I never intended to stay longer than 5 days in Phnom Penh. The cruel combination of choking heat, traffic fumes and a million voices saying, "My friend, Tuk Tuk - moto-bike??" were wearing my cranial Pirellis down.
Even my snots were becoming the same shade of black as when I travel on the London underground.
Then one day........at the junction of two great rivers, I rendezvoued with Ian.
Put simply, my food investigations in Cambodia prior to his arrival were merely brush strokes of varnish on a grand oil painting.
We had both entered the capital by boat. Ian from the Mekong and I from the Tonle Sap. However, we had something else in common........A PASSION FOR FOOD. It was time to get serious.
Based at the oh so colonnial "FCC," (Foreign Correspondents Club)Ian, a man with an enviable pedigree in travel, had planned a "balls-deep" approach to researching his latest best seller. His research had begun several weeks ago in the Mekong Delta (Vietnam) and he planned to follow the river all the way to its source in Tibet charting his food discoveries on the way.
There would be no in-house, out-house, hen-house or errrrrr........greenhouse left uncovered.
Ian had written reams already and had a Cambodian guide on standby when we met. This was no touristy blagger but a guy that would show us things that the Embassies warn foreigners about. A good looking bloke in his mid-twenties, Chhorda was well up for the, "craic" and did his upmost to take us off the beaten track.
Within a day we were out of town eating venomous snake and Ian had been invited to a wedding in a rural part of Cambodia.
My lazy mornings suddenly became ruined by early market visits, my evenings trashed by journeys to boat people and those collecting palm sugar from 100 ft trees, but Hell, I didn't care. I was seeing the real Cambodia for the first time.
