Hero Rats

I have blogged about a lot of different subjects since I started this project 10 plus years ago. Rats has never been one of them and honestly I never thought I would ever, ever blog about these creatures. Now, admittedly, I've seen plenty of these creatures in the last 10 years. In New York City on various trips up there and one or two on a very short trip to Costa Rica. But blogging about them? No. Never really considered that as a possibility.

That changes today.

OK so now that's out of the way...how is all that related to the cover picture of this post displaying a map of Cambodia showing landmine removal progress throughout the country? Well...read on.

If there was one thing that my choice of travel destinations last year did for me, it was to make me appreciate how valuable safety and security is in the place where you call home. Or maybe not so much home as the places we travel (since I don't feel unsafe at home really ever, thank God). Last year we visited two countries (Rwanda and Croatia) where 30 or so years ago there was a good chance that you would not be safe walking down the streets of a town or city. Not as a tourist. Not as a resident. Not as anything. 

In 1991, Croatia was locked in a struggle for independence from Yugoslavia and its cities and citizens faced assaults in the form of munitions shelling from the Yugoslav army. Want to stroll the walls of Dubrovnik in the fall of 1991 like we did last year? Couldn't do it. Not unless you wanted to risk getting hit by a very large projectile that would likely kill you on the spot. The cost of Croatian independence? About 20,000 lives.

A little less than three years after the Croatian War of Independence, Rwanda had it way worse. Genocide. Tutsi and Hutu neighbors and countrymen killing each other hand to hand with weapons as crude and as brutal as machetes because they apparently were different enough to someone with a voice loud enough to call for the extermination of the other group. No 20,000 lives here. 500,000 to 1,000,000 killed. And in the most brutal way. Over nothing really.

Think about all that for a moment. Just a bit more than 30 years ago these places would not have been safe. But we were fine last year. We walked around Kigali and Split and Dubrovnik without a problem. No more killing. No more danger. Not in the way that it was in the early 1990s.

15 or so years before violence in Rwanda and Croatia was raging out of control, something similar was happening in Cambodia, which we recently visited as part of our major trip of 2024. 

Cambodia had it bad in the 1970s. Really bad. Mostly it was due to the Khmer Rouge, a communist guerilla group which took power in the country in 1975 and which was insistent on abandoning anything resembling 20th century advances in industry, medicine, technology and relations with foreign countries and restoring Cambodia to a self-reliant agrarian society. Their methods of getting there? Executions. Torture. Genocide. How about wiping out one quarter of the entire population of Cambodia. One quarter of the entire country's population!!!! For what? Being educated. Practicing western medicine. Being a civil servant in the overthrown government. Being labeled a subversive. Something else like one of those reasons.

The rise and reign of the Khmer Rouge was bookmarked on either side by the civil war in neighboring Vietnam before the Khmer Rough seized power and a civil war in Cambodia once the Khmer Rouge established power. All of that is long over today but it's not forgotten. It can't be. Because while the effects of civil war and ethnic violence in Rwanda and Croatia are not felt with continued violence and destruction today, that's not the case in Cambodia. 

In 2024, Cambodia looks as peaceful and welcoming as Rwanda or Croatia were in 2023. But the conflict in Cambodia is still felt. Not by men with weapons shooting each other but through detonated landmines. From the Vietnam War through the coup by the Khmer Rouge to the Cambodian Civil War there were a ton of landmines placed everywhere in Cambodia. No markings. No labels. No responsibility for future casualties. But plenty of danger. Everywhere. And a lot of them are still there. Waiting to explode.

Mines removed from Cambodia. Amazing how small these things are. Cupcake sized killers.

Between 1979 and 2002, 20,000 people in Cambodia were killed by landmines. 20,000 people. That's a bit more than 800 per year. How many in somewhere like the United States? I'm guessing (and this truly is an unresearched guess) about zero. 800 in a place as small as Cambodia is a lot. Like a ton. Cambodia also has one of the highest per capita number of amputees of any country in the world and the number one culprit is landmines According to a 2023 article in Time Magazine, there are 40,000 amputees in the country of 16.6 million. That's one in every 415 people with amputated something. That sounds high also, doesn't it? It does to me.

How does this happen? Well, by someone walking through an area of the country which is loaded up with mines. Nothing complicated. Just hidden danger everywhere. Maybe it's a tripwire, maybe it's body weight, but something sets these things off in places where nobody has any idea that there's any real danger. It could be a farmer. It could be someone taking a shortcut through the woods. It could be a tourist like you and me. It could be a kid playing near a village. Wrong place. Simple as that. The worst part is most mines aren't designed to kill; they are designed to maim, with some throwing shrapnel 200 meters or so (that's about two football fields with end zones). So you live with limbs removed. And likely pain every day. Got the picture yet? Well, let's keep going anyway.

Maybe you step on a tank mine and get lucky because those types of mines aren't set off by something as light as the weight of a person. You will never know. But a tractor works on a tank mine. Maybe a farmer driving a tractor gets really unlucky and sets off a stacked mine which is a series of mines laid on top of each other that detonate simultaneously. A tank mine is designed to stop a tank. What do you think it does to a tractor? These things can be anywhere. They were laid a long, long time ago by people indiscriminately looking to stop someone else getting near them. No records. No maps. No responsibility. Just danger.

So I know what you are probably thinking: why don't the Cambodians just remove these things. Sure! Great idea! How are you going to propose doing that? Metal detectors? Some of these things are made of plastic. Do you want to volunteer to enter a mined zone with a metal detector when there might be plastic mines out there? Yeah...me either.

This is where the rats come in.

In the mid-1990s, a Belgian and pet owner named Bart Weetjens was thinking in his spare time (I'm speculating a bit here...) about the global landmine problem that faced this world of ours and he wondered if rodents, with their heightened sense of smell, might be a solution to that problem. It appears based on a little internet searching that he started with gerbils but eventually settled on rats. Plentiful and reasonably intelligent and trainable seemed to be the logic here.

The problem? It would likely take up to a year to train a rat to reliably identify the explosive ingredient in landmines (TNT, if you must know) and European rats lived around 3 years. Not a good return on investment in terms of time or money. Lots of training. Relatively short career doing what they were trained to do.

Fortunately for this story, Bart didn't abandon the rats idea. Instead, he starting searching for different kinds of rats. And he found some. African giant pouched rats in Tanzania apparently live for up to nine years. Now nine years vs. three years may not seem like a lot of difference but if you are going to invest a year training a rat to detect TNT, well then two years of regular rat life vs. eight years of African giant pouch rat life is huge. 

At the risk of selling a complex and involved story very, very short, from there the Belgian government got on board and the APOPO organization was formed. APOPO, which stands for Anti-Persoonsmijen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling (it's in Flemish) is now involved in mine and unexploded ordnance removal (and admittedly Cambodia also still has a good amount of mostly American unexploded cluster bombs along with their mines) in a number of locations around the globe. They started working on mine removal in Mozambique with great success and in 2010 turned their attention to southeast Asia. In 2016, they moved operations into Cambodia and in 2018 they opened center in Siem Reap.

And that's where we come in. Well, six years after that date anyway.

The map at APOPO detailing their global reach. Not all spots are landmine clearances.

APOPO's center in Siem Reap is used as their base of operations in Cambodia and is also open for visitors. It's apparently very popular. The place was packed when we got there in the middle of the afternoon and we delayed our arrival an hour or 90 minutes or so based on calling earlier in the day and finding them unable to accommodate any more visitors at our originally planned arrival time.

A visit to APOPO involves some static displays detailing their global footprint and the details behind the work that they do followed by a quick tour which includes some videos about the importance of their work and a demonstration of how their rats find mines. The last piece there is clearly the star attraction.

While the most visible and publicized aspect of APOPO's work involves deploying rats in minefields to detect TNT, the organization uses both rats and dogs in their mine clearing operations and also uses the rats as a means of early tuberculosis detection. I guess it's like a side gig that uses similar principles (sense of smell) to achieve similar results as detecting the presence of explosives. The dogs are trained in Europe and the rats are trained in Tanzania.

So how do you clear an area of mines with dogs and rats? Well based on what our guide, Mankay (guessing at the spelling a bit...), told us the initial identification occurs through intel from local populations followed by an area sweep from a team with dogs. This verifies that there are mines in the area but doesn't pinpoint the location or facilitate their removal.

Based on that initial identification, the area is prepared for detection by the rats. Pathways are cleared in the area about eight feet or so apart by a dude driving what was described to us as basically a heavily armored lawnmower that then allows installation of a setup for the rats to get to work. And no, they don't just unleash a whole bunch of rats in the area. There are currently only 43 trained rats in Cambodia and eight of those work at the APOPO visitor center showing off for tourists. The rats are leashed and walked deliberately back and forth between two handlers until they find a mine. The humans take over from there, carefully excavating and removing the explosive.

Mine detection demonstration. Without live mines. 

This visit definitely drove home both the seriousness of the landmine problem in Cambodia and how scary the prospect of stepping on a landmine and being maimed or killed can be. Or even worse probably having it happen to a family member or loved one. I mean can you imagine living in some rural area of Cambodia living day to day as a farmer and knowing that if you or your family or your kids wander off in the wrong area that you could have a limb blown off? And because of what? Some conflict 40 or 50 years old that is long resolved? I mean the lack of responsibility in laying these booby traps (or having someone else, including kids, do it for you...) is just atrocious. 

The outdoor demonstration portion of the tour gave us a great overview of how invisible these things are from the surface of the Earth and how deliberate and careful the rats are in their work. But it's the removed mines in the display cases in the visitor center and the stories on the walls of the place that are truly chilling. I don't think I'd even seen a mine in real life in a museum before (although I could be wrong) but the quantity and variety of below grade explosives on display at APOPO was truly chilling. Particularly because they were all removed from forests or rice paddies or villages in Cambodia that I'm sure don't look much different than the land around Siem Reap that we traveled through to get there. It's pretty creepy and disgusting actually. 

I do believe it's important we visit places like this when we travel. We could hide behind the walls of a hotel or all-inclusive resort but what's the point? Isn't part of the reason we travel to understand what life is like in other parts of the world. It's not all rainbows and unicorns out there as much as we might like it to be. There are wonderful amazing sights to see in the places we visit but there are also very real problems that are different than what we might experience at home. It's important to understand all of that when we travel someplace new, I think. Learning about the devastating affects of landmines left and forgotten decades ago is part of life in Cambodia. Visiting APOPO was important and not just so they could take the money we paid and put it to good use. 

It costs about 6,000 Euros to train one rat. Just saying...

Mankay pointing out telltale signs of hidden landmines. Again, not live mines.

I can't imagine how stressful it is to clear minefields for a living. And here I'm talking about the humans for a moment, not the rats. I don't want any job where there's a legitimate risk of getting blown to pieces on any workday. I think my job is taxing sometimes. All I do is sit in meetings and try to convince people to see things my way. I have no real context for clearing minefields with an African giant pouch rat or two as my guides. 

Apparently, the rats aren't super enthusiastic about it either. They only work from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and then they quit for the day. I guess a tired rat isn't very motivated from what we were told on our tour. But who can blame them? They are nocturnal, can't see in the daytime and are prone to sunburn on certain parts of their body that lack hair to protect them (ears and tails). Would you want to work beyond 9 a.m. with those limitations in a hot and generally pretty sunny place?

But regardless of the satisfaction of APOPO's workers (both humans and rats...and dogs), the real measure of success here is are they making a difference. The answer is yes. Both on the landmine removal side of the equation and the survivability of their workers side of things. Both the dogs and the rats that are trained and deployed by APOPO go through rigorous zero-tolerance-for-mistakes training and redundant teams of rats are deployed during mine detection operations to verify findings and eliminate mistakes. Someone on our tour asked if anyone had been killed de-mining places in Cambodia and Mankay's answer was basically "would people continue to work here if people had died?" Good question. And answer. 

I can't imagine how much work is ahead of APOPO. The map in the cover photo of this post has a lot of red indicating remaining minefields. That represents a lot more work and a lot more dogs and rats and I'm sure it's all going to go extremely slowly. We contributed to APOPO through our visit but also through a donation before we set out on our trip to Cambodia. A little goes a long way here. A donation of $30 clears 30 square meters of minefield. That seems like it's money well spent to me.

More unearthed mines. Chilling every time I see these. 

Home Cookin'

I don't know what it is about me and farms when I travel but I seem to end up on these things way more frequently than I would ever imagine. Maple syrup farm in Vermont. Cork farm in Portugal. Truffle hunting on a farm in Tuscany. Spice farm in Zanzibar. Wineries in the Napa Valley. Although I'm not sure how much wineries count as farms. They probably don't at all. 

I can't remember the last time I went to a farm anywhere around my home unless it was a sunflower farm. And I'm not sure sunflower farms count as farms any more than wineries do. In fact, they probably count less. But suggest to me that I should go to a farm when I'm traveling and somehow I'm all in. Including in Cambodia. I mean, why not? We are supposed to do different things on vacation that we do at home, right? Even if that means visiting farms, I guess.

Now in my defense on this one on this trip, I was sort of tricked into going to a Cambodian farm. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it. And if you don't believe that flimsy excuse or explanation, you'll probably believe it even less when I tell you I went to the same farm on two different days. I did say flimsy, right?

An astonishing array of dried fish, Siem Reap market.

Here's the thing: I am generally fascinated with where our food comes from so when I saw that the hotel we picked in Siem Reap offered food tours as part of their amenities or features or whatever, I couldn't resist. I mean we were only in Cambodia for three nights (meaning just two full days) so if there was any way to jump start getting involved in that country's cuisine (which I was completely ignorant about) then I was all for whatever I could do. Taking a couple of food tours through the hotel seemed like a great way to do that. 

So we did. 

The premise of both of these tours was pretty much the same: hop in a tuk-tuk; travel 45 minutes or so to a local village; watch and learn how some traditional Cambodian food or meal is harvested or prepared; then come back to the hotel (again, by tuk-tuk) and have the hotel's kitchen cook a specially prepared meal drawing on our farm experience for dinner. Night one featured a traditional Cambodian rice noodle dish that I had never really heard of called num bahn chok; night two highlighted the use of palm sugar, something I'd either never really heard of or never really thought about that much. It's good to explore and taste things you've never heard of sometimes. Another awesome benefit of travel.

But before we talk about what we found at the farm (and it was the same farm both nights), let's talk tuk-tuks, shall we?

We have seen tuk-tuks before in our travels. Kenya. Peru. Zanzibar. Maybe one or two other places. They are three-wheeled semi-enclosed vehicles typically without doors that are driven like a motorcycle of sorts, meaning the accelerator and the brakes are on the handles of the steering column. Usually the tops of these funny little vehicles are some sort of canvas or other flexible covering and you thank God they don't go at much of a top speed because if you ever got in an accident in one of these things...well, good luck I guess. I was thrilled by my first ride in one of these things in Zanzibar last March.

Tuk-tuk. At least anywhere but Cambodia it's a tuk-tuk.

In Cambodia, that is NOT a tuk-tuk. It's a PassApp, so named because there's a phone app out there called PassApp that you use to hail these types of vehicles. It's sort of like Uber or Lyft, right? Just for that type of transport (which is decidedly not a tuk-tuk in Cambodia).

The Cambodian tuk-tuks we took to the farm both nights were full sized motorcycles towing a two-wheeled cart. Maybe a little sturdier and safer but still with no doors but with decidedly more space. Like way more space. I feel like I'm crammed into a regular tuk-tuk (excuse me...PassApp) with just the two of us in the back seat. The Cambodian tuk-tuk is relatively palatial, sitting the two of us in the back of the carriage while our guide both nights sat facing backwards in the second seat opposite us. I'm sure we would have felt the limitations in comfort on a 40 minute PassApp rider; not so on the Cambodian tuk-tuk. Smooth sailing past all the rice paddies and villages and night markets. 

I did ask one of our tuk-tuk drivers what PassApps were called before the PassApp app existed. I mean they had to be called something right? And they didn't just pop up en masse when someone invented an app, right?  He didn't know. This isn't going to keep me up at night but I'm still curious.

Cambodian tuk-tuk.

So...palm sugar and num bahn chok, although the farm visit part of the num bahn chok tour was really about making rice noodles and not necessarily the whole dish. 

It is amazing to me how people make food. Like why would you ever think about making noodles out of rice? What's wrong with actual rice? It has to be way less complicated and labor intensive to eat rice as it is rather than trying to make it into noodles. Don't know how they make rice into rice noodles? Neither did I, but I'll explain in a few paragraphs. Most of this is just discovery or accident, right? I'm sure that one day someone accidentally cut a palm tree and tasted the sap and found it sticky and bit sweet and decided to harvest it deliberately. But rice noodles? Too many steps it seems to be for this to be an accident. 

The family that owns and runs the farm we visited is clearly adept at both harvesting palm sugar and at making noodles from rice. From what we could tell, it's a husband and wife plus the wife's sister and their kids (and at least one grandkid) who are still at home. Both of these visits were a team effort between all members of the family. I have to say I was actually a little nervous about the rice noodles thing. I've had rice noodles in a few spots around my home in Northern Virginia and I have never liked what I've tasted. But maybe this dish in Cambodia is different than in the United States.

Spoiler alert: it was!

Num bahn chok, anyone?

On the basis of the description of the two tours on the hotel's website (the Park Hyatt Siem Reap, if you must know...), I would have thought I'd have found the num bahn chok tour way more interesting. I was wrong here. They both were super interesting. But on the premise of my original thought, let's talk palm sugar first shall we?

I would liken the harvesting of palm sugar to maple syrup tapping. I remember our tour around Baird Farm in Vermont in 2020. Stick a tap into a maple tree at the right time of the year and the sap runs out of the tree with no added effort. Refine it the right way by reducing it in an evaporator and maybe a couple of other steps and you are good to go with those pancakes or waffles or French toast or whatever else you want to pour the stuff over.

Harvesting palm sugar follows a similar process but with a little more athleticism involved. 

Maple syrup tapping takes place maybe four feet off the surface of the Earth. You or I or anyone else can do it easily as long as we have a tap and a hammer and can apply enough force to pound the tap into the trunk and hang a bucket or attach a hose to the tap. Palm sugar tapping takes place at the top of the tree. How do you get up there? You climb.

Have you ever seen a palm tree? There are no branches on any palm tree I've seen. It's a very tall, sometimes gently curved trunk topped by some leaves. Climbing it isn't easy, especially when you are taking up containers to tap the sap of the palm. No hoses here. Homemade bamboo containers need to be carried up by hand (although they admittedly are lowered down by rope).

Sounds difficult, right? It is. The dude (who was the husband / father / grandfather of the family we visited) we watched climb the tree was up in less than 30 seconds. Sure he had a rope ladder of sorts attached to the tree but it was very impressive. He does this twice per day. It took him all of ten minutes to get up there, remove and lower the filled bamboo containers, re-tap the tree and place new bamboo containers and then descend. OK, so 15 minutes max. Probably somewhere in between.

Climbing, tapping and the product. The wood chip apparently prevents bitterness.

This whole process was pretty darned impressive. And I have to tell you that this dude that climbed this tree was cut. I mean there's not an ounce of fat on this guy's body and he's older than me by like eight or ten years. My first comment when he came down from the tree was something to the effect of "I hope I look that good when I'm his age." Who am I kidding? I don't look that good now. I didn't look that good ten years ago. I was impressed. What can I say? Maybe I'm jealous a little. Or a lot. I mean I have like no useful life skills and am out of shape from sitting at desk 40 hours or so a week at work. This guy is climbing a palm tree twice a day. And not just one palm tree. Eleven!!!! And hauling in like 10 kilograms of this sap per day. Crazy!!!!!

It is just in the dry season which is about three months long, but still...eleven palm trees twice a day.

So what now? We down the sweet sap as a shot or pour it over some ice cream or something? Umm...no. While it can be drunk unrefined (and apparently gives a monster hangover after about two shots) it will turn sour pretty quickly and needs reducing and refining right away. And by right away, I mean like right after it's brought down from the tree. 

We were, by the way, offered some shots of the unrefined sap. We passed. I've never been one to shy away from any sort of alcoholic beverage but the hangover you get from this stuff isn't from alcohol. Maybe that will end up on the very short list of travel regrets but I doubt it. 

When we were in Vermont in 2020, we were talked through the process of refining the maple sap. The majority of the work took place in a large heated and temperature-controlled trough to reduce the water content to make the sap into syrup. The process in rural Cambodia is basically the same, although it takes place in a shallow metal bowl over an open flame with lots of vigorous stirring by hand. And it's quick.

45 minutes after this process started, we were eating refined palm sugar. 

I am sure we are missing something about the pain caused to countless lives on sugar cane plantations over the centuries and I'm pretty sure it's related to the scale of production. But if you can get sugar by climbing a palm tree and not enslaving people or engaging in backbreaking (literally) work every day of the week, why wouldn't you do that? I know, I make it sound easy and it's not and I'm sure the yield from eleven palm trees twice a day isn't going to supply enough sugar for the world but this stuff is delicious. I've never had palm sugar before in my life but I'm all in on this stuff. 

Refining and putting into molds and cooling down.

Now about those noodles. This is too long to explain. So let me sum up. And again...I'm not sure why rice isn't good enough but here's what happens to get rice made into rice noodles. And I'll use pictures. 

Step one: Grind the rice. There's a pretty large, human-powered machine here that involves wood and stone parts. And yes, the tourists can work this.

Step two: Dry the ground rice into something pretty solid and like bowling ball sized or maybe a bit smaller.

Step three: Boil the bowling ball sized lump of dried ground rice. At this point it's like a smooth solid white ball. 

Step four: Pound the boiled, dried ground rice into a dough using a pretty large, human-powered, wooden machine. Tourists can participate here too. This really does transform the dried rice into a kneadable dough. It's pretty incredible to see. It's also pretty incredible to see a woman repeatedly moving the dough around while someone else works a very large wooden pounding thing right over her hands moving the dough.

Step five: Knead the dough by hand, adding water to make it more pliable (or actually extrudable). 

Step six: Load the kneaded dough into a mold with a sieve on the bottom of it and load the mold (in cylindrical form) into a pretty large wooden machine with a large lever on one end. 

Step seven: Boil some water below the mold and find the heaviest possible person to sit on the end of the lever. On the day we were out there, that would be me. Our guide took a guess at 70 kilograms. I countered with 90. She told me I didn't look that...(she wanted to say heavy? or fat?). I took her comment as a compliment. But that dough did get extruded pretty fast. I need to lose weight.

Step eight: Remove the cooked noodles from the water and bundle them ready to serve.

I still believe that a lot of food innovations happen by accident. Something gets left out and transforms or someone tries some mistake of cooking and it works out better than what was originally intended. But I can't see how making noodles from rice fits into this category. 

When we were done with the watching part of each of our visits, we were supposed to head back to the hotel and have the chef make us a meal featuring the ingredients we had just watched harvested or manufactured. It totally worked out that way with the palm sugar. But not the num bahn chok. For that meal, we took our shoes off, climbed onto a wooden platform and were served the meal right there and then.

I'm not sure that I have ever eaten a meal in quite this environment before, meaning on a dusty farm in the middle of nowhere halfway around the world using ingredients that have just been made fresh and in part due to my own weight. The noodles were delicious. They didn't taste like other rice noodles I've eaten. They mostly tasted like rice, not that rice has a super strong flavor or anything. They came served in a cool broth of coconut milk, finger tamarinds, lemongrass and turmeric with optional chiles, lime and salt and accompanied with pieces of longbean. 

Believe it or not, this dish is most popular at breakfast. I can't imagine eating it that way, but I know that's my western bias coming out and it's not like I've never eaten noodles for breakfast before (I can recall at least one meal of spaghetti for breakfast in my life...). 

I am really pretty confident that left to my own devices in Cambodia, I would never had ventured out of our hotel and eaten num bahn chok or any meal focused around palm sugar. If I could even have found these kinds of dishes, I'm pretty sure I would have opted for something less edgy and more familiar. And with only two full days in Cambodia, I really feel like I would have missed something amazing here in both the food and the experience we had by joining these two tours. 

These are two experiences that will live with me forever. And if I ever get back to Cambodia, I'll know at least a little something to look for. In the meantime, I will pledge to continue to visit farms while traveling if they can get me a little or a lot closer to the places I'm visiting.

Dinner is served. 

Bengal Floricans

The temperature is a little north of 85 degrees and the sun is just starting to clear the early morning Cambodian haze and we know the humidity that comes every day in this place is coming as soon as the sun really clears the horizon properly. We are in the middle of nowhere (seriously...nowhere) walking in a dried-up rice paddy that seems to go on forever. It's dried-up because it's the dry season and if it weren't there's no way we would be where we are. Dry means dry in Cambodia. That concept is reinforced with every step as the leftover rice stalks or whatever it is we are stepping on try to scratch our legs above the ankles. Thank Buddha I wore my boots out here.

We are here to watch birds and this is supposed to be fun. We're on vacation after all. We are specifically searching for something that looks like a large-ish chicken called a Bengal florican. It's not really a chicken; it's actually a bustard. And despite the fact that there seems to be about no cover to hide them, we can't find a single one of these things. What are we doing miles from civilization and a good distance from our car tramping over the dried earth and finding nothing in the middle of southeast Asia?

So, yeah...we are birdwatchers. There's no doubt about it now. This seed was planted in Tanzania's Lake Manyara National Park way back in 2018 and nudged along a bit during our trip to New Zealand about a year later. Then the COVID-19 global pandemic struck and we started watching what was going on bird-wise in our own back yard. Surprise, surprise, we found more than just the two or three brown species of birds that we thought were out there. We've been hooked ever since. We've been taking one or two trips every month since last summer to local spots around our house. Seemed logical we'd see what was out there in Cambodia, right?

Still...those Bengal floricans. Where were those things? It's getting hot out here.

Dirt track near dry rice fields, Cambodia. 6:09 a.m. also known as "breakfast time".

It's day two of our Cambodia journey. We have just three nights and two full days in country with a bit of a day on either side so day two is really day last. We have planned to pack a lot into those two full days. That's not unusual for us. On Cambodia day one, we got picked up at our hotel at 4:30 a.m. to make a long overdue pilgrimage to Angkor Wat at sunrise and beyond. On Cambodia day two we went birdwatching. Pickup time for day two? You guessed it: 4:30 a.m. It's hot in Cambodia. Like really hot and very humid. Starting early is a good idea. 

We made it to our hotel lobby a couple of minutes before pickup time. Hang, our guide for the day, is already there. He's way upbeat. That's good, I guess. We are still so jet lagged that we don't know if we feel tired or not at 4:30 a.m. We pile into his car with the driver, make a stop to pick up breakfast to go and we are off heading east for parts unknown. We honestly have only the foggiest idea where we are going. East, Hang says. If you feel good about getting picked up in the middle of the night by a stranger in Cambodia and loaded into a car (we did!), east is about all we need to know.

The ride to wherever we ended up (and I am in no way confident I could tell you exactly where we were that morning) took about an hour and a half. To pass the time, Hang told us about what we would see, filled us in on any questions we had about life in Cambodia and told us corny jokes. I am not equipped with a memory bank of jokes. I've tried to remember some from our travels. Hang crushed me with his joke portfolio. 

Q: What did the fish say when he swam into a wall? A: "Dam!"

Q: What do you call a fake noodle? A: Im-pasta.

I know...they are terrible. And that's all I remembered. There were a lot more. By the way, a photograph of a sign with a Bengal florican picture on it is below. That's what we were looking for. Not a chicken; it's a bustard. And yes, the picture below is in color. I guess the Cambodian sun fades signs eventually. Or quickly maybe.

There are not many Bengal floricans in this world. The species is listed as critically endangered because as of 2017, it was estimated that there were fewer than 1,000 of these birds alive in the world. If you want to try to find one in the wild, you'll have to do it in one of two parts of the world: an area in northeast India and Nepal stretching into Bangladesh or a spot in Cambodia possibly stretching into Vietnam. I know, those areas sound huge and if there are only 1,000 (maximum) spread out over those giant areas, finding one on a February morning in a rice paddy in rural Cambodia (which is not a small place) sounds like quite a chore. 

So why are these bustards so rare? Well, like most species that are in decline, habitat destruction seems to be a big reason. Floricans occupy a space on the planet which humans would rather use to cultivate rice. But here, it appears that the florican could co-exist with man as long as man would just leave them alone. Which, of course, we don't. People in Cambodia need to eat and in some parts of Cambodia, there's just not a lot of food. And Bengal floricans have been traditionally very easy to catch and kill and eat. They draw attention to themselves during mating season and they nest on the ground.

There may be some hope. There is a program set up in Cambodia to reward farmers for finding and protecting florican nests. Find a nest, report it, have it verified and then keep protecting it while the nest is active gets you money. The earlier you find it and the longer it is an active nest under your protection, the more money you get. People are essentially being paid to resist eating something that they have found. Hang didn't really tell us or speculate on how the program was affecting the population but there is some information out there on the internet (dangerous to rely on this stuff, I know) that suggests the current numbers are more robust than the 2017 numbers. Still, even if the number is double (and I am completely making that up), the totals are still very small.

Finding a Bengal florican in a rice paddy would be difficult. There just aren't a lot of them anywhere.

Our team of bird-spotters that morning ultimately swelled to six: the two of us, Hang, our driver and two dudes on motos (that's Cambodian-English for motorcycle) who joined us about the time we parked the car on the dirt track we'd been driving along after leaving the main road. Now legitimately, there was a lot of bird activity in the spot we stopped. Not Bengal florican activity but tons of small birds flittering about and refusing to stay still long enough for me to get a good photograph.

Of course, that's what I'm after, right? I do want to see birds but I also want some souvenirs, which means crystal-clear pictures of colorful little creatures that we can't see at home. I am not a binoculars user. I can't work them with my glasses on and my eyes are so bad that I can't get binoculars adjusted to allow me to see. So my binoculars are the 83x zoom camera we've been dragging all over the world with us since 2017. It allows me to see things at a distance and if I'm quick enough, I can snap a fuzzy or gorgeous picture in the moment. Hopefully gorgeous.

That first hour looking for Bengal floricans got me the two pictures above. Literally, those are the only two worth showing anyone and I have no idea what the little bird is. It's not even clear enough for me to get Merlin to say what it is. Obviously the other is a pile of pelicans on a telephone line, which is something I couldn't even have imagined ever happening until I saw it in real life. 

These pictures in no way reflect what was going on around us. Harriers. Egrets. Storks. Cuckoos. Bee-eaters. All there. They just wouldn't sit still or were so far away that the haze coming off the Earth didn't make for anything like a quality sighting or picture (and those two are of course the same). And of course, no Bengal floricans. None. Not a one.

Time to move. Off the road (meaning the dirt track) and into the rice paddies. 

It worked. Sort of. We ended up positioned at the edge of a paddy near a couple of bushes and a sort of overnight shelter on stilts. I'd call it a blind but I'm not sure that's what it was. I think it was probably built to house rice field workers, not to watch birds. But we got more results here. Pied bushchat (above). Black drongo (above above). Brown shrike. House sparrow (not exciting but seriously). Pied starling (below). Black-collared starling (below below). All sitting on poles that man had installed at some point or on top of one of the two bushes or even on some leftover rice stalks. 

But still...no Bengal floricans. This likely wasn't our day to see these birds. All the same, we started walking into those dried rice paddies. 85 plus degrees. Haze clearing. Humidity coming. Those stalks scratching over the tops of our boots.

And then...one of our spotters swore he saw a Bengal florican somewhere in the paddy. He'd seen it through his binoculars and pointed us to more or less where it was. Let's fan out and walk in a straight line to flush it out. This sounded like some results. I ran point. I was told that it was right in front of me and all I had to do was walk to where Hang was pointing. I followed instructions.

All four of us walked step after step more or less in line, scanning in the brush that we passed as we came to it. There was no way. No way was there a couple of feet high bird out in this place and I swear that we walked further than Hang told us to. No Bengal florican. Not here. Not today.

And right after I was about to give up, there was a flutter and a rustle. Not from in front of us. Not from along side us. From BEHIND us. Bengal florican aloft and flying away from us. 10 or 15 feet off the surface. Camera up. No time to focus. Just point and shoot and hope before it lands. Boom! Bengal florican photograph. Seen it!

I know. It's not a great photograph. It's hazy. You can barely see the bird but it's clearly there, although it's not clearly a Bengal florican closeup but what other species would it be. Was this worth it? Are we satisfied with this? Not remotely. But you know what the best part was? 

We saw where it landed.

I kept my eyes on that spot and walked towards it with so much purpose. No way was I going to miss it like before. And I got there with no bird fleeing to somewhere that I couldn't reach or anything like that. But I'm telling you, this thing disappeared. I didn't get close enough to one of these things to know really how big they are, but based on the photograph above, we are clearly talking about a bird that's about two feet or so high and about the same length back to front. But it was absolutely nowhere to be found. And there just wasn't that much cover. But it was gone. Disappeared into thin air.

We quit. We signed up for a morning of birdwatching and we needed to get back to Siem Reap. We had a planned stop to see some spotted owlets in a tree where they hang out but that would be it. One Bengal florican, some starlings and an assortment of other small birds, including some distant looks at bee-eaters. And if you know anything about me, you know I love the bee-eaters from a couple of trips to Africa.

Look, there are no guarantees with nature. We know this. We know we are at the mercy of whatever Mother Nature wants to allow us to see.

The rest of our morning was incredible. We were NOT done.

The owlets were awesome. We expected one. We got two. They were extremely active. They fought. Or from our perspective they at least quarreled. They were loud. And they seemed to keep looking down at us like we were bothering them, which we probably were. But it made for some great photographs. This was almost like a staged encounter and that's totally OK. I can totally get the concept of seeing birds where they usually hang out. Not sure I'd ever seen an owlet before so this was special.

Also, our Bengal florican encounters were not at an end. Our spotters had found a pair right before the spot where the owlets hang out and we moved back into the rice paddies, although we had to move a herd of cows a bit out of the way to get there.

I'm not going to blow-by-blow our second trip into the paddies. It wasn't a whole lot different from the first encounter with these birds except: (1) we didn't walk past any floricans this time and (2) there were two and not one. 

So the proof of our second encounter is below and it's actually the best of three pictures I took of one bird (I completely missed the other). Three pictures. Got that? I don't know that this necessarily fulfilled us florican-wise on this day trip but I think there are two things to keep in mind as I think back on this day. With nature there is no guarantee (I know I already said that but it bears repeating). We've been out there looking for wildlife all over the planet and have had amazing encounters and have been disappointed. Expect the latter and hope for the former. 

And if there are just 1,000 of these birds on the planet, we just saw 0.3 percent of the entire remaining population in one half day trip from Siem Reap with not much effort. Think about that. We may have seen 3 of the remaining 1,000 of an entire species anywhere. In a rice paddy which we didn't even cover anywhere near comprehensively in about four hours. How lucky are we to have had these results?

Now, if the picture above and a couple of photos of spotted owlets seems a bit underwhelming to have me label the rest of our birdwatching experience "incredible", you would be correct. 

To me, a great birding experience comes with a couple of signature encounters. They might not be what you came for and they might not even have to be a brand new species. But if there's a connection made with a species that is unlike any other past trip you been on and had with that type of bird, then it can be amazing. It might be something small, it might be something transformational. You know it when you find it.

Checking out the spotted owlets and finally, finally finding a Bengal florican or two were definitely two looks at birds we have never had before, but the quality and intimacy of the florican sightings left a lot to be desired. So we needed something more to put this day over the top. 

Enter the bee-eaters.

I saw my first bee-eater in Lake Manyara National Park in 2018. I realize I already talked about that trip as sort of the genesis as my serious interest in birdwatching. We followed up that introduction with two different species of these birds on a day cruise along the Kazinga Channel that connects Lakes Edward and George in Uganda. That was just last year, less than 12 months ago. Bee-eaters fast became one of my favorite kinds of birds. They are so colorful and well put-together; never a feather out of place. They are not toucans or hornbills but they might be on par with kingfishers and eagles and things like that.

When we moved off the dirt track and onto to the rice paddies for the first time we saw one green bee-eater from a distance and managed to get just-at-the-camera's-range picture which I have found to usually yield a little bit fuzzy and slightly unsatisfying results (I'm not posting that one). But at least we got one. Then on our way over to see the owls (and before our detour to find the two additional floricans), we found a couple of blue-tailed bee-eaters just sitting on a small plant near the ground and managed to get the pictures below.

This is a gorgeous look. They stood still. They posed. I love how colorful these birds are. I love their black beaks that continue going onto their heads as black masks of sorts. And I love the red eye that's visible in the last of the three pictures. Very cool sighting. These couple of minutes with these two birds definitely made this trip worthwhile. On top of seeing in person what has to be one of the rarest birds in the world. 

This whole trip took about eight hours. 4:30 a.m. to about half after noon. With 90 minutes to two hours for each leg of the trip, that got us about 5-1/2 hours in the field looking for birds and getting these 13 pictures of what we found. Totally worth it. Our ride for the day was set up through the Sam Veasna Conservation Tours which runs birding tours to various points in and around Siem Reap. I'd have nothing but good things to say about our day with Hang and the rest of the guys who helped us along that day and I'd do something else with this company if I ever found myself back in Cambodia any time in the future, as remote as that seems right now. 

I know that 4:30 a.m. pickup time sounds rough. But when you only have two days to spend in a country, there's one big advantage to starting that early: you get to do other stuff later in the day. As long as you can find a way to stay out of the Cambodian afternoon heat.