The JaYmes Escape

Barbeque smoke wafts through the air with the hubbub of Khmer laughter. Grinning faces surround sturdy plastic tables covered in jugs of beer, buckets of ice, plates of uncooked food, and, at the centre of each, a tabletop gas barbeque. I’m sitting on a white plastic chair on a concrete floor under a sort of open-sided marquee; pitched on what feels like it might be a car-park. It’s not though, most Cambodians don’t drive cars so there’s not much call for car parks here.

“You want to go somewhere the Cambodians go?”, Peter, my moto driver, had asked. A moto is basically a motor scooter and also a kind of taxi. Weaving around the traffic in Phnom Penh holding on for dear life during a torrential plee-uhng downpour is a truly Cambodian experience. Peter wears an Inter Milan shirt which is unlikely to be genuine, and has never heard of McDonald’s.

We order some beef and vegetables, plus a side of bread. It comes with a little bowl of sauce and a bowl of chopped chillis – you can put as many chillis as you want into your sauce then dip your cooked morsel in it before you eat. The beer comes in big jugs – 2 pints for US$2, and the waitresses run around refilling glasses with beer and large chunks of ice. I really can’t get into having ice in my beer so after the first couple I politely decline.

“You want some cockroach?”, Peter asks with a massive grin, I’d seen the waitress wandering around touting a large tub of someting that looked a bit like nuts, but I hadn’t really paid it much attention. I laugh and politely decline explaining that the local experience only goes so far, but could I take a picture of the lady with the big tub?. She agrees, provided we buy 1000r (US$0.25) worth of roaches, which come in a little bag. He dumps a handful on his plate, eating them raw with a big grin, I think, realising that I probably don’t want him to throw them on our barbeque. “Cambodian eat everything”, he says with a chuckle, and I think to myself that fresh cockroaches might well be healthier than McDonald’s anyway.