“You see that dish? That’s dog meat,” said Raksume who was standing me dinner at his family’s palm leaf shack on the edge of the village. “Oh” I said. And then, “Hey, where’s your dog?”. Raksume gestured unceremoniously towards the road. “It had accident so we eat it”. “Reksume” I said, he looked at me wide-eyed, “don’t ever offer an Englishman dog meat”.

In the Cambodian village where I live, a lone gangly foreigner slowly burning to a crisp, animal life is cheap. It’s easier to source meat than vegetables. The first thing that I disguarded upon arrival was vegetarianism.

I came to Cambodia to take up a voluntary post with a new NGO in a rural village. I optimistically decided that I would eat whatever the Khmers ate. I was convinced it was just a matter of letting my system adjust. And so it was: two weeks of incredible dysentery.

It took about three weeks to adjust to the new diet. I was thinner. Each pink fingernail contained a dash of white. My system began to cope with the influx of foreign bacteria seeking an ex-part party lifestyle in my guts.

When I emerged from the dust of Highway 2 and into Phnom Penh, I immediately found a hotel and ordered chips and eggs. They arrived. The eggs stared up at me. My stomach cringed. They reminded me of the incident.

It was the third week living in the village. I was hungry. Really hungry. Ap, the local woman who was cooking for me, served up dinner. My stomach gurgled. I grabbed at the covering plates to reveal: rice, watery soup and a small pile of eggs.

I cracked a shell and began to peel. It leaked fluid. Weird, I thought. As I picked away more shell and revealed the interior I began to realize something was very wrong. The egg resembled a grey brain. I knew what it was.

Inside there was a boiled duck fetus like a Kinder Egg from Hell. I thought of the fetus and I thought of my hunger. It was too late to find any more food. There are no all-night garages in the provinces. So I covered my eyes and chewed it down.

It tasted delicious. Unsurprisingly, like duck meat mixed with boiled egg. Then I felt a brush on my tongue. Oh God. It was a feather. A tiny little feather. I gagged and swallowed it down. My stomach felt topsy-turvy but my mouth watered for more. In the end, I discontinued my eating of the eggs. My Cambodian friend laughed, poked a hole in egg shell and slurped down the fluid.

Cambodian cuisine is to Asia what English cuisine is to Europe. Both countries dwarfed by the gastronomic achievements of their neighbors: Thai and Chinese, French and Italian; these cuisines have conquered the world while English and Cambodian food remains over-cooked, under-flavored and too reliant on one source of carbohydrates. There is a baffling ignorance of basic flavoring; no garlic, almost no spices and where’s the chili?

I was in Phnom Penh. A guy was selling deep fried chicks on the riverfront: their little bodies frozen in oil like Han Solo in carbonite. They were next to piles of deep fried crickets, maggots and tiny frogs. As I looked at the gruesome features, a tuk tuk full of Japanese tourists pulled up. They spilled out, their mouths forming perfect ‘O” shapes; they brought their cameras to their faces with the smooth movement of a robot. Click, click, click. The vendor raised a sign. “No Purchase, No Photo” it read in four languages.

His muscles and skin were wrapped around his bone like wire. He was not here for entertainment. That was clear. For research purposes, I purchased a selection. First came the crickets. As big as my thumb nail and oil-brown. I munched one. It cracked like candy and formed a chewy mush. I swallowed it down. It tasted like eating a KFC serving box.

Next were the maggots. Each popped in burst of buttery fluid. They were almost pleasant. But no matter how tasty they were, my brain was not fooled. “Awoooga, Awooga, warning, warning, you are eating insects, danger, danger”. My adrenaline glands primed. Perhaps it could be an experiment in mental reprogramming.

Take your average westerner and feed them insects and duck fetuses while playing Sray Mun songs a loop and see when their identity breaks down. Maybe not.

Maybe I have been spoiled by the rainbow of powders on my spice rack at home but I am convinced that if the average village woman in India can magic up a Bharji and Dhal then Cambodians should be able to come up with something delicious too. And some say eating insects are the answer to the world’s food shortage. They taste OK. So maybe the Khmers are ahead of the game.

Nathan Thompson

In Cambodia it’s a time for government workers, teachers and students to knock back some beers, eat rice, watch some TV, play Facebook and have a bit of a sleep. For peasants, proles, serfs, slaves and sellers, it’s just another day. With the exception of New Year,9-5, Le weekend and public holidays are still fairly bourgeois concepts in Asia.

Days off in the big cities have a surfeit of opportunities, like, erm, varied bar crawls, decent food, cheap amphetamines, horse tranquilizers, ladies of loose moral virtues and disco dancing. Some Barangs might partake in sport and arty cultural stuff, but this could just be a rumour.

All of the former are more difficult, if not impossible, to acquire outside of the Penh, Reap and Ville, and can easily damage a carefully crafted reputation, especially if one is spotted partaking in arty culture.

In the quest for wholesome entertainment, I came across a copy of the Ministry of Tourism’s crime against the English language ‘Guide to Battambang’. An interesting chapter read thus;

“Tourists can see fox bats in Bay Domram(Baydamrang) pagoda located in the north Banan about 8km, the east side of Sangke River bank…..There are hundreds of the fox bats hanging on the trees, producing a loud noise and a large stint as well. It is interesting of its attractive by hanging itself to the branch of similar to bat but bigger than bat and look like dog. It is free of charge for visiting and taking photos” (Sic)

I know Banan district reasonably well, but had not come across a ‘bigger than bat and look like dog’, so it was filed away on a ‘Things to do on public holidays before it starts really raining’ list.

I’d also been told about a new Chinese constructed dam on the SangkeRiver, further upstream from the dog-bats and an older derelict tribute to Pol Pot era civic utopia– an abandoned dam, quite far away from the actual river.

My erstwhile colleague, all round gentleman and scholar, Doc, enquired politely of my plans for the day off. On hearing my idea, Doc’s aging eyes lit up with the enthusiasm of an excited school boy.

“I can show youwhere the bat tree is’ he said, before adding “I’d like to see these dams” dropping the hint heavier than a B52’s payload. With Doc’s standing as a long term Cambophile, historian, botanist, ornithologist and pretty good Khmer linguist, he was nigh on impossible to refuse.

I swung past the hotel the next morning, Doc already waiting in his sandals and beige socks pulled up to the knee. He had in his possession a detailed map of the province, with all the villages, hamlets and contours clearly marked. With myself as pilot and Doc as navigator, there was no way we could get lost on the myriad of confusing tracks which crisscross the countryside.

Bigger Than Bat and Looking Like Dog, in the Wat of the Riiiiiising Sun

We found Baydamrang village easily enough by heading south along Road 154, roughly following the Sangke.

Before the well-known Prasat Banan temple, a blue painted sign points the way to Baydamrang Bridge. Simply cross the rusting old Bailey bridge and stop by the Wat of the Rising Sun (cue a musical rendition).

We politely roused a semi-conscious lady from her hammock so Doc could ask her the whereabouts of the famous chreung. She looked us up and down with pity implying she thought us a tad simple and also we weren’t the first mentally lacking Barang to pop up at inconvenient moments in order to ask her the same stupid question.

She pointed up. Shit me!

The only 2 trees of any note in the village were covered in bats, Lyle’s Flying Foxes (Pteropuslylei), according to the internet. A group of black and ginger furred flying Jack Russell terriers, fanning themselves with oversized flaps of wing skin and all belonging to some bloke called Lyle, apparently. Flapping, chirruping and generally making a right racket; comical. Every now and then one would get spooked or excited and take to the air. With a 2 foot wingspan, they look both weirdly sci-fi and highly amusing.

The head monk at the Wat of the Rising Sun is said to keep the bats out of the cooking pots of hungry locals with a mix spiritual conservationism and the long baton of the law. However, when I asked a friend, whose mother is a native of Baydamrang village, he spoke cheerfully.

“Yes monk protect” he smiled “but me and brother make trap bamboo, sometimes catch and…. (making a ripping apart motion with his hands,he grinned).. Eat, yes, very delicious”. Oh Kampuchea, the land of contradictions.

A Goddamn Dam

As natural wonders are slashed n’ burnt or eaten, man-made wonders are springing up all over the place, as a flood of Chinese investment money weaves its way along Chinese-made roads on Chinese trucks to Chinese bought land to create Chinese built infrastructure in the countryside.

The new Sangke dam, gleaming with white paint is such an example of civil engineering, designed with the purpose of irrigating local rice paddies for that holy-grail of promises; 2 crops a year, as well as providing hydro-electricity for God knows where. The extra electricity supply will be more than welcome – it’s up and down like a bar girl’s knickers right now.

The structure is impressive enough; okay, it’s not quite the Hoover dam, but the humble Sangkeain’t exactly the Colorado River – and it even had some real glass windows. The water level behind the barrier was significantly higher than downstream, with one sluice gate releasing some of the build-up.

The river looked clean, deep and inviting, and, with the Cardomoms rising in the background, whoever snapped up this piece of real estate will probably be building a nice resort sometime soon. The ecological impact and economic benefits of this project will only become known with time, but it doesn’t look like it will fall over just yet.

Local Khmer labourers were scoffing chicken heads and drinking beer in the shade of a convoy of (Chinese) trucks. Kindly, they offered a beer, which was accepted. Kinder still, they offered chicken heads, which were politely declined, as was our offer of payment.

‘Loy Chine’ they nodded happily, rubbing fingers together. Geopolitical chess games and commie land grabbing conspiracies aren’t as interesting as a day’s honest work for real money (with breaks to drink beer, eat chicken heads and have a bit of a sleep).

There seemed a genuine sense of pride for the construction; these are a few of the people who hope to gain from the irrigation, when the mile upon mile of concrete canal systems are filled up and water flows out to the farmers in the field. However, this being Cambodia, it could all end up in disaster of a thousand varieties. We shall just have to wait to see how it pans out.

Dam Pol Pot

Having heard of a previous failure at dam building, built during the Pol Pot era, we asked for directions, which proved to be helpfully accurate (follow canal, turn left before bridge, keep going). An old chap told us he’d been part of the original crew on that and the colossal Kamping Pouy earth dam.

The secret to his longevity, he told us, when so many thousands of his comrades had perished; go slowly; dig 1 shovel at a time. He also added that he’d had a bad back ever since the late ‘70s, so remember that next time your overweight cousin who works in data entry complains of RSI.

We followed an immense canal for a few kilometres, a straight slice cut and lined with concrete slab after concrete slab after concrete slab running as far as the eye could see. Turning off the new road and onto the track as instructed, there were no houses, just trees, shoots of green grass and wild flowers. It’s amazing how a few rain storms can transform a barren Martian dust bowl into an orgy of colour.

The Pol Pot dam was there, as promised, high above a dried up gully. Decaying, decrepit but still suggesting a misplaced arrogance. Useless and forgotten, yet it still stands, shadowed by the forest canopy.

Above us a hawk wheeled and screechedand song birds called from hidden perches. Again, the contrast of this country- the crumbling skeleton of man-made folly reclaimed by nature,and now kept under the guardianship of scores of tortured souls.

Maybe it was the lack of human presence, the tranquility, or simply knowing a little back history, but this definitely was eerie; one of those hair-rising-on-the-back-of-your-neck kinda places. I doubt many locals go there in the daytime, and would bet my last riel that none do at night.

We stayed a while, basking in the peace and quiet, before heading out in the wrong direction, stopping in random villages to enquire of our whereabouts on the map (along with a beer) and ended up sunburnt near Moung Russei (a long way off course).

So, a country where monks spiritual retribution is overturned by the thoughts of a tasty, yet karmastically illicitbat curry, the poor share lunch and beers with passing strangers, old men are pleased to only sufferback pain from years on the gulag and spirits of the dead guard nature from the living.

A place where grown, educated men armed with a detailed scale map get lost and forget which way is east. A country where flowers bloom from sun scorched clay after a kiss of rain. It truly is the Kingdom of Contradiction.

Pedro Milladino

The book is an adventure story, spiked with a heavy dose of backpacker noir, through the eateries, street food stalls, and hazy bars of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. In this edited extract, Nash launches a doner kebab business in Sihanoukville with mixed results..

The initial trial of the pop-up restaurant at Rodney’s bar turned out to be an eventful evening. But then, I suppose, what did I expect living so close to Serendipity Beach? It was New Year’s Eve, and the place was dead. Many of the bars and restaurants had shut for the four-day Khmer holiday so the Cambodian cooks, waitresses, and bar girls could go home to their families. Some of them were travelling hundreds of miles to ramshackle farms and slums in northern Cambodia.

Two days on bone-cracking roads, and two days with their loved ones. It was tragic to think that some of the young mothers only saw their children two or three times a year, and then only for a couple of days. The rest of the time the youngsters are brought up by the grandmother while the mother sends money home. I could only wonder at the strength they had to get back on the bus, back to their tiny, shared rooms, knowing they wouldn’t see their children for another few months.

But it wasn’t just the ones with children or parents to support. One bar girl from Battambang had a Cambodian father and Chinese mother who had died in a car crash when she was 11, leaving her to bring up her younger sister and brother.

She’d been employed as a maid in a rich Khmer family’s house, cleaning, cooking, and doing laundry all day for $7 a month and a small room for her siblings to sleep in. Occasionally, “uncles” would wander in at midnight, reeking of rice wine. Tears welled up in her eyes when she told me her story, and she turned away and wiped them.

“I say to Buddha when I pray, next time let me live anywhere, but not this country. Everything is wrong about Cambodia,” she said.

Not that extreme poverty, trafficking, human rights abuses, the global food crisis, and Cambodia’s Great Land Grab were of much concern to Rodney. He kept pointing at all the closed bars and rubbing his hands. By 7pm, he’d snared most of the alcoholics on Victory Hill.

All the food experts were in there, muttering about kebabs, and the best ones they’d had. And whether it was best with naan bread or pita, and whether they liked pickled green chillies in theirs, and one place they’d been to that seared the chillies for a second over the charcoal grill.

Then there were the culinary merits of minced lamb compared with slices, and the divisive issue of whether the chilli sauce should contain grated carrot, and whether it was a gentleman’s right, by God, to insist on “crisp, fresh slices” from the elephant’s foot rather than “stewed slices from the pot”.

“You’ve got the slices, you’ve got the pita, they rip it open, cut it, you’ve got your meat, you’ve got your sauces. Doner kebabs! I fucking love them,” said Rodney.

The boxer was there with his new Cambodian girlfriend. He’d met her in the street two nights ago. He started boasting about how he once lived above a shop “that sold the best fucking lamb doners in the world”. When I told them I only had chicken they shook their heads, and sucked through their teeth like mechanics peering up from a bonnet, and I had to keep explaining about the price of lamb.

WE HAD chipped in $20 each to buy Akara, Rodney’s bar manager, a single mattress and a double one for her parents for the Khmer New Year. They all slept on the floor of their wooden shack down the road. It was heart-breaking to see. I walked past on my way to the beach each day. Her mother and father would always be sat outside playing cards. Akara once muttered: “If my father work, family have mattress.”

We always tipped her well, and Rodney paid her $150 a month in the high season – double the normal wage in Cambodia – and $100 a month in the rainy season. But most of it went to pay off her father’s gambling debts.

“Her father not take care,” Rodney would often say.

With the midday sun burning down, and 35C temperatures in the shade, it was miserable to see a family of six living in that 20ft by 10ft wooden shack without a fan or air con, trying to get to sleep on nailed boards, bugs below them, mosquitoes above them. Akara showered using a bucket filled from a water butt, but came in every day looking immaculate. None of us knew how she did it.

Rodney crept upstairs to get the mattresses and we all gathered round. It was a touching moment. Akara’s face broke into a huge smile and then tears. Her father arrived later on a moped to take the mattresses home. We found out later he drove straight round to the pawn shop with them. I told Rodney I’d give my share of the kebab money to Akara. After that, they all wanted kebabs, and I had eight orders all at once.

It was easy juggling the food, the biggest problem was competing with the beer glasses. There was only one sink, so we battled for space. And talk about an open kitchen. It’s one thing being on show in a restaurant, but at least you’re tucked away behind aquarium glass like a zoo exhibit, or separated by a counter too high to jump over – you don’t have to put up with people walking through the kitchen to get to the toilets.

It was impossible. The food experts were all far too curious, and kept stopping for a chat. At one point, a battle-scarred expat called Gary walked through. He was barred from most of the bars on the Hill, and had been in the country for three years without a visa. There were dark rumours about why he couldn’t go back home.

“What bread are you using for the kebabs, kiddo?” he said, venturing into my side of the kitchen. He was definitely past the water cooler. He was definitely off the toilet right of way I’d marked on the floor with yellow tape. He was definitely on my side of the kitchen.

“Wraps,” I said. I told him I was using wraps.

“Fucking wraps! Jesus! Why don’t you use pita bread, that’s a proper kebab that.”

I politely pointed out that it was just a trial and we were checking out suppliers, and it was easier to get fire-breathing midgets in Sihanoukville than pita bread, and tried to get rid of him. He was still hanging round as I wrapped the kebabs. I was annoyed with Rodney for letting him in the bar in the first place, let alone allowing him to loiter in the kitchen. But then it was my kitchen now. Rodney had told me himself.

“That bit’s mine, this bit’s yours. Lovely jubbly,” he’d said.

I hate people hanging around in the kitchen, but this was a frightening looking man with a teardrop tattoo under one eye, meaning he’d killed someone or been raped in prison, or both, and my usual hints were lost on him. In the end, I was forced to put my arms up and walk towards him in an uncertain shooing manoeuvre. Luckily it worked and he lurched off.

My T-shirt was soon stuck to my back. It was truly unpleasant. I thought about cooking bare-chested, but I didn’t want to put the customers off. Rodney had mentioned putting a fan in the kitchen. He had one standing idle in the bar. He came through at one point and joked: “I’ve been thinking about it. But I thought, no, I want the customers to smell the food! Then they’ll order more!”

I wanted to teach Akara how to make the kebabs, but she was far too busy. Every time I showed her how to cook the chicken there was a shout from the bar. I didn’t know how long I’d be in Sihanoukville for. There were other places I wanted to see along the coast that might be a good spot for a restaurant, and I wanted to make sure she could take over when I left. Even if she sold four kebabs a night, it would double her daily wage, and she could move out of that shack, and away from her thieving parents.

We sold all the kebabs in three hours. An Aussie called Wozza had three in a row, and the Finnish boys had two each. I cleaned down and went to sit with the others. They kept talking about the food and the Finns raised their thumbs. And then a fight broke out between Gary and the boxer’s girlfriend. It turned very ugly, and people began to leave. I tried to calm it at one point, but Gary immediately eyeballed me.

“Believe me Tiger, you don’t want to get involved,” he growled.

He was right. I didn’t. I went off and sat at the bar.

“You don’t need this when you’re trying to sell food,” Wozza whispered to me as he paid his bill.

In the end, Rodney closed the bar and kicked everyone out. He spent the rest of the night muttering to himself in the mirror about how they were all barred, and how his friends had let him down. He brightened up after a couple of hours.

“Do you know something?” he said. “I love it!”

I went back to my room and lay awake for hours. The night had been a disaster. Even the thought of Akara’s joyful tears was soured by the ugly scenes at the end. There would be no mention of the food on the expat forums and rocket-fuelled parish news grapevine, just the trouble.

Then I tried to make light of it. If it wasn’t Cambodia’s first pop-up night, and it probably was, it was definitely the first one to bar all its customers on the opening night. What is it about kebabs?

Down and Out in South East Asia is available to buy on kindle for only $4.99 via Amazon.

And here’s the Amazon link if you’re in the UK.

Just like the etched design on the plate glass windows, this excellent new restaurant has all its ducks in a row.

Less than a month after opening its doors in Phnom Penh, Duck is delivering an experience that’s hard to beat and even harder to resist: delicious food, excellent service, comfortable atmosphere and a management team that clearly knows what it’s doing.

It’s a place that’s classy yet not pretentious, with light jazz background music, subdued lighting, eclectic artwork and patrons ranging from expats to Khmer couples to families with kids – all enthusiastically passing around dishes to sample.

With its soft brown decor, gentle music and upscale ambiance, it could easily be located in San Francisco, Cape Town or Melbourne except for the contrast between the interior and the exterior. As incongruous as a thoroughbred in a rice field, Duck is a shiny new establishment in a neighbourhood that’s teeming with life.

Positioned between Meta House on one side and the decrepit White Building across the street, the restaurant provides a fish-bowl view onto the bizarre world outside. Tuktuks and motos whizz past the floor-to-ceiling glass walls, women in Angry Bird pajamas drag recycling carts and Lexus SUVs compete for space in front of the entrance. While the interior of Duck may be subdued and artsy, it’s the scene outside that makes it quintessentially Phnom Penh.

Since the restaurant is still in its infancy, the menus are printed on stapled sheets of paper. But that’s the only thing that’s undeveloped in this tasteful spot. While there’s no duck on the menu yet (stay tuned), there’s a selection of dishes that are mouth-watering to read about even before you taste them.

Brandy chicken liver pate with caper berries. Mushroom risotto with truffle oil. Wagyu Scotch fillet with port jus. John Dory fish and chips. These are just a few of the dishes, which are prepared in the rear of the restaurant in a sparkling open kitchen by a chef who has 25 years experience cooking in Australia and New Zealand.
.
On our visit, we wanted to try them all. But we settled for two appetizers, three mains and two desserts between the three of us.

The meal began with complimentary shot glasses filled with delicious and creamy warm tomato soup. From then on, it was first-rate all the way. The wine list is extensive and offers bottles priced from $19 to $175 (Chateau Candale Cabernet Merlot) as well as glasses priced from $4.50 to $9, most of them hailing from Australia, New Zealand, France and Italy.

We started the meal with the wild mushroom medley made with burnt butter and truffle oil ($6) as well as the salt and pepper squid with lime aioli ($6). While the truffle flavour was hardly perceptible in the mushroom dish, it won our vote for the most delicious of the night with its mixture of enoki, King Brown (oyster) and shiitake mushrooms, lightly sautéed in burnt butter (filling the restaurant with a great aroma), bursting with flavour and perfectly seasoned in the kitchen. (We noticed the absence of salt and pepper shakers on the table and figured it was the chef’s way of letting diners see he knows what he’s doing). The salt and pepper squid was good but not up to the standard of the other dishes.

For main course, I ordered seared Norwegian salmon with a teriyaki glaze, served with braised tomato sugo (concentrate) and cilantro ($17). The fish melted in my mouth and the glaze gave a slightly crisp, slightly sweet casing that made me want to savour every bite. Slowly. In silence.

Same with the red snapper served on top of baby potatoes with popped capers and a drizzle of pesto ($13). Both Skip and Wes (my dining partners) ordered this dish and both declared it to be one of the best dishes they’d eaten in Cambodia.

Everything arrived at the same time. Appetizers were served less than 15 minutes after ordering. And all were artistically presented on shiny white plates.

There were two dessert options on our visit – crème brulee with caramelized banana fingers, and chocolate mud cake with chocolate sauce and berry compote (both $4.50). We couldn’t decide between them so we ordered both.

I’m not usually partial to banana desserts but I have to say this one captivated my tastebuds. While the chocolate mud cake was incredibly decadent and delicious with three individual pots filled with sticky dense chocolate, blueberry preserve and fluffy cream (Skip’s favourite), the “banana fingers” gave me a new appreciation for this quintessential Cambodian fruits as they were encased in a crisp, toffee-like coating and served alongside the creamy pot of brulee.

While Duck is still emerging as a newcomer on the dining scene, it’s moving fast in delivering new options. Starting this week, they are open for lunch during the week , brunch on weekends and breakfast weekdays starting at 7am (with dishes priced from $2 to $4.75).

Keep watching this space. I’m pretty sure they have lots more waiting in their wings.

Gabi Yetter

Duck
47 Sotheros Boulevard (opposite the White Building)
Phnom Penh

I teach two grades – grade six and kindergarten one. Whilst the kindergarten class keep me on my toes with their brilliantly un-developed sense of acceptable behaviour, my sixth grade class sometimes leaves me feeling a little flat.

It is me to blame, not them, of course. It is not their fault that a teacher who has finally managed to acquire a good level of classroom control finds herself pining for the chair fights and rocks-at-glass-windows anger that she faced daily working in schools in the UK.

My sixth graders are twelve to fourteen years; their hormones bomb them with whiskery chins and pimples which ambush their K-pop wannabe faces. Lessons require plenty of giggly group work or energetic team games for the chemically charged classroom.

There is an extremely good-natured vibe in the class on most days, unless some massive female calamity has occurred, such as one of the girls buying the same patent pink plastic high tops as another. Most of the time, however, the atmosphere is just oh so……..nice. Which is great, I tell myself.

Why then, recently, have I found myself secretly wishing for a classroom outburst- a screaming, frothy- mouthed, fierce, vitriolic, thirteen year old rebellion?

Four years ago, I can remember walking home to my damp house in Sheffield after a day on the school ground battle field thinking ‘this is it, I’m out of here’. I needed to see what else was out there-away from the sleet and the Rotherham to Sheffield commute. To go alone to somewhere warm, weird and foreign. To free myself from days on end of negotiating with young people who were angry and lost and fed up and bitter.

So, I came here and I really haven’t looked back that often until recently. Now, though, more and more memories are coming back to me of those days when I would be striding up the hills to home high on the achievement of having a conversation with a severely traumatized, fed-up thirteen year old girl and making some sort of progress- even just enough to know that she may come and find me the next day rather than kicking her classroom enemy in the teeth again.

Last week, in my grade six class, I used a recent BBC News report about a search and rescue dog teaming up with a robotic snake to help find people stuck in the rubble of collapsed buildings. The students came up with a multitude of insightful questions and opinions on this as well as on the Boston bombings which we had been studying the week previously.

We had some excellent discussion about science, technology, aliens, bombs and dogs. They asked if they could make a pressure cooker bomb at the end of the unit, I said maybe, we all laughed. They are not only clever and ridiculously conscientious but also very amusing.

However, as much as my students enlighten, entertain and interest me they also depress me sometimes- I won’t lie. Right down from the tiniest kindergarten toddler up to the teenage students there is this inert, innocent but blatant classism, racism and political apathy. Well, of course there is. Of course. The fact that I completely understand the reason for it all does nothing to alleviate the disturbed feeling it stirs inside me sometimes.

Examples of classism appear daily. Yesterday students wrote sentences using phrasal verbs for their homework. At least four students wrote something along the lines of:

“You should not look down on your neighbor just because you are better than them”, or
“It is not right to look down on the street kid. Just give them 1000 riel and look away”.

They didn’t mean for their answers be so ironic but it made me chuckle as I sat alone and marked them. Then I felt angry with them and after that just angry at myself for thinking I have the right to be angry with them. Maybe I hadn’t given them enough examples, for want of not force feeding them my own opinions.

They are such good kids, so wonderfully behaved that one student came to me the other day to ask if she could wear slippers the following Monday because her Mum was going to wash her school pumps at the weekend and they might still be wet.

‘Course you can, thanks for asking’ I said.

One minute I thought,’ Oh how sweet’ and the next minute I was hit by whimsical nostalgia for all forms of refusal to abide by school uniform rules – right back to my own teenage dedication to my cherry red Doctor Martins and my defiant refusal to replace them with black school shoes.

I was a child in the eighties and a grunger in the nineties. I spent days listening to Dinosaur Junior and drawing awful murals on my bedroom walls, splashing bleach on Army and Navy haversacks and making really bad home-made Butthole Surfer t-shirts. Buying bootleg cassette tapes, herbal resin and mood rings in our favourite shop and then getting stoned all afternoon amongst the Roman remains of a castle that lay just behind the bus station was our life for a long time, privileged as we were to live it.

I had the freedom to be happy, high, low, desperate, angry, hate-fuelled, listless, at times completely lost, other times- at moments I can remember to this day- completely found.

Then I grew a bit older and entered the wonderful late nineties world of the UK’s finest free parties, raves, festivals and house-parties and all the immense, ecstatic, off your face and just a molecule dancing to the beat moments that those years bought.

I miss working with teenagers that I can find common ground with. I miss their angst and expressions of injustice and their rebellion. I know that there is no way that I will ever be working in that field here in Cambodia because no matter how well I can speak the language and read the history books and the newspapers, I will never be able to engage in the same way with the Cambodian youth. This is not my country and never will be. I will never understand it because it is around me and not within me.

Sometimes I think I could look for jobs which involve working with less fortunate teenagers but I know that these jobs are not for foreigners but for the Khmers who understand their own youth culture and have lived through their own history.

Of course I accept this. I know about keeping ‘schtum’ on many issues and expecting a widespread ‘schtumness’ to cut off any debates that start to meander away from the safety of the ‘schtum’.

We can happily and comfortably stick to discussions on evolution, aliens and robotic snakes. Teaching, in my opinion, is such an in- the- moment experience involving keeping the cocky, rich boy quiet enough for the hugely introverted, lanky boy at the back to speak sometimes. To focus on keeping the K-Pop fan gigglers and the pimply boys all spinning on an axis that will provoke and retain a productive classroom environment. It is great, I love it. I just miss the youth-fuelled grit of home sometimes.

We had a mock Master-chef week at the end of the last unit and it resulted in the runner -up girls group locking themselves in the toilet for the remainder of the lesson crying when they had all promised me that they wouldn’t leave the cleaning up for myself and the cleaner to do.

I felt angry and wanted to explode at them for watching too much psycho-emotional music videos and being too privileged to consider helping the cleaner mop up after them. I let it go.

I understand that these students are living happy, middle-class lives and that they have no reason to step outside their bubble. I understand the history and the present situation. There is absolutely no reason for them to rebel or feel bitter and every reason for them to focus on their mobile phone bling and the trips to Singapore that have been promised if they keep their grades high.

There are obvious reasons why the anger is deep-rooted inside for anyone here over thirty-five. For those younger and from less fortunate families, maybe a lot of bitterness stems from a feeling of abandonment because their parents may have needed the boys to go away to be monks and the girls to go away and work.

However, they don’t have the luxury of being angry or reveling in uniform rebellion, festivals and raves. They just need to make money to send home to their folks. These people are by far the toughest people I have ever met. You can see their toughness in every lithe motion and every simple, bare-faced expression.

My children will be Khmer-Brits and they will have their childhood and teenage years perhaps split between here and there. This will be their country and so will Britain. I can’t see into the future any more than I can return to the past, obviously. I just wonder what will happen with the youth here, with that generation who will be adults by the time my children will be teenagers.

A recent enlightening article recently on Khmer 440 about a French guy’s experience growing up here in Cambodia really got me thinking about teenagers here and my teenage years and how it will all pan out.

The thirteen year old I, drunk on White Lightning cider, scrambling through thorn bushes with our grunger crew to escape the ravers with knives, thought I was tough and experiencing the roughness of the ‘real’ world- but little did I know.

However, at least I am lucky enough to have felt that roughness and to have been gritty, given my parents shit and come out the other side as an adult with a connection to society, wonderful memories and parents who have far from disowned me.

Using the word youth so much in one article only screams of my lack of it, but I am still young enough to remember and keep hold of that memory of youthful urgency to find truth. Quietly, from the sidelines, I wish for the fierceness and bravery of the youth in Cambodia to keep on getting stronger and for them to find ways to change what is theirs.

Anna Spencer

I sat down to begin a day of work in the small office of the NGO where I volunteer. It was the day after Khmer New Year, when all through the pagoda, not a creature was stirring – not even the massive turtle that lives in the reservoir.

I was looking forward to getting some work done before the school children returned to scream and throw empty packets of noodles everywhere. Of course, I began by checking Facebook. I was scrolling down the news feed when Sambo, the energetic English teacher, poked his oversized head through the door. “Will you drive a monk to the beach?” He asked. I only thought for a second before replying in the affirmative.

I’d been living in the Wat for over two months and driving my red Suzuki for two weeks. The journey from Wat Baray in Takeo to Kep was to take three hours. Obviously when a convoy of monk-carrying Cambodians are involved, things are not going to go smoothly. I packed a bag full of sun cream and hats, loaded my monk and set off.

Naturally, I assumed we’d take National Highway 3 to Kampot and then zip across to Kep. Naturally, I was wrong. For some insane reason the guys decided that the best route was to cut across National Highway 2 (what I like to call, “the highway of pothole death”) and make our way to the beach via crater-strewn death traps also known as “Cambodian Roads”.

“We drive fast – understand? You not get leave behind” said Supon, the only one of the crew who could speak English. I rejected his paternalism with a macho nod. I had it under control. We set off. Potholes approached like advanced level Space Invaders. I weaved in and out accelerating madly inbetween. “Must keep up with the orange streaks ahead,” I thought to myself.

The roads worsened. We would hit 100km/ph for a few seconds and then decelerate to a crawl through the dirt obstacle course that Cambodians call “road works”. My arse was marinated in sweat and aches. My spine flattened from pothole jolts. We bounced and bucked over Martian roads in the intolerable heat.

When it seemed like it couldn’t get any worse it was time for a detour. Without explaining what was going on we left the “roads” in favor for a single raised track about 2 feet wide. I swayed flipping my handlebars left and right to avoid teetering into the Paddy fields below.

My orange cargo abandoned his Buddhist equanimity and grabbed onto my shoulders in fear. We cornered sharply. For two miles I looked death and broken-bones in the face. If I crashed and survived then I certainly would be imprisoned for grievous monk-wounding. Why this marvelous detour into medieval village?

It was lunch time. Our party was 16 strong so lunch had to be pre-arranged. I wasn’t sure if it was a business or the house of a relative. We arrived; I jerked my leg over the bike and scrambled for the shade. As is customary, the monks ate first while we lay people waited. When they were done, it was our turn to “nyam bi” i.e. eat nondescript sour soup and rice. I had long since stopped caring about my diet. When you live in a pagoda and eat whatever the monks leave, you get used to eating gruel and rice for every meal.

Fortified by two coffees, I emerged from the warren of paths between the paddy fields next to the Khmers who were waiting for the sweary barang to catch up. “So, where to next?” I asked, hoping to be told we would be back on some semblance of a road. “We go over this mountain now” said Supon. Oh, obviously. Why drive on newly tarmaced, flat highway when you can rattle and buzz your way over a mountain on a 100c moped carrying a monk on the back?

The road was clay red. To say it was potholed is to infer that there was a part of the road that wasn’t potholed. I can’t say that. It was rather like driving on the Moon, if the moon was a few billion miles closer to the sun and had enough gravity to make sure you smashed your tailbone every time your seat dropped into the next mini-crater.

We climbed steadily. As we came around the peak of the small mountain, through scrubby bushes and rocks the horizon became hazy blue. It was rather like that moment in the BBC version of the Chronicles of Narnia when, after hundreds of miles and trial-by-witch, the Pevensie children gasp, “why, Aslan! It’s Cair Paravel”. We curved back down the mountain and onto the smooth quiet roads of Kep.

The young monks stripped down to their orange boxers and vests and hit the water. I was alongside them swimming and splashing. On the beach, a busload of Korean Christians joined hands in prayer and then hit the water, all wearing t-shirts and long shorts. It had taken 5 hours to get here and was probably worth it.

I left the next day leaving the guys from my village in Kep. I had an appointment in Phnom Penh and the group had started talking about driving to the top of some local mountain to visit a religious site (and probably to pay respects to the victims of the drive there).

I drove to Kampot, got on Highway 3 and was back home within three hours which included the time it took to eat breakfast. I listened to Nirvana’s Nevermind on my mp3 player and overtook a large truck with ease. Why, in God’s name, did we not go this way in the first place?

Nathan Thompson