Day 93: Phnom Pehn and beyond

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We traveled by overnight bus to Phnom Pehn. It is pretty common for us to select overnight travel, you don’t miss a day of moving and seeing, you don’t add overnight expenses for lodging and typically the fares are cheaper. What I wasn’t expecting was for the entire bus to be bed cots instead of seats. One side of the isle was single bunk beds and the other side of the isle had two separate cots next to each other with bunk beds. Never have I been so happy to be traveling with a friend than tonight! We arrived in Phnom Pehn and caught a bus to Kampot and made it out to our hostel. Again what the hostel photos didn’t show was the domitories were not only in the house but also in 2 shipping crates connected by a bathroom. Don’t worry we ended up in the shipping crates! To cap the night off, we headed into town and ate at volcano. It turned out to be a very local spot, busy and specialized in Khmer Grilling. This means you order the meat and then can select various soups, veggies and other delectables and grill it yourself. We tried to do this in Siem Reap, but our waiter removed our grill from the table as we sat down as if to say, no, no, no, no...not for you. It was such a local hangout that the menu was only in Khmer and the waitress spoke very little english. However, she was able to slowly walk us through our choices. When we got to certain pages she would flip the page very fast and say, no, you cannot have. We still aren’t sure if this was because they were out or because she didn’t trust us. When the food came (we settled on something that had shrimp and beef), we also found we got beef livers and octopus along with veggies and a HUGE slap of butter. When was the last time we cooked these things...probably never. After she showed us how to turn on the grill we did what all good Minnesotans do in this situation and just continued to add butter to everything and guess what...it all ended up tasting like chicken...just kidding, but it was eatable.

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