I took a trip out to the spice garden, where I was the only visitor and the staff were all far too busy to take any notice of me.
So I wandered around, enjoying the huge number of butterflies everywhere. There were a lot of pepper vines – Cambodia is famous for producing very good quality pepper – and they were just coming into flower.
I’ve seen pepper growing in India, and I know that the vines creep up trees in the wild, so they’ve built them some shade here to replicate their natural habitat.
I saw some other very interesting plants
If anyone wants to make a plea or a swam leat, let me know and I’ll bring you some back.
Any guesses as to what this might be used for?
Finally I came to this rather strange contraption –
– it’s a cricket trap. There’s a light fixed to the side which attracts the crickets at night. They fly into the polythene and then drop down into a pool of water at the bottom and can’t get out again.
I am reliably informed that I could collect two kilos of crickets a night from one of these traps. So if I invested in a wok and some oil, I’d be self-sufficent in fried crickets for the rest of my life – what a tempting prospect.