(Daniel) Today we planned to leave the town of Siem Reap to go to Phnom Penh, the Capital of Cambodia, and last time I visited, the scariest place that I have been to date.  Although, judging by the changes I have seen in Siem Reap, I really wouldn’t be surprised to drive into a modern European style city!

I finished proof reading my diary, and packed up most of our things, before Nii and I walked to the Café de Paris.  Feeling like something substantial, I ordered a Hamburger, (the cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast!) while Nii ordered a spicy papaya salad, she has not been happy with Cambodian food, which is not spicy at all.  As we waited for the food I drank green tea, but something caught my eye from the bar.  (By now it was nearly 12 o’clock, and having been up since early, I was allowed to look at the bar at that time of day!)  To my infinite surprise I spotted a bottle of Leffe Blonde and another of Leffe Brun.  These are my very favourite beers, a fact so well known, that my local in England stocks them especially for me, and I am often given a crate or two as a Christmas or Birthday present.

I called the waitress over and asked her about the price of these beers which command a £3.50 price tag in my own country.  They were only $3.50 a bottle, my mind flashed to the last time I had found a bottle of the Belgian delicacy, back in Malaysia which had been an equal surprise.  Prior to that I hadn’t seen a bottle of Leffe since driving through Belgium at the beginning of the Expedition.  If there is one thing that I could say I regret from the European start to this journey, it is that we didn’t stock up on some of the amazing Belgian beers available to us when we had the chance.  

Anyway, I guess I have done enough explaining on the matter to get my point across!  Perhaps people who feel like me about the finer things in life, especially those of the edible kind, created with such care, (and by Monks in this case) will understand why I chose not to leave today, and instead opened one of the beers which I had missed so much, and often found myself describing to people in fond reminiscence.

One Hamburger and three bottles of Leffe later, our plans to leave were well and truly on the back burner!  I had brought the laptop, so as to send out the updates that I had written and organised yesterday.  These all went out via the wireless connection in the café along with a message chasing up the updates which I had sent over a week ago.  Finally I would be able to get back into completing the diary which had grown as the expedition did into something in it’s own right.   I downloaded the diary into a word document the other day and was surprised to find that I had enough material to write a book.  Of course it wouldn’t be a very good book, but it makes me wonder if when the next half of the expedition has revealed itself, perhaps there will be enough adventure and experience here to create something publishable.

Nii and I returned to the Hotel and had a sleep for a while, after a few hours we walked out to the market to see what strange foods Cambodia might offer.  It turns out that Tarantula is a common food in the east of the country, and that the delicacy here is hatchling duck, a duck chick, several weeks away from hatching, but formed inside the egg.  This is eaten whole, presumably cooked although I am not sure.  I will try these both if possible and make videos of the experience for the web site!  I am excited about the hairy spider idea, but the duck feels like a bit of a challenge, perhaps this will be the country to push me over the edge!?

After our tour of the market, we ate dinner in a lovely French restaurant overlooking the street, the building, as with most of the older architecture in the town was French colonial and showed the beautiful combination of Asian simplicity with French style that the colonizers managed to achieve in most of the countries that they occupied.

After dinner we stopped in at the Café again and drank a couple more bottles of leffe before walking back past the neon signs of bars and restaurants to our hotel. 

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