melkor

I'd agree wholeheartedly with marie-louise - Pho 84 rocks. I eat there every time I'm in the area.

Bistro Lulu and Becasse were the two best meals we had on our last trip to Sydney (six months ago). No trip to Sydney would be complete without a meat pie, Hannah's Hot Pies is where we got most of ours (they are owned by the same people as Harry's Cafe de Wheels)

Glad you're enjoying our trip. That picture hardly does the dish justice - it's one of the best asparagus preparations either of us have ever had. This trip has further confirmed my belief that the only food worth going out for is either very low end or very high end. Our best experiences have been at the extremes and our worst failures culinarily speaking have been at the mid-range restaurants. We've got a flight home in 9 hours, so we'll wrap up the blog from the airport lounge.

Dinner at Felix (sorry the pictures are so dark - the lighting by our table was minimal): This is what you see when you enter the restaurant from the elevator. Very sleek and modern, the place feels more like a club (even has a dance floor) than a restaurant. We settled on Felix as our dinner choice pretty late last night (close to 7pm), so we were fortunate that our hotel concierge was able to secure a reservation for us that night at 9, and a table with a view of Hong Kong Island at that: The bread basket included herb crispy flatbread (advertised as spicy but not very), focaccia rolls, and soft dinner rolls. Seared ahi tuna - the tuna itself was very fresh, and was sprinkled with salt, pepper, white and black sesame seeds, and minced chives. This was accompanied by a sauce (wasabi and what tasted like creme fraiche, swirled with hot mustard) and a salad of greens, radicchio, cucumbers, fennel, and pickled ginger. All of the components contributed to the overall harmony of the dish. Seared foie gras - very good quality foie gras with a nicely crisped outside and creamy interior. The berry sauce, slightly sweet, was a great contrast for the rich foie. Caramelized onions provided a welcome depth. Herb coated trout - the fish wasn't dry, but it was oddly firm, and the sauce, while silky in texture, was overpowered by the dill. This was served with a handful of vegetables and mashed potatoes with the same herbs as the sauce. Grilled lamb medallions - really really freaking good. The lamb was very flavorful without tasting gamy, and was served with an excellent red wine reduction sauce, along with a few bits of blue cheese, which I normally don't like, but in this case worked well. Spinach - sauteed with garlic, this tasted pretty much like what we make at home. "Felix 5" - 5 of their 6 desserts (all but the cheesecake). On top was the chocolate fondant - MsMelkor's favorite, even though she usually finds chocolate desserts tasty but uninteresting. This version had a great smooth, fudgy texture and rich flavor. In the middle were the pineapple financier (very enjoyable, simple pineapple flavor), tiramisu (my favorite even though I generally don't care for tiramisu, but this was an excellent example of the dish, with the perfect ratio of ladyfingers to mascarpone), and "apple pie" (the only real failure of the evening - the apples had been soaked in liqueur, which seemed to replace the apple flavor with alcohol). On bottom was mango pavlova - this dish had too many components (meringue, egg white cookie, some strange creamy substance, mango slices formed into a flower, blueberries, and odd cubes of mintiness), which made it difficult to eat. Chocolates - chocolate covered ginger, which was waaay too much ginger for the amount of chocolate. Eating the chocolate off the ginger stick worked better, as this provided a hint of ginger rather than a walloping. The other item was a tasty, but standard, chocolate-covered pretzel. The service was strange - almost nonexistent, and somewhat awkward, but overall we both hugely enjoyed the meal. It was quite different from what we've been eating for the past three weeks, and was a good example of what "fusion" cuisine can be.

MsMelkor read about Yellow Door kitchen in a few places - there are a few sites I found on Google that list a handful of home-style restaurants, including Yellow Door. It was also mentioned on eG here. We weren't seeking it out, but as we were wandering through the area, we recognized the sign, so we thought we'd give it a try. It's a bit chilly here (15-19C) so we skipped the ferry and took MTR across the water. We hear it's got a great view, but I'm not sure we're going to get to it this trip.

Breakfast, Lunch, and Snacks: We started our day with the standard hotel club breakfast - nothing amazing, but better than yesterday. Neither dish really merits much description, but here are the pictures and what's on each plate. Smoked salmon on crackers, chocolate muffin, croissant with blackberry/elderberry/ginger jam. Yoghurt with dried fruits and nuts, croissant with the same jam as above. Lunch was another story altogether. We spent the morning around Hollywood road, checking out the antique shops. The Yellow Door Kitchen can be found in the middle of a busy market in the area: The contrast between the ultra-modern archectecture and the street vendors is amazing. It's also interesting to see that most of the street vendors and all of the grocery stores list country of origin on all the produce/meat displays. That small yellow sign, above the green beer sign lets you know you're in the right place. It's only six flights of stairs to climb to get to the restaurant. Finally. The restaurant lists its address as 6th floor 37 Cochrane Street, Central. It's worth finding, it's worth the hike up the stairs, and it's amazing that you can eat there for a quarter of the price of Hutong. Not that Hutong is overpriced, this place is just an amazing deal. There are set menus for 2 and 4 at lunch, and probably something similar for dinner. Glass noodles with shredded chicken in chili sauce - the noodles were thick and roughly cut, the ideal texture for holding the spicy sauce. A wonderful start to the meal. Szechuan dan-dan noodles - thin noodles with minced beef (it's often made with pork, but luckily for us, it was beef today), toasted sesame seeds, peanuts, green onions, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, chilies, and I'm sure several other mystery ingredients. This was waaay too much food but was at least as good as the previous dish. It had great spice, but the heat did not overwhelm the other flavors. Deep-fried fish in chili sauce - as you can see, this was served whole and was drenched in a delicious chili sauce with garlic, ginger, green onions, minced chilis, cilantro....The fish itself was perfectly cooked (most of the fish we've had on this trip has been somewhat overcooked, which is probably for the best when we're eating on the side of the road). The chili sauce was moderately spicy and thick. Braised chicken - this tasted surprisingly similar to something you'd have in the south of France, and was very well-prepared. The sauce was white-wine based, and the dish included whole cloves of garlic, whole shallots, and celery. There was a bit of minced chilis, and the chicken was hacked, which makes it a bit more interesting to eat. It was strange to have something that reminded us of the food we make at home. Carnage - we did our best but there was just too much food! While we shopped after lunch, Melkor needed fuel: Le Gouter Bernardaud chocolates (caramel on the left, cashew on top, pistachio on right) POCKY!! We're off to dinner at Felix at the Peninsula. Supposed to have great decor, which is always a bit suspicious, but we hear the food is good too. Hopefully we'll enjoy it as much as Lucy did.

We unfortunately have neither time nor the required visas for a trip to Macau. We spent a few hours walking around the Mongkok night markets, which had surprisingly few options for street food - all of which looked or smelled bad. Having been smelling donuts for some reason all day we decided to skip dinner and have coffee and donuts in bed while watching a DVD.

We've been running around more or less non-stop since we landed here in Hong Kong. Internet access is extremely easy to find as there is wifi available everywhere in this hotel - not that it has made our posts more frequent as you must be in the hotel to use the service available there. Our first few food experiences here were less than earth-shattering, primarily due to our laziness. We're staying at the six-month old Langham Place hotel while we're here in HK. As we are on a club floor, they include breakfast and an afternoon tea, and an evening cocktail hour in the lounge each day. Snacks in the hotel lounge, served with glasses of completely uninspired Veuve Cliquot yellow label. More lounge snacks - all three were well made but were quite strange together. Grilled veg, tandoori chicken, and thai beef salad. Granted, I'm the idiot that put them together on a plate.... Creme brulees (the custard was too firm) on top, tiramisu (unremarkable) in the middle, and banana fritters (not a good choice to serve buffet-style since they were soggy) at the bottom of the plate. We were exhausted last night so we made a somewhat poor decision to eat dinner at the hotel restaurant. This hotel is in the middle of Mongkok, a train ride away from the restaurant-oriented parts of town - the easy answer clearly isn't always the best one. Sesame walnuts with a slightly sweet glaze - we had heard that it's common for restaurants in HK to serve you appetizers you haven't ordered then charge you for it - this is an example of that. They were a good start to a mediocre meal, but I don't think we would have ordered them if given the choice. Veggie egg rolls on the left, sauteed bamboo shoots on the right. The egg rolls were the highlight of the meal, with fresh tasting filling, crisp skins, and an excellent sauce. Half-chicken baked in salt - extremely moist, though the chicken was a bit bland. It was served with two sauces, one described as 'special sauce' and the other was a puree of garlic/ginger/green onions/sugar in vinegar. The skin was very rubbery, which we neither expected nor ate. Shortribs with a dark and spicy sauce, onions, and peppers. A complete pain in the ass for us to eat with the chopsticks, the dish tasted good but strangely the beef shortribs on the Singapore flight from SFO to Seoul used better quality beef and overall tasted better. So our waiter drops off the previous two dishes then asks 'Do you want rice?'. We say 'Sure'. He asks what kind. I stupidly say, 'Whatever you think would be best with this'. He delivers a small bucket full of this - fried rice with sea cucumber, duck (we think), prawns, and assorted veggies. An inoffensive dish, but also a worthless contribution to the meal overall. Breakfast....It's hard to get motivated to go down 38 floors to then hunt down breakfast when you can just ride down two floors on the elevator and have a decent bite to eat. This morning MsMelkor was the only one who remembered to photograph her breakfast. Egg custard with crabmeat at the bottom, apple turnover, fresh fruit. The egg dish had very little flavor aside from the crabmeat at the bottom. It's hard to go wrong with an apple turnover, though, and fresh fruit is definitely a good thing. I had french toast - tasted as you would expect french toast that's been sitting in a steam tray long enough to still be there when we dragged ourselves out of bed at 9:30am. Smoked salmon on toast - surprisingly good, the fish was clearly cured in citrus before being lightly smoked, it was as good or better than the smoked salmon we buy from Dean and Deluca at home. Fortunately for us, we fared much better at lunch, which we'll write up in a separate post.

Lunch and snacks on a Royal Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong. Champagne and orange juice before takeoff - both were better than expected with the champagne being fresh and clean with a bit of citrus (Lanson is the producer, neither of us have seen it elsewhere). Cashews with an ingredient list that includes 11% butter can't possibly be bad. This was just strange. That's some sort of wasabi mayo in a hollowed out tomato. Each of those two slices of stuff are from different terrines, salmon makes the center of one and the outer layer of the other, and kapong fish fills the same role in reverse. A surprisingly tasty pretzel (once salt was added) and a roll - it's not clear why we were served a pretzel to go with the fish, but it tasted good nonetheless. Duck breast cooked in red wine sauce (to an interior temp of 500*F it would seem) - MsMelkor found it completely inedible, I was hungry enough to overlook its flaws. The noodles and veggies were reasonably good. The veggies included pumpkin, a translucent white thing, a non-beet beet looking thing, and a bunch of standard mixed veg - carrots, zucchini. Cheese plate with no description - one was a mild semi-firm cheese which was fine, the fruit-studded soft cheese was less fine. Green tea cake and cappuccinos - the bottom layer was a green tea sponge; the middle layer was sweet bean paste, and the top was a green tea mousse. While we were checking in at our hotel in HK we had afternoon tea and some berries. English breakfast tea, raspberries, blueberries, whipped cream, a couple of tarts - all very good and a welcome improvement over the no-guns/no-whores check-in booth in Siem Reap. Bowl of fruit in the room - grapes are in need of a bath and neither of us is motivated to clean them so our fruit intake will have to wait till we leave the room. We've got excellent connectivity here, so updates will be more frequent. We're here for another three days and have planned little more for this leg of our trip other than the next hour so any ideas/recommendations are welcome.

Dinner at Sara-Jane's was excellent. Having eaten curries of one kind or another for most every meal the past few weeks this was a nice change. The restaurant as was mentioned earlier in this thread is in an office building and is quite strangely decorated inside, looking more like a cafeteria than decent restaurant. The sign didn't instill much confidence in the place either. Thai-Esarn and Italian?! Lemon juice and tea - the tea arrived both hot and cold having been brewed and then poured over ice and delivered without stirring at all, quite strange to sip through a straw a beverage which is both hot and cold - switching from one to another completely at random. Gai Yang (chicken and sticky rice) - chicken marinated in coriander root, chili, garlic, and black pepper. Since we are all "curried out" it was a great departure from what we've been eating for the past few weeks. Very balanced flavors and moist meat. Beef Larb - minced beef with shallots, chilis, mint, and chives. This had good texture and flavor, but we both preferred the gai yang. Another fruit-juice welcome drink at the hotel bar Breakfast this morning was perfect on all counts. Roti on the griddle on the food cart. Roti starts out as a tiny ball of miracle-dough, it somehow stays together while the roti-guy stretches it from a ball maybe 2 inches across to a disc that is 18 or so inches across. It then goes into the oil on the griddle, crisps up a little and is folded into a square, it's flipped over and fried a little more. Then it goes onto a piece of paper, has a little sweetened condensed milk drizzled on it and it's ready to eat. Perfection - it even passes the Dr Nick test. Crispy and greasy, the perfect thing to eat first thing in the morning in the cab on the way to the airport. MsMelkor's real breakfast in the Thai lounge in Bangkok Airport.

Or a cube of blue for dessert!

In economy class the food on Thai is pretty bad, in business it's OK. Bangkok air is worse and President is even worse. Singapore has really good food in business class, having never flown in economy on Singapore I've got no idea what the food is like. Our flight to Hong Kong in a bit is on Thai, hopefully the food will be better this flight.

Last night dinner was provided courtesy of Bangkok Airlines. Fish which seemed at first to be coated in some sort of breading turned out just to be gummy-skinned, overcooked, bland white fish. The rice was passable and the veggies inoffensive. The best part of the meal was the coconut ice dessert which was surprisingly decent. Today we didn't so much have breakfast as snack on stuff as we wandered around Bangkok. Grilled potato and corn dough balls - very heavy and a perfect start to the day. At least until we made it to the end of the block by which time they were cold and no longer delicious, having turned into balls of lead. Random chocolate/hazelnut filled almond cookies from some bakery along the road - crispy and satisfying. After walking around the garment district near our hotel for the morning we took the sky train to the weekend market which is absurdly huge and packed full of vendors, tourists, and locals. We'll likely need to purchase another bag to bring home all the crap we've bought. All that bargaining required sustenance. Clean kitchen, busy restaurant, no tourists inside - perfect. Pineapple shake, which is simply a pineapple, some ice, and a few moments in a blender. Healthy deep-fried cashews - salty, a little spicy, with some chopped green onions. Strange fried spring rolls - the skin was like 10 layers thick and it was stuffed full of unidentifiable veggies and served with curried peanuts on top. Tasty if a bit odd. Finally found sticky rice with mango - As Pim said earlier there are green mangos all over the country (which MsMelkor loves to eat with chili powder/sugar/salt) but the ripe ones are far harder to track down. This one was quite good, nicely ripe and sweet. The rice could have been a little creamier though. Off to Sara-Jane's for dinner then a flight to Hong Kong after breakfast. We'll likely have wireless access at the airport lounge in Bangkok so we may post from there.

We've seen those small green oranges all over Thailand as well, but in Cambodia they have baseball sized green oranges that make genuinely bad orange juice. The best OJ so far this trip came from an orange grove near Tha Ton in northern Thailand, fresh squeezed from orange oranges. We're having dinner tonight at Sara-Jane's - we'll post about it tomorrow, but having found sticky-rice and mangos at lunch today we'll likely order something different tonight.

Since we've got really fast wifi access at the Phnom Penh airport we'll get ourselves fully caught up. We had lunch at Friends the Restaurant. We were both happy to eat there since it's a great cause - the fact that the food was really good was just a nice bonus. As strange as it is to eat in a Western restaurant here, this is a place that could be boxed up, staff and all, and deposited in San Francisco and be packed all the time. The menu is all small plates, some western, some regional. We had a fairly light lunch: Smoked eggplant dip - the stuff on top that looks like dill much to our surprise is actually fennel tops. Otherwise it's just a very creamy and very good version of baba ganoush served with really good baguette slices that are passed under a broiler before being served. Sweet potato french fries with curry mayo - much less sweet than our sweet potatoes, like a regular french fry (twice fried) but rather than fluffy inside they are creamy and they have a nice crispy outside. Mushroom and leek springrolls - fairly standard, just good. More mushrooms than leeks. Total bill was $7, and any tip you leave goes to the foundation supporting the students. Flight is boarding in a minute, and we've had some iced coffee while posting this.

Taro? That coconut baobing looks Chinese to me. ← Tasted just like coconut, but really it could be anything. The coconut baobing was from Vietnam (purchased for 60 cents at a roadside stand halfway between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh during one of several stops along the way).

When we arrived back in Phnom Penh we went directly to our hotel. On this trip we've stayed in a huge range of places. In Phuket we stayed in a semi-lux bungalow resort on a hill overlooking the white sandy beach: It's amazing to think that's what the place looked like a week ago. In Cambodia, we stayed at a guest house where the toilet and shower are disturbingly close together: Our next hotel also provided the same toilet/shower system (common in inexpensive guesthouses in this part of the world), and posted a very specific list of rules posted in the room including: no ironing in the room, no explosives, no prostitution in the room(!!), and guests must fill out the registration form. Just for good measure this is the check-in booth: As we were both dangerously overdue for a proper shower and a comfortable bed we checked into the hotel Amanjaya in Phnom Penh upon our return yesterday. While the hotel is expensive by Cambodian standards it's a spectacular deal for a luxury hotel. Once we arrived at the hotel we decided to stay in for the rest of the night. For our New Year's Eve dinner we started with the hotel's welcome drink of pomelo, watermelon, and orange fruit punch The garnish that looks like a giant slice of lime is a green-skinned orange, which we assume is what all the restaurants we've had orange juice at have been using to create a fresh-squeezed orange juice drink that tastes frighteningly similar to sunny delight. Once finished with our fruit punch we moved on to a pitcher of mojitos. Since we were at a restaurant where the greens are less likely to cause lasting harm to our bodies we ordered a salad with goat cheese and puff pastry. The aged goat cheese and hot puff pastry was nice, but it'd be difficult for it to match the joy provided by the first fresh greens we've eaten in a few weeks. Fish amok - this was beautifully presented. It didn't look like a lot of food (we've seen it in large bowls previously), but it turned out to be plenty. It could have used a little more sauce, however, since it was a bit dry. Seared tuna with fried zucchini and an orange sauce - the orange sauce was made from those same green oranges which are nowhere near as sweet as the oranges we are used to and made for an excellent savory sauce. The zucchini, tuna, and sauce worked very well together. Chocolate ice cream drizzled with melted chocolate for dessert. All of the dessert options were western and they make their ice cream on site. When we woke up we had tea and the plate of fruit the hotel provided in our room For a late morning breakfast MsMelkor fared far better than I did with her duck noodle soup: MsMelkor has been starting the day with rice or noodle soup nearly every day here, but this was the first time we saw duck as an option. The broth was delicious, flavored by lots of duck meat (yummy) and skin (rubbery). Strawberry yogurt drink. We didn't realize this came with the soup, as it wasn't listed on the menu, and were very confused when it was delivered by our non-English-speaking server. Not bad, though. A surprisingly good pain au chocolat, buttery and flaky, was the best of the bread plate. A very bad idea, the doxycyclene pill was the best part of this course aside from the breads. We're off to the airport, more from Bangkok.

It's an interesting experience trying to upload a bunch of pictures at random internet cafes around Phnom Penh. It's a city of a million people; there is at least one internet cafe per block on the main roads yet this is the third place we've been this morning and I think we've got a 50/50 shot at getting anything online today. We'll be in Bangkok tonight - access is much more readily available there. Having spent the past 40 minutes waiting for a 2meg archive to copy from a cd here to my webserver in California let's see if we can get ourselves caught up on photos. Yesterday we decided to take the bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh since it takes 5 hours and flights here are often delayed for longer than the entire trip takes over land. A 5 hour bus ride costs $4 USD here and takes the main road through the countryside. The road is mostly paved and 2 lanes wide (1 in each direction in theory). The experience is completely surreal - the general theme for 5 hours is a bus careening down the center line of a narrow road, drivers hand firmly planted on the horn with cars, motorbikes, carts pulled by cows, bicyclists, and pedestrians scattering in all directions. Meanwhile the TV is either blaring Khmer music videos that seem to be a cross of Yanni and Celene Dion which for some reason about half the people riding the bus feel the need to sing along with. The alternate entertainment when the TV isn't playing music videos is a Cambodian comedy routine which was far more entertaining for everyone else on the bus than it was for us. Clearly the volume on the TV has to be brutally loud or it wouldn't be audible over the blaring bus horn. Backtracking to two days ago where we left off with our photos. pre-lunch refreshment was provided by a can purchased purely based on the name printed on it: It tastes just like the stuff inside a young coconut plus the delicious flavor of tin-can and sugar. The view from the restaurant at lunch (with the appropriate number of walls) watermelon juice lok lak vermicelli salad w/chicken this is what we tried to order for dessert, but unfortunately they were out of ice scream. mid-day refreshment, this stuff is amazing. In the afternoon we climbed all over Beng Mealea temple, which is where they filmed Tomb Raider (having been there I'm somewhat interested in seeing the movie). The jungle has spent the last thousand years reclaiming the temple. What isn't rubble is fair game for climbing which makes for a hugely fun, somewhat dangerous, and extremely tiring afternoon. As MsMelkor mentioned earlier we had tea for dinner, which I believe is the lamest dinner I've ever had. No picture necessary. Breakfast yesterday still in Siem Reap: MsMelkor's porridge Melkor's baguette french toast (redundant?) the restaurant's resident cat. For lunch before our bus adventure our driver took us to a restaurant recommended by our guide which he had not previously been to. Depite the fact that it had no walls and had chickens running through it the food wasn't as good as it should have been. a couple of the chickens are somewhat visible in the center of this pic, uploading a larger one would be far too painful at the moment. most of the restaurants we've visited in Cambodia deliver silverware to foreigners this way - the glass is filled with boiling water and brought to the table still simmering. Khmer chicken soup, which is a chicken broth and coconut milk based soup with those little round eggplant similar to thai eggplant, shallots, cubed chicken, onion, cilantro, and minced red chilis. The spice seemed to have been toned down for us, so we added some more chilis and a pinch of sugar. Cashew chicken, which was stirfried with a bunch of veggies. Aside from being somewhat bland it was pretty good once it was tossed with some chilis. They brought us the largest young coconut we've ever seen to drink after we finished our iced coffees. On our grand bus adventure we had a couple of snacks, purchased from stalls at the bus depot. Packaged foods that we've tried here have had far fewer ingredients than those at home - the chocolate corn (??) thing had all of 5 ingredients all of which are naturally occurring and easy to pronounce. Despite the promising ingredients list the package contained this: Not that they tasted all that bad (MsMelkor disagreed), sort of like captain crunch that someone had dumped a packet of instant hot chocolate mix on. These were far better, and we weren't the only people on the bus eating them We've been sitting here for the past 90 minutes so we'll finish getting caught up later. (Happy new year)

The morning glory tastes sort of like spinach, but more mild and the stems add a nice crunch. It's hardly a subtle dish as it's served in oyster sauce with lots of garlic. Spinach would likely yield a similar result. It's not at all clear if the morning glory being used in these dishes is the same as the weed that grows all over the place in the states - it'd probably be worth finding out before trying to cook them. Strangely we've been unable to find sticky rice with mangos when we were wandering around Thailand. We'll go back to hunting for them when we're in Bangkok tomorrow. We've found plenty of strange desserts though - the strangest being found on a Thai Airways flight from Chiang Rai to Bangkok last week: This dish clearly wouldn't be complete without the sprinkling of sesame seeds on top. As best we could figure it's a coconut gelatin carved into a perfect cube and dyed blue for some inexplicable reason. It didn't taste bad, but it also didn't taste good.

We picked this part of the world because we were planning to travel with a friend who is from this area; after her schedule changed we figured we'd just wing it. Neither of us speak Khmer or Thai, but anywhere we've been unable to find someone who speaks even a little English, we've been successfull by just pointing at stuff and bargaining for purchases using a calculator to show offers/counteroffers. Generally speaking, French is spoken in Cambodia by tour guides and people old enough to have been here when it was a colony. We booked most of our hotels and regional travel arrangements a couple of days before we needed them - tonight we are firming up our transport from here to Phnom Penh and somewhere to stay once we get there for New Years' Eve. A few things we booked in advance (the week before we left). We know enough about the food to be able to order what we want to eat, but we're far more likely to eat Thai food at a restaurant rather than try to replicate it at home. The only Khmer restaurant we've been to in the States is Battambang in Oakland - the majority of our success eating here has been following our noses and listening to our driver's advice. Having been treated like a human pin cusion before we left for the trip I (Melkor) can't say I'm all that excited about the medical tests we'll need when we return home, but given that mb7o's picture of the ice delivery looks cleaner than what we saw I'd agree that some more poking and prodding might be in order. That beef soup from this morning was available with noodles, but they seemed to be packaged ramen rather than the hand cut noodles we'd been enjoying in Thailand so we passed on them. The broth for the soup looked and tasted like it was made from a beef base with tomatoes, green onions, cilantro, lemongrass, with some lime to squeeze on top. The bread was really excellent - they were warming each piece on a charcoal grill before serving. It was definitely worth the 37.5 cents it cost. If anyone needs contact info for our driver send either of us a PM and we'll forward his contact info. We're wiped out from watching the sunrise at Angkor Wat, hiking all day, and watching the sun set from Phnom Bakheng - a temple on a hilltop overlooking the whole valley. We need to find a simple bite for dinner and get some sleep. In the morning we'll try and get some more pictures online, but for now here is a basic description of the rest of our day: We had no luck finding breakfast II, but we had a nice lunch in the middle of nowhere next to Kbal Spean (2 hours from town on what it would be generous to call a road). Again no walls, though this place was surrounded by gardens. Since we had just driven past a huge tarp full of watermelons by the side of the road on the way there, we had to order a glass of watermelon juice when we saw it on the menu. Unlike the watermelon juice we've had in the States, this was thick and flavorful, and tasted as if it had just been squeezed. For lunch we had lok lak; if I (Melkor) were less asleep I'd ask Google what exactly it is - for now I'll leave it as cubed beef with garlic sauce and a lemon pepper sauce and a fried egg on top for good measure. We also had vermicelli with chicken and shredded carrots and cucumbers, green onions, basil, and peanuts on top. Later in the afternoon, we had a few glasses of sugar cane juice to cool off between temples - one of our new favorite beverages. It's pretty much what it sounds like - sugar cane that is juiced by passing it through a machine that looks like a giant pasta roller. Sometimes other juices (like pineapple) are added. Signing off for now. More in the morning (night for most of you)!

No real reason to worry about the ice - it was hacked off a giant block on top of a makeshift table using a rusty saw, what could be more sanitary? Last night we had dinner at Sawasdee, the Thai restaurant at our hotel - the food was good, though far better can be found one country to the west of here, so I think we're done with Thai food for the rest of our Cambodia adventure. The som tam (green papaya salad) tasted fine, but a few days earlier we had the same dish at a market in Chiang Rai which was much better. This was from last night This was what we had in Chiang Rai The food at this market was some of the best we've had this trip. Along with the salad we had deep fried snakehead fish with chilies and spices, and a plate of fried morning glory. The fish was oddly presented since it had been taken off the backbone but was still packed full of pinbones which made it quite difficult to eat. The morning glory dish is one we've had several times while we were in Phuket. This version was sauteed longer, so it tasted less fresh, but it absorbed more delicious sauce! This morning we woke up before dawn, met our driver in what would be the lobby of our hotel had it any walls and headed off to see the sunrise at Angkor. Walking around the temple in the dark with a full moon has a very strange Indiana Jones feeling to it. After watching the sun come up, on the advice of our driver we stopped for breakfast at this road-side tent: where you have as your options for breakfast what is in that huge pot or nothing, bread is optional but strongly recommended, since it has an amazing crust and enables you to sop up all of the broth: We "chose" the beef soup with a warm baguette, the soup - very satisfying, though we'll stop for more breakfast-related food on our way to a temple in the countryside later this morning.

We've shrunk a bunch of pictures down to a reasonable size and found a slightly faster Internet cafe (oddly enough next door to the other one). Here are the pics to go with the previous post... Airline breakfast this morning looked like this: Followed by our very hearty combo of porridge, fruit, tea, and anti-malaria pills at our hotel restaurant (run by Thais): After breakfast we went to the Angkor Wat complex to wander around for the day. Tomorrow we get an early start to watch the sun rise at Angkor Wat, then meet up with our guide for a trip in the countryside for a somewhat remote set of temples. The good news, as we learned on the way to the temples this morning, is that the driver we've hired is very into food - he took us to lunch at a tent/restaurant that serves mostly taxi/tuktuk drivers: where we had this for lunch: Iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk Sugar cane juice (made on the spot) Chicken Amok - traditional Khmer food recommended by our driver, it's the Cambodian version of chicken curry served in a hollowed out coconut. The typical Amok is seafood, but it can be made with chicken, tofu, etc. Chicken Curry with veggies - also served in a coconut, this dish was a bit more spicy than the chicken amok, though neither was as spicy as we expected after a discussion with the server about our ability to eat spicy food despite our pasty white complexions. Wandering through the complex I (Melkor) had coconut water on a walk from one temple to another: These are available all over Thailand, Cambodia, and anywhere else with a similar climate - it's just a young coconut with a hole hacked in the top (usually with a slightly rusty cleaver or machete) and a straw. They are good at room temperature, but they are great on a hot day when the coconut has been kept on ice. Fortunately, this one came directly from an ice chest. It's hard to describe the beauty and scale of the temples here. Pictures really don't do it justice. It's amazing to be able to climb all over these ruins; one of our favorite temples from today is being actively reclaimed by the jungle - it's completely unrestored, and the only places that seem to be off-limits is what's left of the roof of the temple, and a few piles of unstable rubble. We'll see about posting a few images of the area tomorrow just to give you a sense of where we are. It's 6:00, and we are desperately hungry, so we're going to end this post now and seek out dinner. More tomorrow.

So here we are in an internet cafe in Siem Reap Cambodia, sharing a dial-up connection with a handful of locals. We've been traveling for two weeks, we're blogging the last week of our vacation here. In the past two weeks we've been wandering around Thailand, we were fortunate in our inability to extend our diving trip in Phuket last week so we were safely up north in Chiang Rai for the earthquake and Tsunami that trashed the beach we were staying on a few days earlier. We spent the past two days in Phnom Penh which was surprisingly enjoyable. Good food, nice people, and traffic that makes my driving look calm by comparison. This morning our first meal was on a converted cargo plane flying from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. We'll add pictures once we find reasonable speed net access. On a 45 minute flight on President Airlines we were fed a bag of peanuts and what looked like a croissant but was egg bread with some sort of coconut jam inside. When we checked into our hotel this morning we had a proper breakfast (for the country we just left) of rice porridge with chicken, scallions, and celery tops - the usual condiment tray of chili powder, sliced chilis in vinegar, fish sauce, and sugar was provided. Some pineapple, papaya, orange juice that tasted more like flat orange soda, lipton tea, and a doxycycline pill rounded out the meal. We're off to Angkor Wat for the day, we'll check in again tonight - hopefully with pictures. MsMelkor & Melkor

I did the same thing as a kid, frozen pizza was still better in the oven than the micro - but if you put one in each the microwave one would hold you over until the baked one was ready to eat I had pretty good luck making grilled cheese in the microwave using two of those discs (one on top one under the sandwich) but then again that was a while ago, somehow I doubt it would taste as good now.

Any wine shop would likely be happy to part with a bunch of empty boxes should you be willing to buy a bottle or two of wine from them. Another good option is just to ask at a grocery store that sells wine. I wouldn't worry about a 20 minute move for a few dozen bottles, you could just wrap them in towels and pack them in a box or three and drive them over.