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Lara Dunston, Travel and Food Writer

Lara Dunston

Travel and Food Writer

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New Cambodia Culinary Tour Dates Coming Soon

August 18, 2015 by Lara Dunston

Marum, Siem Reap. Cambodia culinary tour. Copyright 2015 Terence Carter / Lara Dunston / Grantourismo. All Rights Reserved.

In May, my photographer husband Terence Carter and I hosted a culinary travel writing and photography tour with Backyard Travel. It was delicious fun although completely exhausting, so we’re doing things a little differently next time. Here’s what to expect…

You can read about the first tour here and here and we’ll be posting more details about the upcoming Cambodia culinary tour dates on Grantourismo and this site very soon.

The May tour started out in Siem Reap and Angkor, and also took in the remote temple and villages of Banteay Chhmar and colonial Battambang. We crammed the eight days with loads of scrummy experiences, from street food tours and Khmer dessert tastings to a private cooking class with one of Siem Reap’s best chefs. It was loads of fun.

We had a lovely group of enthusiastic participants, however, everyone had different interests – while some were keen to develop their writing and photography, others were really just here for the food, and that was fine. The itinerary was also very full and very tight.

So next time we’ll be loosening the schedule a bit and slowing things down a lot. Here’s what you can expect…

New Cambodia Culinary Tour

We’re going to start off with an optional full day of writing and/or photography workshops that will provide some direction for the actual tour. Those who just want to learn about Cambodian cuisine (and eat!) can join us a day later.

If you choose to meet us a day earlier, then you can opt for a half day of writing or a half day or photography – or both! Both half-day programmes will consist of short, punchy, bite-sized lessons on techniques to develop your food and travel writing skills, whether you’re a beginner, amateur writer with more serious aspirations, food/travel blogger, established writer, or photographer.

There’ll be small, manageable writing tasks crafted to complement the experiences in the tour that you can complete each day. By the end of the tour, you should be equipped with enough material to form the basis of a story.

The photography workshops will focus on food, travel and portrait photography with advice provided for every situation that you will find yourself in during the week.

We’re partnering with a different company to run the Cambodia culinary tour, and we’ll announce that, along with the dates, price and itinerary details very soon.

With Backyard Travel, we’re planning a culinary tour for October 2016 in another Southeast Asian country. Those details coming soon too.

What to Expect on our Cambodia Culinary Tour

Over the course of eight days and nights, you’ll get to:

  • learn about Cambodian produce and ingredients at lively local markets, where you’ll see and smell fragrant herbs, spices, roots, and pastes;
  • taste authentic Cambodian food, from slurping soups at local stalls and grazing on Cambodian snacks on street food tours to feasting on tasting menus at fine dining restaurants, such as Cuisine Wat Damnak by Chef Joannès Rivière;
  • discover the secrets to cooking Cambodian cuisine on a private cooking class set amidst the rice paddies;
  • visit the artisanal workshops operating out of village homes, where local families make traditional rice paper, rice noodles, desserts, and Cambodia’s famous fermented fish paste prahok, using the techniques of their ancestors;
  • experience the spectacular Ankor temples, including savouring the sunrise over stupendous Angkor Wat (a must-do experience); examine the intricate bas-reliefs at The Bayon, to learn about the culinary traditions of the Khmer Empire; soak up the atmosphere of moss-dappled Beng Mealea; explore mysterious Banteay Chhmar, a vast ruinous temple that few people visit due to its remote location near the Thai border;
  • engage with locals in villages and experience life in the countryside on strolls through the rice paddies outside Siem Reap and on breezy tuk tuk tours into the bucolic countryside around Battambang;
  • get a taste of contemporary Cambodian culture and arts, during a performance of the Phare Cambodian circus, which combines circus tricks and acrobatics with traditional and modern theatre, music, dance, and more, to tell stories of Cambodian life.

This tour will include downtime for those who’d like time simply to relax, write, swim, go for a stroll along the river, indulge in a massage or treatment, or experience a ticklish fish spa.

For those who’d prefer to use that time to get some additional writing or photography coaching, we can arrange that too, as well as one-on-one time post-tour for an additional fee.

Some of the participants on the last tour were also keen to shop, so I’ve added an optional extra at the end of the tour: my Shop Siem Reap experience, which includes a shopping-focused itinerary crafted to suit your interests and tuk tuk driver, and is part guided and part self-guided, with time at the end of the day for a well-deserved massage or spa treatment.

While I’ve curated this tour and I’ll be there to host you, I’ve handpicked some of Cambodia’s best guides, chefs, home-cooks, and foodies to join us along the way for different experiences – you’ll be learning about Cambodia and Cambodian cuisine from Cambodians, as you should be.

If you have any questions or would like to express an interest in the tour, feel free to leave a comment below, email me at laradunston@me.com or get in touch via the Contacts page.

More details about our new Cambodia culinary tour coming soon!

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Brief Bio

Lara Dunston is a Cambodia based Travel & Food Writer and has regular gigs with: The Guardian, CNN, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Feast, Delicious, The Independent, Telegraph, National Geographic Traveler / Traveller, Get Lost, Wanderlust, Travel+Leisure SEA, DestinAsian, AFAR. Read more here.

Related Websites

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SIEM REAP RETREATS

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TERENCE CARTER PHOTOGRAPHY

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How are you all doing? We’re back in beautiful S How are you all doing? We’re back in beautiful Siem Reap after a whirlwind trip to the Cambodian capital to get Terence an emergency passport and take the opportunity to start updating our Phnom Penh guides. But I still want to share some Phnom Penh pics with you, in case you’re planning a Cambodia trip. And you should! A post on that subject going up soon on Grantourismo.  We spent a full day cleaning the apartment, which flooded while we were away – seems they had wild storms in Siem Reap with horizontal rain! Good thing I wasn’t here as it would have triggered memories of the nightmare of an apartment we moved into after the pandemic began, which flooded *every* time it rained.  I made a beeline for the markets to buy some beautiful produce and have been busy recipe testing, cooking and writing, while Terence, in between shooting dishes for me, has been occupied with the new Grantourismo design.  You may only notice small design tweaks, as the main point was to move it to a new theme to speed things up, as it’s a big site, being 12 years old with thousands of posts. I’ll let you know when it’s done so you can test it for us x  Pictured: the famous stall at Psar Chas or Old Market in Siem Reap, which specializes in all things preserved and fermented, from prahok (fermented fish paste) and juicy Siem Reap sausages to smoked fish and buffalo jerky, a fantastic drinking snack.  #SiemReap #market #OldMarket #PsarChas #foodstall #cambodianfood #khmerfood #localfood #localproduce #fermentedfoods #preservedfoods #fermentedfish #prahok #buffalojerky #sausages #fishpaste #shrimppaste #foodwriter #foodblogger #travelwriter #travelblogger #culinarytravel #foodtravel #marketlover
Hello @foodpanda_hongkong Glad you liked our phot Hello @foodpanda_hongkong 
Glad you liked our photo, but you do not have the rights to use it. You’re stealing our livelihood when you steal our content. Remove it now. @foodpandaglobal is owned by the billion dollar company @deliveryhero — you should be paying for images instead of stealing them from us and other small publishers and photographers. Or creating your own content.
We do.
It’s reassuring that in a city that’s changed It’s reassuring that in a city that’s changed so dramatically in recent years — so many buildings have been demolished to make way for lofty apartment blocks and towering hotels, completely changing the character of some Phnom Penh neighbourhoods — to find a heritage building that’s received little more than a coat of paint. (It used to be a pale lemon colour.)  The home of UNESCO’s Cambodia offices, the 19th century villa has long been one of my favourite French colonial buildings in Phnom Penh. Whenever I stroll by I imagine it as a breezy bar and restaurant, open for architecture- and history-lovers to soak up the atmosphere, rather than private offices closed to the public. But at least it’s still standing.  #phnompenh #travelwriter #travelwriterslife #lifeofatraveller #travel #travelgram #traveladdict #travelling #travelblogger #heritage #architecture #colonial #indochine #french #frenchcolonial #villa #mansion #colonialarchitecture #frenchcolonialarchitecture #facade #balconies #balustrade #cambodia #cambodianarchitecture
I knew I couldn’t keep up the pace of posting af I knew I couldn’t keep up the pace of posting after so long away from social media 😂 We just got too busy and something had to give...  A few of you asked where the pizza shot was from @pizza4pscambodia in Phnom Penh, so here you go... half salami and chorizo, and Parma ham and house-made burrata, which is luscious and creamy.  Someone else asked what is Japanese pizza exactly... it’s not okonomiyaki, which I know a lot of US food sites call ‘Japanese pizza’, even though it’s not, it’s a battered pancake.  Firstly, the actual type of pizza is Neapolitan-style, the original pizza invented in Napoli (Naples) in Italy — thin soft base spread with tomato sauce, baked quickly in a pizza oven on super high heat, with a puffy, slightly chewy crust, and a base that becomes a bit wet in the centre.  However, whereas Neapolitan pizza has very strict rules, otherwise, it’s not Neapolitan, Pizza4Ps’ pizzas are ‘Neapolitan-style’, as they get very creative with their toppings, using Japanese ingredients such as seaweed. It’s this — and Japanese owners — that makes it Japanese pizza, a style that began in Japan post-World War 2, when an Italian-American war vet is said to have started the first pizzeria, making the Napoli style, not American styles, of pizza.  A couple of you also asked to see the dramatically different Phnom Penh skyline. The changes are breathtaking if you haven’t been to the Cambodian capital in a few years. I’ll share that pic shortly.  #phnompenh #cambodia #travelwriter #foodwriter #travel #food #foodblogger #travelblogger #travelingram #lifeofatravelwriter #lifeofafoodwriter #traveltips #restaurant #phnompenhrestaurant #pizza #pizza4ps #pizzaoven #pizzalover #japanesepizza #neapolitanpizza #neapolitanstylepizza
That’s our pizza going into the oven at @pizza4p That’s our pizza going into the oven at @pizza4pscambodia yesterday, the Phnom Penh outpost of the Japanese-owned restaurant group. It started out with one hugely popular restaurant in Vietnam some years ago, hidden down a lane in Saigon’s Japantown, and now has restos scattered up and down the country.  Pizza4Ps’ Japanese pizza has a thin base and thick crust, and while it’s more Italian than the American-style so popular in Cambodia, it tends to be wetter than Italian pizza, especially if you order their pizza with a ball of heavenly house-made burrata, which the waitress slices into at your table, spreading the luscious creamy cheese over the pizza. So good!  There are also no rules when it comes to the toppings, so while we had to try our favourites from the mother restaurants — Parma ham and burrata, and their own chorizo and salami — we took note of their Cambodia inspired creations. These include a a very pretty nom banh chok pizza spread with a freshly pounded Khmer herb and spice paste and sprinkled with edible flowers, and a whole page of salmon dishes. Cambodians are crazy about salmon.  #phnompenh #cambodia #travelwriter #foodwriter #travel #food #foodblogger #travelblogger #travelingram #lifeofatravelwriter #lifeofafoodwriter #traveltips #restaurant #phnompenhrestaurant #pizza #pizza4ps #pizzaoven #pizzalover #japanesepizza #restaurantdesign #restaurantinterior
One thing I have not missed as a travel writer dur One thing I have not missed as a travel writer during the pandemic has been the fast pace of these updating trips. No matter how hard we work to try to squeeze everything in, something always gets left out, as we run out of time each day. And we’ve been doing this for decades, it doesn’t get easier; we haven’t figured out a magic formula.  One place I was determined not to miss trying was the new-ish @pizza4pscambodia — the first Cambodia branch of a Japanese owned Vietnamese based restaurant group specialising in Japanese pizza. I was so pleased we got to enjoy a quick lunch there yesterday, even if we weren’t able to sample their 4Ps craft beers (liquor sales were banned for two days during the local govt elections) and even if the service wasn’t as good as it is in Vietnam.  Apart from the style of pizza, three things really distinguish @pizza4ps — they work with local farmers to source the best quality local organic produce and you can really taste it; they produce their beautiful cheeses and charcuterie in house when they can’t source it locally (their creamy burrata and mozzarella are sublime); and they are a zero waste restaurant. I’ll tell you more in the next post.  #phnompenh #cambodia #travelwriter #foodwriter #travel #food #foodblogger #travelblogger #travelingram #lifeofatravelwriter #lifeofafoodwriter #traveltips #restaurant #phnompenhrestaurant #pizza #pizza4ps #japanesepizza #restaurantdesign #restaurantinterior

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ALL MEDIA (WORDS AND IMAGES) COPYRIGHT © 2007–2022 LARA DUNSTON AND TERENCE CARTER | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. DESIGNED IN APARTMENT RENTALS, HOTELS AND RESORTS AROUND THE WORLD BY GRANTOURISMO MEDIA. ASSEMBLED IN SOUTH-EAST-ASIA.

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