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We finally got around to visiting one of the local micro-breweries last weekend - the Munich Beer Restaurant. Although it was quiet in the afternoon when we stopped in for a tasting session, apparently this place gets very busy at night and is particularly popular with the Khmer. There are two styles currently on offer - Munich Gold and Munich Stout - although i'm uncertain what either has to do with Munich. At $1.10 or $1.50 for a small glass the prices are reasonably competitive with the local mega-swill which goes for $1 or 75 cents in happy hour. The menu made me a little nervous as the pictures seemed to show some very cloudy beer, and both beers are indeed very cloudy for any commercial or even home-brewed beer. The stout is a lot more drinkable at around 4% alcohol than most of the tropical stouts available here, and has a strong coffee aroma and flavour, but somehow seemed to lack complexity to me with the coffee being so dominant. The Munich Gold was much more drinkable. Despite the clarity issues it has a noticeable malt and hop flavour profile, medium bitterness, and a hoppy nose. It took me a while to work it out, but what really makes this beer stand out here is that it is an ale, the first one I have found in South East Asia. If I had to compare it to a commercial brand it would be something along the lines of a Coopers Pale Ale (although it's even cloudier). Unfortunately, I don't know the history of the restaurant or where the brewer learnt his craft. One thing that did make me chuckle was that someone in the restaurant is employed to sit inside the brewery next to a glass window and pour the beers which are ordered in the restaurant apparently direct from the conditioning tank. Overall, i'm not sure if the quality of the beer here deserves a return visit but it is refreshing to see someone doing something different to the big commercial breweries.The Munich Beer Restaurant is at #86 Sothearos Boulevard, Phnom Penh.
Phnom Penh has been getting some unseasonally heavy rain over the last few weeks. After speaking to locals and ex-pats who have been here a while it appears that these early rains don't consitute the arrival of monsoon season (although monsoon is imminent), but it does provide a taster of what we have in store for the next 6 months or so. Em snapped this photo of street 352 last week, just outside her office, after a particularly long and torrential downpour. It seems the drains and sewers here are woefully inadequate to deal with this intensity of rainfall and apparently floods like this can be a daily occurrence in some parts of Phnom Penh during monsoon. Em really struggled to get home from work on this particular day. Hazards to watch out for include the drain covers being forced up by the water pressure leaving gaping holes for you to disappear down, as well as wading through a dilute cocktail of raw sewage and other nasties. The cities many rats also come up from the sewers during rain this heavy and need somewhere high and dry to hole up. The evening of this storm we went to one of our local bars where I saw a very large rat run across the floor and under the benches. Although cooling rain sounds like a great idea right now in the height of the hot season I suspect that monsoon isn't going to be much fun.
Check out this bad boy which I picked up at Pencil the other day.
Features include; retractable recharging plug, protective grill so you don't electrocute yourself (or Emma), light to attract the flying critters to your web of doom, and a satisfying big red button for distributing justice. All for the bargain basement price of 3 bucks. We had a few bugs in our bedroom last night which gave me the opportunity to take it for a spin. It's a little more powerful than I expected (think of the cracking sound one of those electrocutor things on the wall at the butcher makes). I also made the mistake of swatting a bug against a nice fluffy pillow which I won't do again. Em is convinced this new found power will go to my head and i'll be dancing around on the bed in my undies like a blood drunk hunter every night. I have no idea what she's talking about...hmmm I wonder if you could make a double headed Darth Maul version...
Em & I visited O'Russei Market this morning, it's a great market much more geared towards locals than tourists. We couldn't believe it when Em discovered a cupcake stall, cupcakes mmm....
Well, you knew it was coming...the inevitable beer blog entry. Although there's no real ale in Phnom Penh, there are some half decent beers, so I decided to make an attempt to review the best of the local brews. My approach was to go out and buy one of every beer readily available here (from one of our local supermarkets "Pencil" which is good for buying beer and things made out of plastic but not much else), Em & I then sat down one afternoon and tasted them. I should say that some Western beers are easy to find here as well (Guiness, Heineken, Budweiser etc) but I haven't included them below.
The Largers
...a lot of them isn't there ? Some of these are from neighbouring countries (Thailand, Singapore, Laos) but are readily available in Phnom Penh so i've included them. Rather than providing tasting notes for all of these, i'm going to select some heroes and villains. First the villains, although i've had them both outside of Cambodia i'd have to say that Tiger & Singha didn't stack up well at all, lacking in flavour and with a really bad chemical aftertaste. The stand-outs were Chang, Anchor, Beer Lao, Leo & Angkor ("my country, my beer"). Chang (Thailand) and Anchor (Cambodia) in particular are crisp, clean, refreshing lagers with a slight hop flavour and noticeable bitterness. Chang won a gold medal at the Australian International Beer Awards a few years back apparently and I think it's well deserved. Angkor is very much the local brew here, widely available on tap in bars around town. Whilst it's not quite up to the standards of Chang & Anchor it's still very drinkable. Beer Lao (Laos) and Leo (Thailand) are also decent and worth a look. I had great difficulty ordering Anchor until I realised that they actually pronounce it with a soft ch (like much), presumably to differentiate it from Angkor which sounds the same in a noisy bar.
And now for something completely different...
There are 4 key ingredients for most beer ; water, barley, hops, yeast. This basic recipe is the result of centuries of experimentation by those trying to brew a tastier drop. So, i'm a little sceptical about anything that excludes one (or in this case two) of these ingredients. Khmer Palm Beer (Cambodia) uses palm sugar for it's fermentables and flavouring. Whilst it is great that this beer is made from locally sourced ingredients (barley & hops don't grow in the tropics), I honestly can't find anything to recommend it. A large part of the sugar must be unfermentable as it is very sweet, similar to an alcopop. It also doesn't keep well, lacking the preservative qualities of hops, so a bad bottle is a very frequent occurrence. At worst it can taste sour and sulphurous, like bad eggs.
The Stouts
There seems to be a strong tradition of stout drinking in tropical climates and there are three stouts readily available here at the moment. I'm not certain why they all clock in at 8%, it would be nice to see something at the lower end of the alcohol range for this style (4-6%). Stouts obviously are popular with the locals as you'll frequently see slabs of Black Panther at roadside bars. ABC (Singapore) has a coffee / chocolate aroma and pours with a creamy brown head. However, the roasted malt and coffee flavours are dominated by a strong 'burnt' flavour and noticeable alcohol. Black Panther (Cambodia) lacks in aroma and has poor head retention, it also has a noticeable unpleasant after-taste, not recommended. The pick of these for us was the Angkor Extra Stout (Cambodia) which has a coffee aroma, roasted malt and coffee flavours with a noticeable hop bitterness, and a good creamy head. With the abundance of lagers here, it's wonderful to find some beers with such strong character.
It's not quite Real Ale but it's not bad...
Finally, i've found this little gem is available in quite a few bars and at least a couple of bottle shops in Phnom Penh. Beer Lao Dark Lager (Laos) is something like a Vienna Lager or a Munich Dunkel. The alcohol isn't too noticeable at 6.5%,
it has a lovely dark bronze colour with a frothy white head. Although there isn't any noticeable hop flavour, and only a slight bitterness it has a lovely malty flavour and a light-medium mouthfeel. As a real ale drinker, this has become my drop of choice in Phnom Penh.So, that's it, the world of Phnom Penh beer in one blog post. Apparently, there are currently two "micro-breweries" in Phnom Penh which I haven't visited yet but will be sure to report here when I do !
I decided to hire a dirt bike for our trip to the seaside. It's a pretty good way to get around here as the roads are often not good and we thought it would be fun. I hired a Honda Baja 250cc from "The Bike Shop" which is a French run shop on street 302. The bikes here cost more to hire than the local shops but they seem in pretty good nick and are well maintained with genuine parts which seemed pretty important to me for our 500+km round trip.Despite not having ridden a bike since leaving Blighty 6 years ago, it was really easy to pick up again and I soon found myself blatting round Phnom Penh. So after strapping on our one small bag, Em took the very uncomfortable pillion position and we took off for Kep.
The number 3 highway to Kep wasn't all that great, some small stretches of dirt, not enough tarmac for two lanes, and some of the bridges were out or damaged which meant you had to take a detour through the dry river bed on dirt (not sure what they will do in the wet season). The result though was that we couldn't go too fast - our top speed for the whole trip to Kep was probably 50kmh - which was lucky as one of my few concentration lapses happened on the way when I started checking out a large Buddha Em was pointing out to me and ran off the road onto the verge by accident.
The low speed was also good for me to get acclimatised to Cambodian highway driving which is just as terrifying as Phnom Penh city driving but in different ways. When I passed my bike test back in the day I took an extra 2 day advanced course where the guy taught the art of "defensive riding". On English roads they didn't literally mean everyone else is "attacking" you but that was the mentality to develop ie: what if that car pulls out etc. In Cambodia, it's very important to have this mentality all the time as that car definitely will pull out and everyone is quite literally out to get you. I said in a previous post, bikes are pretty low in the road pecking order. So, if cars want to overtake on the single lane highways, and you're the only thing coming the other way, they'll pull out. Blind corner ? No worries, just pull out. Brow of a hill ? She'll be right, out you go. Very quickly you learn to ride almost in the gutter and eye off your potential runoff all the time.
Starting to develop that 1000 yard stare...
The other local road hazard I was introduced to on the way down was cows. These mangy looking specimens wander round trying to find a decent patch of grass and they'll just step out if they think it's on the other side of the road. Get that emergency stop ready...by the way the steaks are pretty terrible over here but that's another story.
We did some real dirt up and down Bokor Mountain for a day trip which was great fun, 30km of hairpins up and down the side of a mountain to see an old resort. The next hazard we encountered just after this on the way to Sihanoukville and to be fair it wouldn't happen all the time. It was Khmer New Year and one of the traditions is to throw water at people. I don't know why but I never saw this happen to anyone on foot. It seems to be mainly a motorised pursuit and everyone is fair game. The first time we saw a 'squadron' of moto's screaming down the highway with the pillions throwing water bombs at each other and the drivers, then some kids on the side of the road started throwing water bombs at Em & I as we whizzed past. The most spectacular was the sight of 2 open top trucks carrying 20 people each and a dustbin of water pass each other on the busy highway and everyone on board unload on the opposition using saucepans, buckets etc. Needless to say we got soaked multiple times, but I managed not to crash the bike.
Highway 4 back from Sihanoukville was a great road, only single carriageway but good tarmac all the way, fast, and it had proper road markings. The road markings don't really mean anything however. They had solid single white lines and solid double white lines in the middle of the road in a number of places, but on some occasions I couldn't see why and on others where they were definitely needed there were none. The whole exercise was academic though as I quickly realised that no-one pays any attention to them anyway. The thing is that everything I said before is still true (overtaking on blind corners, brows of hills, when you're coming the other way, double solid white lines etc) except that now it's happening at 100kmh. How's that verge looking now ? The added danger is that now there are swanky 4WD's & dark glass Lexus' coming flying up behind and overtaking you when you're trying to overtake the guy in front. The low points of the trip back were probably the articulated truck coming the other way deciding that we weren't big enough to worry about and pulling out to overtake another artic (we were run off the road yet again), and the black military 4WD overtaking us that almost took us out as I pulled out to overtake a slow van. I couldn't help wondering about the road death toll on the way back. It must be high, not just because of the poor driving standards and roads, but because people are frequently jammed into cars / trucks, hanging out the boot as they fly along, sitting on the roof of a van etc. We saw one cattle truck leaving Kep which must have had 100 + people in it...standing room only !
By this time my 1000 yard stare was fully developed. I found myself constantly looking way ahead up the road, in my mirrors, in my blind spot like a paranoid crazy man. At several points I was angry enough to vent with my horn, but it's really pointless as that isn't what the horn is for here. To be fair to the Cambodians, they've actually got this one right, the horn is used to say "hey, i'm here", and not "*!@# you, you crazy ^#*U%&@". The times they usually say "hey, i'm here" though are just after they've pulled out to overtake on the brow of a hill, oncoming into your path just before they run you off the road etc so I don't think I can really praise driving standards too highly.
Sorry for ranting but there is a point to all this. After 5 hours of extreme concentration that had left me feeling like a physical and mental wreck we arrived back into Phnom Penh. Ah, home sweet home, just a few kilometres to drive through streets we knew and well, kind of loved. But no, what's this, the traffic's being held up by some traffic police to let a government convoy through, and now we can go, but the cop is pulling me over, and i'm trying to ride round because I know why and oh no, it's too late I have to stop.
We'd heard all about the corrupt local coppers from friends, lounging around on the side of the road in groups of 4 or 5, waiting for a barang to come past, pulling them over on some trumped up charge and getting them to pay an "on the spot" fine. I'd already dodged them several times (they're too lazy to give chase if you just drive past) but this time i'd have had to ridden over the rozzer to escape which didn't seem like a good idea. We knew the right strategy to adopt, act innocent and dumb, smile a lot, negotiate heavily from their opening price to a figure of $1-$2 or so, and off you go.
After 500km of nightmare roads, and in my heightened mental state though I lost the plot a little bit, I started throwing my hands around and demanding to know why they'd pulled me over. They got a bit agitated and started mentioning the police station. The "charge" was that I didn't have a Cambodian drivers license, my international license doesn't cut it apparently. At this point Em wisely intervened and asked for the "on the spot" fine. We both laughed out loud when the old filth wrote down $70. Then we sat down on the ground and waited. I was still fuming, but Em did a great job to get them down to $3 which we paid. As we were leaving the tough guy who had given me a hard time came over and leering said "How much did you pay huh ?". Grrr...if only I was Eric Bana.
I know this is the lay of the land here. These guys only get paid $30 a month so supplementing their income this way is kind of understandable. I can't get it out of my head though that this kind of endemic corruption in society and institutions has and will continue to retard progress in this country.
All things considered, the bike was great fun (apart from very sore behinds) and we would both do it again.
Em & I had a great trip down to the seaside over Khmer New Year, lots of adventures to blog about when i'm feeling better (have been sick with a stomach bug). For now though, here is a link to the photo's :http://gallery.me.com/pete.andrews/100046
By far our favourite way of getting around PP is the ubiquitous Tuk Tuk or Moto-Romauk. Walking down the street you are constantly propositioned by these guys who all seem to have a different sales patter down. We now have a banter going with our local driver who hangs down the end of the street. The Tuk Tuks in Phnom Penh are more comfortable and less noisy than their Bangkok equivalents as they are really motorbike chariots (rather than the integrated 2 stroke versions in Thailand). The breeze is very welcome on a hot day and it's a great way to see the city and experience the insane traffic without any personal risk. Having said that, our Tuk Tuk was T-boned by a car on the roundabout the other day. Luckily like most crashes here it was low speed and no damage was done. A Tuk Tuk typically costs $1-$2 depending on distance and time of day. I think these guys must make pretty good money and i'm sure most of the moto drivers would aspire to get a tuk tuk one day, seems to me they are like the London cabbies of Phnom Penh.
Em & I have visited a cool bar / art gallery / cinema venue called Meta House a couple of times since we've been here, and we think it's going to be one of our regular hang-outs. As well as an art gallery downstairs, there is a rooftop terrace bar and open air cinema which shows a different film each night. The art scene here isn't all that developed yet and Meta House seems to attract twenty or so people (a mix of expats and Khmers depending what's showing) each night. Last week we watched a documentary filmed in 1989 which tracked progress in Cambodia following the fall of the Khmer Rouge. There were some keen local historians in the crowd, and the Q&A session with the film-maker was fascinating, particularly to put what we'd seen in context of current events and the ongoing Khmer Rouge tribunal. The Prime Minister Hun Sen was interviewed in the film and his youth and passion for change in 1989 made for a stark contrast with the current state of affairs.
Last night we went to see a very different set of films made by a young Khmer guy who is a master and teacher in the mon-Khmer martial art of Yuthakun Khom. Apparently Yuthakun Khom dates back a thousand years or so to the Angkor Empire, and it consists of kicking, punching, wrestling and lock type moves as well as some weapons work (staffs, swords etc). Despite only having one small digital camcorder, the 21 year old film-maker Norak Soeng has written, directed and starred in several films which resemble low-budget Hong Kong martial arts flicks or Kung Fu movies. The cast is made up of the students of the local club where he teaches. The movies were pretty funny, and the live voice-over also caused some laughs (classic lines such as "You bastard!" and "I love you too, babe"). The action highlights were probably the flying head kick to knock a guy off a motorbike (no stunt doubles here), and the flying knee lock around the head followed by a roll down some stairs. Don't ask me how I managed to get Em along to what was essentially a "boys night", but I think she enjoyed it too. The film-maker has apparently won some awards at the Apsara TV video competition last year and i'd say it's well-deserved, I suspect he would like to become a Khmer Bruce Lee and he does have all the ingredients - great martial art skills, an eye for action, as well as good looks and a foppish haircut. Good on these guys for getting up and doing this stuff on such a low budget and minimal equipment.
The guide for Meta-House is available at most cafe's and bars around town, and there's also a web-site for anyone who's interested ; http://www.meta-house.com
Firstly, apologies for the lack of updates of late. By way of catching up, here are a few random thoughts and happenings from the past week.
It's still stinking hot in Phnom Penh (30's & humid), but we've had a few dry electrical storms at night. We were at the FCC having a drink the other night when a dust storm blew in. It was fairly dramatic as the FCC has open sides to allow you to look out over the Mekong as you sip your Gin & Tonic. Gale force winds and dust forced everyone to retreat into the bar. Anyway, monsoon is supposed to be arriving very soon (2-4 weeks), and apparently it literally arrives in a day. I'll keep you posted !
Last night on the way home we spotted a couple of American missionaries on push-bikes (wearing the uniform white short sleeve shirt) who had stopped to spread the good word to some Khmer's hanging out on the street. I don't think they were getting very far, there were some pretty blank looking faces.
Well, next week is Khmer New Year. This is a big holiday in Cambodia and Phnom Penh will empty as most Khmer's head out to the provinces to spend time with family etc. Some very impressive lights and decorations went up in town yesterday. Em has 4 days off work for the holiday so we're taking the opportunity to head down to the coast - Kep, Kampot & Sihanoukville. I've hired a dirt-bike to ride down from Phnom Penh which should be fun.
Finally, i've also found some interesting blogs whilst i've been researching our upcoming adventures, these two are particularly good and worth checking out (the first is the blog of an English guy who has been living here a while by the sounds of it, and the second one provides news, commentary and video clips of the current Khmer Rouge trial which is taking place in town) :-
http://www.andybrouwer.co.uk/blog/
http://www.cambodiatribunal.org/index.php
Oh, and my nemesis...is a street sign on the corner of Street 240 & Norodom. As i've said before, tall people aren't really catered for very well in Cambodia. This particular street sign is right in the middle of the pavement (see my previous post about pavements), and at the perfect height to take out the top of my head. Em can pass under it just fine. I've now clocked myself on it twice, the last time I picked up a nasty bump and cut. Grrr....240 street sign, you'll get yours!
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