From 1975 to 1979 Cambodia was ruled by a group calling themselves the Khmer Rouge. It's difficult to overstate how brutal this regime and it's nominal leader, Pol Pot, were and how thoroughly Cambodia was decimated by those four years. By the way, anyone still consoling themselves with the post facto reason for invading Iraq of "Saddam was a despot who killed his own people" should read up on Pol Pot. He made Saddam seem like a neophyte; Pol Pot orchestrated a draconian reordering of Cambodian society that resulted in the death of a quarter of its population (approximately 2 million people) and Western nations weren't exactly falling all over themselves to depose him. In fact, it took an invasion by the Vietnamese to dislodge the monsters.
During and after that reordering, in which the capital city was completely emptied so that Cambodian society might become a Maoist agrarian society, widespread famine ensued. Desperate, the people took drastic measures to survive. This included eating spiders--specifically Skuon spiders, palm-sized tarantulas. The Khmer Rouge is gone, but the habit of munching on arachnids is not. At a stop over during the bus ride to Siem Reap (the city outside Angkor Wat), we came upon a food stall serving up Skuon spiders. Watching the live ones scramble over each other in a cardboard box, I wasn't remotely curious about how the fried ones tasted.
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