great relief, everything was served family style and you could take as much as you wanted (I really wasn’t over the three breakfasts yet!) so I vowed to only try 2 bites of everything! The soups were not bad, the coconut broth was pretty tasty with a squeeze of lime. Best thing though was they had a sugar cane press there so I got a freshly squeezed sugar cane juice. I’ve had this before and it’s gorgeous, very sweet, with a slightly citrus/ginger undertone. Must be absolutely dreadful for you as it’s basically liquid sugar but – it’s natural right 😜

Off in our carriages again for stop 2 – this one to a stall on the street with miniature chairs that looked like they were for nursery school children (these are everywhere, what does Asia have against full sized chairs…?!) Here we had deep fried rice flour balls with spring onion dipped in a sweet and sour coconut sauce – pretty good, bit oily maybe, and a pancake made from rice flour, egg and turmeric with a filling of chicken mince and onion. For this you got a lettuce leaf, put some cucumber and fresh herbs in, tore the pancake open and added some of the wrapper and the chicken, rolled it into a little tube and dipped it in peanut sauce. Wasn’t bad at all but nothing to go crazy about and go over the 2 bites!

Tuk tuks again and we raced through the very centre of town, huge wide open roads with thousands of cars, mopeds and tuk tuks going in a dozen different directions – Juliet said it was like being in an action movie and she was absolutely right!

Next stop was for the Cambodian version of Vietnamese bah mi – a very light and crusty baguette filled with pickled vegetables and crunchy roast pork.

This was lovely, really fresh and tasty. There was an adorable baby at the restaurant who I made friends with too – I do realise in the photo she looks terrified but I swear she was waving and giggling seconds beforehand 😳

Another high speed chase later and we were at the Russian market, so called because in the 1980’s all the Russians did their shopping there. The Russians are long gone but the name has stuck! We grabbed some fresh jackfruit from a street vendor – soooo much better than the ones I got at Bangkok airport, it was so fresh and sweet.

Then we went to a bbq stall run by three young blokes – apparently they are very big with You Tubers and Tik Tokers – I really wasn’t expecting to have you tube and tik tok talked about so much here, shows how much I know! They were grilling every type of meat you can imagine, painting on their special marinade with a paintbrush of the like you’d use for slapping on a bit of emulsion! We tried some bbq pork rib – ribs aren’t really my thing, too much bone, and some grilled chicken which was really juicy and tender. I just had the chicken breast though, not the other more unusual parts of the bird you can see in the pictures!

One of the guys (white baseball cap in picture) was really sweet and when we were taking pictures he kept jumping in and doing a thumbs up! He had a very blingy hoop earring on and I said I liked it and pointed to my sparkly hoops I was wearing. He then leaned in conspiratorially and admitted ‘is a fake!’ I assured him mine were too so not to worry 😂

We walked through more of the market and there was just so much to see and do, I could have spent hours there people watching and taking photos of all the unusual foods. People really live their lives right out on the street here, the concept of privacy doesn’t seem to exist as in the same way back home – people quite happily take a nap on the street next to their food stall, feed their kids, scream and shout – everything is going on right in front of you.

Then we went on to our main meal, all of these before having just been ‘tasters’! This was at a quite trendy restaurant, lots of corrugated iron and bare brick. Huge screens showing football. And a live band. A really bad live band 😂 Apparently rock and roll is still quite a thing over here and a lot of the band members seemed to be modelling their haircuts on Elvis! So it wasn’t the most relaxing of places but was pretty fun.

Food included – fish amok, like a yellow fish curry with potatoes, morning glory with garlic, grilled squid with kampot peppercorns, beef lok lak (like a beef stir fry with a fried egg on top), chicken and pineapple, rice – and then the stars of the show – frogs legs and beef with red ants! Yes, really. Frogs legs taste like bony chicken and I didn’t think you could taste the ants in the beef although the others insisted you could – in fairness, I very rarely eat beef so I don’t have much to compare it to, but my taste buds could not differentiate the anty extras!

Lots of cans of beer were drunk by the male members of the party and it looked so odd as the can la over here have ring pulls that detach totally – I don’t think I’ve seen that since the eighties!

Once the men had depleted the beer stocks sufficiently, we headed to our penultimate stop which was an old couple, literally sitting on the side of the kerb making dessert.

Now I do not have a good history with SE Asian desserts, they are normally very gelatinous and luridly coloured – however, my luck changed! This was so delicious. It was a pancake made with pandan, filled with shredded fresh coconut, a drizzle of condensed milk, dried crunchy sugarcane and sesame seeds. It was so good! Crispy, crunchy, sweet. I broke my own rule and ate the lot and paid the price by feeling quite sick but it was totally worth it! Apparently they’ve been there for decades making the same thing and it’s famous, we were assured people rolled up in Bentleys and Rolls Royces to get them!

Last stop was a very fancy outdoor cocktail bar where we felt conspicuously underdressed compared to the other very glamorous patrons. A cocktail of our choice was included in the tour price – I had an Alice in Disneyland – elderflower, kaffir lime, watermelon and soda. Hilariously, an Alice in Wonderland was exactly the same but with gin added! The owner was French I think and lovely, we got chatting as she had on a necklace with a tiny pineapple charm that I have the exact same one of at home! So we bonded over a shared taste in jewellery 😂

Once we’d all drunk our fill the guide queried ‘home or party?!’ I admired his optimism but it was a unanimous vote for home!

Tomorrow is a cycling tour, pick up at 7.30. I’m super nervous but feel the fear and do it anyway!

Lots of love xxx