After a hearty breakfast of sticky rice, we decided we would go looking for one of the bakeries which the Intrepid booklet recommended, but unfortunately we found it.
Something had changed between when the recommendation was written and when we arrived at the bakery; the coffee was rubbish and they didn’t seem to be selling any kinds of pastry. So we strolled back through town, past the central market, to our hotel. Today we would be getting in a bus to go and see Wat Banan. The bus ride there was over the same sort of wide enough but very bumpy roads which are relatively easily navigated on a motorcycle, and not much fun at all in a minivan. The jolts and jiggerings were fun for about 15 minutes, but only for 15 minutes.
Wat Banan – the ‘Wat’ part means Temple, not sure what the Banan part means – sits peacefully on top of a small hill. To see the temple you climb to the top of the hill, up about 400 or so stone steps, which are lined with very solid stone balustrades, on the end of which sit ornamental carved nagas. A Naga is a sort of a nine-headed snake creature, but with all the snakes standing up together they end up looking more like peacocks. There are three main buildings, all built more than 900 years ago and dedicated as HIndu temples. Like many others they are now used either by Buddhists or as tourist attractions, or both. Our guide informed us that many Hindus do still visit Wat Banan out of interest, because of course the sculptures and layout are not of the Buddhist type.
The sculptures themselves all convey stories of significance to Hindus, usually to do with the lives of the three main Gods; Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu. Shiva is the God of destruction who destroys each universe when that universe’s time is up; Brahma creates the Universe, and Vishnu watches over things and maintains harmony. That’s not all they do; they might occasionally incarnate themselves as someone else to achieve these purposes, or make deals with each other so that they have to help each other, and so on. Yes; today’s HIndu deity is an active deity.
And the view from the top of the hill is majestic, seeing as there basically aren’t any other hills around.
On the way back to town we stopped at a winery, which was something I hadn’t really expected to find in Cambodia. Too much rain, one would think. But rows of grapes there were. At a wooden table under a hut we sat and paid 50c each for a glass of mildly alcoholic sour grape juice. Yes, it wasn’t the greatest wine in creation, but it was kind of funny to be having a beverage at 11am. Luckily they had brandy to wash the taste of the wine away, so after a glass of wine and a smaller glass of brandy I wouldn’t have minded having a nap in the bus but, you guessed it, it was a bit bumpy. And I was too busy giggling at the stranded bogged truck we came across. It wasn’t actually stuck in the mud. It was just stuck sideways on a big bump, with one corner in a big hole.
(tee hee).
We arrived back at the hotel just around about midday. The cooking school didn’t start until 3pm; we engaged in hibernative naptosis for a litltle while, and got ourselves back out of bed just before 2.30, which was in time to walk over to the restaurant which runs the school but not in time to have had anything much for lunch. It’s only about a four block walk from the hotel to the Smokin’ Pot restaurant, and everyone who was in the class was from our group anyway, so we met in the lobby and strolled on over there with plenty of time to spare.
When I say cooking school, it’s worth mentioning that most shops and restaurants in Cambodia are no bigger than 3m x 5m; our cooking school was actually conducted more or less in the restaurant, and we did our chopping on the same table we had eaten at the night before, and other tourists walked past and saw us chopping and peeling and smushing and decided ‘That looks like fun’, and signed up for tomorrow’s cooking schools. And we had a funny little man named Vannak, who wouldn’t have been much older than myself or Alice, leading the group. Like most of the people we had encountered he spoke disarmingly good english, and like most of the Cambodian people we encountered, he was pretty cheerful.
While we did have the option to choose things from the menu, but everyone was happy to go ahead with the standard menu – Fish or Tofu Amok, Beef or Tofu Lok Lak, and Vegetable Tom Yam, which is a watery soup – and we walked back over to the market to buy some bits and pieces. In the market they sell every type of food in existence, and I bought a bag of fresh pineapple for lunch, while we wandered through the market building and out the other side, to find fresh coconut, tomatoes, chillies, fish, mushrooms, and other things necessary. I was looking the other way when it happened – although the noises led me to detect something was going on – but the girls were lucky enough to see a frog being peeled. Apparently it’s just like pulling a sock off.
Hey presto – no skin.
There were all kinds of baskets of all kinds of other exotic things, and many large piles of fresh vegetables; probably the thing that stood out most was the fish sticks. They looked like they were packed in the same plastic as the thin round Kraft Cheese sticks you can buy here, only they were made of fish paste. We didn’t buy any.
At our outside table the cooking school continued, and we learned things like how garlic is easier to peel after you whomp it from above while holding the knife sideways, and how easy chilli paste actually is to make, and also coconut milk can be made by soaking the ground flesh of the coconut in water, sticking a bunch of the mush inside a cheese cloth, and, well, milking it. Presumably if you leave it to settle the coconut cream journeys to the surface. To make Amok, all you do is fry the solids and then heat up the chilli paste in coconut milk, and then wait for the fluid to boil off or soak in.
It makes something very much like a Stroganoff but with chilli and ginger type flavours; filling and tasty.
We did our chopping at the table, outside, and then moved about one metre to do our cooking inside, at gas burners, and we ate each course as it was cooked, and then began chopping the next one. I think you could safely say it was a satisfying and slow afternoon. I made a little mistake with my Lok Lak and put in more salt (none) than I was supposed to, because the sugar and the salt were in bowls next to each other. So it wasn’t quite as sweet as it could have been, but it was still not a disaster. The last and easiest course was the Tom Yam, which mainly involved chopping some stuff and then boiling it for a while. In Cambodia they have a thing called a straw mushroom which, when eaten raw, can be poisonous and/or hallucinogenic; Vannak stood watching the stopwatch on his watch, making absolutely sure that we all boiled our mushrooms for at least three minutes.
We left for our hotel fat and happy, and dreaming of being able to make such things at home.
Ella upped the ante in the spot-a-decent-bakery competition by pointing out a very decent and cheap bakery one block along from the market; we bought some doughnuts and a sweet loaf type thing for breakfast the next morning, and took ourselves back to our room, to look at pictures and write about things.
Greg
