Spiders!

Today was another long bus ride from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. We left at 7:30 a.m. and drove until 4 p.m. It would have been a shorter drive, but the highway, for essentially its entire length, is being reconstructed. So we drove through a construction zone for eight hours!

It was a poor village, but note the John Deere tractor in the background!

Village kids are happy to greet the tourists.

To break up the trip, our new local guide, "Rath" (pronounced more like Raht), planned several stops. One was a village, very rural and very poor, where a woman makes her living finding a preparing a food item considered a delicacy here: tarantula -- yes, as in very large spiders!

She showed off a bowl full of live spiders to us upon arrival, and I was sufficiently freaked out just by that. Then we walked with her to the edge of the village where she demonstrated how she catches them. Essentially, after doing this for years, she has developed a good eye for spotting the holes in the ground in which they live. Then, using a small shovel, she digs down until the disturbed spider pops up to defend itself. She then quickly uses a stick to flip it over and hold it on its back while she uses long fingernails to pinch off the ends of the fangs. Defanged, they are rendered harmless. However, she admits to having been bitten many times, if the spider happens to be quicker than she.

Having collected a sufficient number, she returns home, keeping them alive and fresh until she has a customer. Then she takes the necessary number, one at a time, and squeezes them at the sternum, which kills them very quickly, but leaves the body intact. They are washed in a bowl of water (they live underground, after all) and then pops them into a wok of boiling palm oil. It takes only a few minutes of stirring the oil until there are deep-fried spiders, ready for eating. 

Two members of our group popped whole ones into their mouths as the guide demonstrated. Several more, including Mary, tried just a bit of the meat. Since spiders are definitely not my thing, I passed.

We had lunch at a nice little spot along the shore of a lake. The food was good, even if not entirely local (fish and chips was one menu item). However, our table was out on a dock, with a thatched roof overhead and water below. It wasn't terribly stable, and the rocking and swaying was difficult for those affected by motion discomfort!

We stopped briefly at a village where Buddha sculptures are made. It was similar to the neighborhood we visited in Yangon, but more spread out and less populated. We also visited a village where an 800 year old river bridge is still in use. The bus couldn't go over it, but we walked across. Motorbikes used it, too. Loudspeakers were blaring the chants of a funeral ceremony taking place in the village, mournful in any language or tone system.

Our tour director tried to help pass the time by playing a DVD of The Killing Fields on the bus's flat screen TV, but it was a bargain market bootleg copy of the DVD that kept freezing up, so we only got through half of the movie.

800 year old bridge. U.S. engineers take note.

Arriving in Siem Reap, the town appears a bit more prosperous and a bit less dirty than Phnom Penh. There are only about 170,000 residents here, and probably about that many tourists at any given moment. The tourist trade creates the prosperity. The king has a residence here, and we walked a bit in the park near to it, observing a unique temple honoring two revered Buddhist monks, and a flock of very large fruit bats hanging in the upper branches of a tree.

The hotel is quite nice. Dinner was at a nearby restaurant that clearly caters to tour groups. The food was very good, but again, not very Cambodian. By the time we returned to the hotel, it was already 9 p.m., and time to end a long day on the road.