Daily Life in Cambodia

Food Sold in a Highway Rest Area

May, 2012

While driving to Kampong Thom Province, we stopped in a rest area on National Road 6. These are commercial rest areas, just a group of restaurants and hawkers offering a variety of foods and drinks to those braving Cambodia's highways. Here are some foods the hawkers offered to travelers at the rest stop.

Fried grasshoppers are a favorite snack all around Cambodia. A small plastic bag of them costs about 25 cents.

This young woman is selling a small fruit that is a cross between a grape and an olive. Eat more than a couple, and they turn your tongue black.

These girls are selling small bags of jackfruit. This way of selling it is quite attractive because jackfruit is covered by a huge, thick shell that is hard to penetrate.

Kampong Thom Province is known for its tarantulas sold as snacks. People are much more a threat to the spiders than vice versa. This little boy displays one of the tarantulas that can be bought as a snack--after being fried.

More popular than bottled soft drinks in Cambodia is sugarcane juice. Before, all the squeezing machines were hand-powered but now the ones like this motorcycle-mounted squeezer are powered by small gasoline engines. The peeled stalks are fed through the wringers four or five times to squeeze out all the juice which is then served over ice in a glass.

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