Skuon, a highway town 75km from the Cambodian capital, is better known as “Spider Village” because of the unusual snacks sold in its marketplace. Travellers coming here are often on the road from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, and are confronted by baskets filled high with fried tarantula, silkworm, crickets and cockroaches amongst other bugs. All ready to eat, for those who can handle it.

As one of the guests in my tourgroup allowed a live tarantula to crawl all over him as part of an interactive section of the tour, fried and barbecued bugs were handed out to us to try, with my main feeling being that the tarantula legs weren’t too unlike the crispy shredded beef you can get from a Chinese takeaway.

Finding out how they were gathered was explained to us and has always stayed with me as it signified how different food gathering can be outside of our bubble. Locals, often children, will go out into wooded areas in search of the tarantulas that populate much of this small village, tempting them out of their hiding places in the ground into empty bottles and often coming back with numbers in the hundreds to sell at market. For anyone interested there are various videos online of this process in practice. The bugs themselves cost pennies to buy and many visitors go for the novelty of the pictures they come back with, however there is a darker side to why eating spiders is such a tradition in Cambodia.

During Pol Pot’s brutal leadership in the 60’s & 70’s which saw a quarter of the population killed, famine took hold of the country and many survived by eating anything they could find. Most of the time this would be in the form of tarantulas and various insects, which would provide people with much needed nutrition, especially protein.

This explanation given by our tour guide was on my mind as I was trying to get my head around the surrealness of the market. Where you might feel as though the market sellers may be playing up to the cameras it is interesting to remember that there’s a reason as to why they’re there in the first place. As well as getting to tick the quirky street food box off your checklist when travelling Southeast Asia, you gain a more rounded understanding of Cambodian culture by giving the village a visit.