Cambodia tour- Day 5 – journey to Siem Reap

Today, we left the capital Phnom Penh and headed for Siem Reap, home of the famous Angkor Wat.

We stopped a couple of times along the way and shared the bus with the other G-Adventure group and their Cambodia CEO (mine was Thai).

Facts about Cambodia:

He mentioned that 95% of Cambodia are Buddhist, but only 16% follow it properly. You can choose the length of time you want to be a monk, unlike Vietnam when it’s for life. Parents want their children to be a monk, they have to pay for the privilege, but it is believed the child will them pay back with all the good things they do as a monk as it will affect the preparations for the parents in the next life.
Another big problem they have had in Cambodia is HIV. He mentioned that it is believed that the UN was responsible for being over the disease prior to 1993 when 2.7% of the country was diagnosed with HIV. The numbers today are now at 0.7%.
Like most Asian countries, women were traditionally kept at home, but they are seeing this change now with more women being educated and working.
Divorce is less than 1%. However, this does mean that they had a lot of domestic violence.
Life expectancy is now 70, but it was 57, only 20 years ago

One of our stops was the Koh Chan Village, which is a Chinese Community Island village. Here, they create silver, cooper and bass bowls, plates, and more. The men tend to shape the metal, and then women carve and decorate.

Another stop was to try palm fruit. The fruit comes from the female palm tree. It didn’t really taste that nice or overly sweet. I think it had the texture of mushrooms, but a strange sweet taste. I found out later that it wasn’t ripe enough as it should have been sweet. The other thing we tired was the centre of the Palm fruit, which looks like a jelly, doesn’t really taste of anything. It’s not sweet. We didn’t see the flower but was told it could make 1-2 litres of juice. It is this juice that when dried makes Palm sugar.

The second to last stop was to try bug! They had so many, and I tired silk worm, didn’t taste too bad, they have a sweet taste. They had children walking around with live Tarantulas, which, as you can imagine, scared the crappie out of me, and I was back on the bus first!

Then it was time for lunch, with no liking coconut. I am unable to try a lot of the famous dishes. This was popular for baked fish paste.. so that’s what I tried. It was ok. I won’t be ordering it again, lol