A few stories along the road from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap (which is the town near Angkor Wat).
All about silk
One of our stops was at the Santuk Silk Farm. Santuk Silk Farm is more than just a touristy stop. The head of this enterprise is a woman from this region. Her mission is surely to make silk products for sale and profit. But she has structured her business to help educate and train local people to be entrepreneurs themselves.
We were able witness many of the steps between silk worm and finished fabric.
The life-cycle of the silkworm is to become the silkmoth. Silk threads come from the cocoons that conceal the transformation from worm (which is really the larva) to moth.
Silk moths lay batches of eggs, which become larvae. These larvae eat mulberry leaves, grow, and molt. They repeat this cycle four times. The fifth stage is when the larvae start spinning their cocoons, in which they will pupate and transform into moths.
Silk workers “mount” and organize the cocoons. The cocoons are sensitive to temperature, humidity and motion.
While in the mountages, the larvae start spinning silk around their bodies. Each of the cocoons is made out of a single long silk fiber, that the larvae produce using their special silk glands. A cocoon is about the size of a cotton ball, but the silk fiber that makes up the cocoon can measure up to 1.6 kilometers / 1 mile in length.
If left alone, the moth will develop and will push out of the cocoon. This emergence breaks the cocoon, rendering it unusable for silk production. Therefore, before the complete development of the moths, the silk workers boil the cocoons. Boiling kills the pupae and leaves the intact cocoons. And it softens the silk fiber.
“Reeling” is the process of pulling the silk fibers out of the cocoons. A single cocoon’s fiber is too fine to be used alone. So, fibers are reeled from multiple cocoons at the same time to create silk threads.
Silk threads are then twisted together into bundles and skeins.
These skeins in turn can be dyed and woven. ※
Spirit houses
In Cambodia, when you build a new house, you place some real gold and real silver in the ground beneath the house. Now you’ve ensured that the gold, which is the sun, and the silver, which is the moon, always shine on the occupants of the house.
If you buy an existing piece of property, you know that the spirits of the previous owners are already and always there. So you make sure there’s a spirit house outside your house, to honor them. We saw these little temple-houses raised up on podia everywhere, both at private dwellings and at businesses.
You also have a type of spirit house inside your house. This one is for your ancestors – without whom you wouldn’t be there!
Be nice-mean to your baby
Until they’re about 5 years old, children only hear sweet endearments phrased negatively. Imagine the tone of “Oh, what a cutie sweetie little bundle of loveliness!” with the words, “Oh, what an ugly little boy!” The reason is that past-life parents and relatives are ghosts now and they’re all around, paying attention. Parents don’t want to make their babies attractive to the ghosts who might snatch them back to their realm.
Yummy tarantulas
When we shared photos while we were in Cambodia, the images of our snacking on fried tarantulas received by far the most comments!
Everyone in our little tour group was excited — or grossed out — by the opportunity to eat some fried bugs and spiders. OK, most were grossed out, but very happy to encourage the crazier of us to munch away.
We had heard that during the horrors of the Khmer Rouge period, poverty and hunger were so dire that people turned to insects and scorpions and such just to survive. And that today, this kind of roadside stop is just for us strange tourists.
Well, both of those are true, and not quite the whole story. It turns out that people discovered that some of these creatures actually taste quite good: tarantulas, scorpions, silkworms and grasshoppers in particular. Today, they are a relatively expensive delicacy, saved for special events.
As part of convincing us gullible tourists, we were told that tarantulas live underground and are vegan! Supposedly, they eat roots of trees, and trees are considered medicinal and healthy, so eating tarantulas is healthy — right? Well, on the one hand, they aren’t exactly vegan; they feed mostly on insects like grasshoppers, beetles, and other small spiders. On the other hand, they are a healthy food, full of protein and iron, magnesium, phosphorus and copper.
By the way, don’t eat spiders that you find in your Cambodian house: they are poisonous no matter how they are prepared. ※
By the way, there were lots of nice options for non-insectivores too.
Famous Cambodian cupcakes
Something a little more appealing? This story starts about five years ago in the village of Preah Dak. The matriarch of a local family started making and selling palm cakes in front of her house along the highway. Folks from Phnom Penh as well as visitors like us stop here for the sweet tasty cakes. One Cambodian visitor said this coconut cake is part of Khmer identity. ※
The ingredients are sticky rice, coconut cream, and palm sugar — a lot of palm sugar. We found a post online that included a quote from the Cambodian Cupcake Master Chef: “I mix the dough with palm sugar, leave it for long enough, then mix it with palm fruit and coconut milk and leave that for half an hour to an hour and then we can start steaming. With this recipe, it’s so much faster than in the past when we had to leave it for hours,” she said. ※
Nāgas in Cambodian culture
We stopped briefly at an old bridge called Spean Preah TϞs. In itself, it was a bit interesting. Somewhere around 1200 CE, this bridge was constructed to connect the capital of Angkor and a provincial area to the southeast. This route was just one part of a broad network in the Angkor kingdom.
But it’s also a very nice example of the ubiquitous seven-headed viper Nāga sculptures.
For us, unaccustomed to such displays of cobra-like snakes, the sculptures are rather fearsome. We don’t think of rearing cobras as at all comforting.
But this type of Nāga is in fact comforting for Cambodians.
More generally in various Asian religious traditions, the Nāgas are a divine, or semi-divine, race of half-human, half-serpent beings that reside in the netherworld, and can occasionally take human or part-human form.
Stories of nāgas have been part of Khmer society for thousands of years.
One such story is a romantic origin story for Cambodia. It starts with an Indian prince named Kaundinya and Soma, a nāga princess. As the legend goes, Kaundinya received instruction in a dream to take a magic bow from a temple and defeat Soma. During the ensuing battle, Kaundinya and Soma fell in love and married, and established the royal lineage of a dynasty that ruled large parts of what today are Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. Their kingdom became known as Kambujadeśa or Cambodia.
The love story between Kaundinya and Soma is the foundation for many standard practices in modern-day Khmer culture, including wedding ceremonies and other rituals. The Khmer people regard themselves as descendants of the nāgas and many still believe the nāga exist today, destined to one day return and restore prosperity to their people.
In Khmer culture, nāgas symbolize rain, and a bridge between the mortal realm and Heaven. They have the ability to transform into half or fully human and act as protectors against invisible forces, deities, or malicious intentions.
Furthermore, Cambodian nāgas possess numerological symbolism based on the number of their heads. Odd-headed nāgas embody masculinity, infinity, timelessness, and immortality, since all odd numbers derives from the number one. Even-headed nāgas denote femininity, physicality, mortality, temporality, and the Earth. Odd headed nāgas are believed to represent immortality and are carved and used throughout Cambodia.
(source)
Opportunity and debt
On our final morning in Cambodia, Fila accompanied us to the new Siem Reap-Angkor International Airport. Its site is out amid agricultural fields about 50 km / 31 mi from Siem Reap. A Chinese company, Yunnan Investment Holdings Limited, built the airport under a 55-year build–operate–transfer agreement.
We visited during the dry season, in January. Rice fields were almost all dry, waiting for the rainy season that doesn’t come until August. We saw no mechanized farm equipment.
Fila explained that some rice farmers whose land was near the new highway to the airport as well as the airport itself sold their land to developers. With the purchase funds, the farmers built themselves new houses on their remaining land; perhaps they bought a new car. Then they realized that they’d sold their only source of food. Now they had to find work in the city and enter the indebtedness economy. Fila’s sad point was that the Cambodian education system is so undeveloped that ordinary folks don’t always understand indebtedness and unscrupulous developers.
Apsara dances
In our post about the Angkor temples, we mentioned the sculptures of divine Apsara dancers. We had the good fortune to enjoy real-life Khmer Apsara dances too.
We attended a dinner performance at Apsara Theatre in Siem Reap. Some of the dance pieces were recreations of dances that had been performed at offering ceremonies and palace celebrations in the Angkorian era.
King Jayavarman II, educated in Java, is given credit for the origins of Khmer choreography. In the 12th century, Indra descended on Earth and presented Jayavarman II with the kingdom of Cambodia, the attributes of kingship and the mythical Apsaras, who revealed choreography to Khmer people. (from the Apsara Theatre brochure)
These dances include very specific postures and gestures. Like for Hawai’ian hula, each movement carries a meaning. For example, when the left hand faces back and the right hand clasps in front of the chest with 3 fingers pointing up, the index finger touching the thumb, it is a symbol depicting the image of the snake Nāga. ※
Buddhist blessing at Preah Ang Kok Thlok
This stop wasn’t on the road to Siem Reap; it was near the Bayon temple at Angkor Thom. After a morning of walking among the temples, Fila, our guide, took us to receive blessings from a Buddhist monk.
We found an open-air structure filled with buddha statues right across the road from the Bayon temples. A Buddhist monastery is nearby.
A monk in standard orange clothing sat on the floor before the statues. His sleeping companions gave us a good feeling.
One by one, we were invited to approach the monk, bow and put out our right hand. He chanted and then wrapped a bracelet of red, green and orange threads around our wrist.
Afterwards, we asked Fila what the monk had been chanting. Fila shrugged and said he couldn’t understand the monk’s words; he wasn’t speaking Khmer. Instead, it’s a language specific to these Buddhist monks. But Fila reassured us that the blessing was for our safety and prosperity and good health. At least we think so.
All of us in our little group chose to wear the bracelets for the rest of our visit to Cambodia. Seemed like the indigenous (and perhaps safe) choice to make.
Wearing thread bracelets has been a tradition or custom of Cambodians since long time ago. In the past, the thread bracelets people wore were made of white raw thread that obtained from the Seima ceremony [which is a ceremony at a Buddhist temple].
In Cambodia, about 95% of populations are Buddhists. It’s believed that the threads have power to chase out all evils. People wear it as bracelets, children wear it as necklaces.
Nowadays, the thread bracelets people wear are not only the white raw thread but mostly are colorful. Some are purely red, green, and some are mixed of five or seven colors in a bracelet. These colorful thread bracelets are now received from senior monks of particular who people believe they can grant the divine power into the bracelets to protect them from evil spirits which possibly bring them misfortunes. After a period, the old bracelet must be replaced with a new one as the protection power has its limited life span.
The string is also attached to the steering-wheel of cars or motobikes for the same belief is for safety while traveling.
(source)
We enjoyed a very gracious, pretty and tasty meal at SPOONS Cambodia. SPOONS is a locally led non-profit organization on a mission to provide disadvantaged Cambodian youth with a pathway out of poverty and toward financial freedom through hospitality skills training.
January 2024