Living' it up French colonial style in Kampot and Kep, Cambodia

In its heyday, Kep was a fancy coastal resort town favoured by the French, although it was abandoned by holiday makers following Cambodian independence and subsequently looted by the Khmer Rouge - leaving behind an array of ruined villas.

The town is very spread out with a beach square in the middle, separated from the main urban bit to the East and the famous crab market to the West by a couple of stretches of empty coast road. It's quiet and what street lighting there is goes off about 9pm. The people are very laid back and friendly, and far more likely to spend their time playing kick volleyball (fun to watch) than trying to sell you stuff. We were relieved to find not all towns as intense as Sihanoukville or Phnom Penh, where you can feel like a walking ATM sometimes.

Kep also has one of the tiniest national parks going, really just one forested hill rising up from the beach. We walked its 8km circumference in flip flops (due to rubbish rental bikes and my shoes having broken). Posted on trees along the way are signs informing any who care to read about the resident flora and fauna. At one point while we were learning about lychees we spotted a troop of monkeys above us, who clearly knew all about them.

Welcome to Kep

Kep is great for food, if a bit pricy. (By the way, Cambodia has an odd dual-currency; ATMs dispense US dollars, which are interchangeable with the native Riel. This means I get more confused than usual when checking change). We had an astonishingly good seafood dinner at Breezes restaurant, with grilled barracuda wraps and prawn crackers used as little edible trays for shrimp salad (brilliant idea). Kimly restaurant was great too, although Jon had to make do with shark as they were out of stingray.

Crab is the town's main draw, and so to try it out we went to the crab market, which was smoky and bustly in the best tradition of food markets. When we asked for a kilo of the crustaceans, one of the ladies promptly waded out into the sea to retrieve some live crabs from a trap. These were briskly weighed, washed and chucked into a steel pan on the fire to steam (I'm sure they died quickly...). 5 minutes later we were presented with our super-fresh lunch. Eating it took far longer and was a very enjoyable mess.

The crab market

Just before we left for Kampot we sampled a fresh sugar cane drink, the famous smelly fruit called durian (banned from many hotels and minibuses but actually quite nice) and had a visit to Kep Oceanarium, which houses several surprising sea creatures brought up from the bay just outside.

Durians, sugar cane drinks and imprisoned sealife

Kampot is only about forty minutes from Kep, a much larger town (though still small really) and the major trade centre for the area. Once there we headed to market, which was chaotic but full of helpful people, to get my shoes fixed by a street side cobbler. Definitely worth doing as they did a very thorough job, re-stuck my flip flop soles into the bargain and only asked for $2 (we gave $3). The rest of the market was full of excitingly unidentifiable fruit - we bought a large quantity of what turned out to be longan and sapodilla, plus some mini rather tasty oranges.

Shoe fixing, sapodilla, longan and mini rather tasty oranges

The town is noisy in a mainly good way. There are several fascinating windowless buildings which play birdsong at high volume to attract unwitting birds to nest inside the cave-like interior. Bird's nest soup is big business! Our arrival also coincided with 'wedding season', and all over the place (usually in the middle of the road) pink marquees were going up and tables laid out to celebrate Khmer nuptials. All very festive, but we were driven onto the streets till midnight after appalling, ear-splitting karaoke kicked off at one near our guesthouse.

Kampot is world famous for pepper and also has large salt farms - it's the condiment capital of Cambodia! We took a quick tour to see it all. The salt farms consist of many tennis-court sized beds, raked flat and then filled with seawater which evaporates over about 10 days, leaving behind a bed full of salt crystals! It's then collected and stored in sheds ready to be shipped out for cleaning.

The pepper plantation (Starling Farm) was equally interesting and much greener. All black, white, and red pepper comes from the same plant (news to us), but is harvested and dried differently. The peppercorns picked on the cusp of turning yellow and sun-dried turn black; those left to ripen and turn red can be dried for red pepper or blanched first for white. The green berries are eaten fresh in stir-frys too and are super hot but very good!

Salt and pepper!

Bokor Hill, to the West, has an apparently amazing 'ghost town' type abandoned French hill station on top. I say apparently, as we didn't quite make it up... The summit is 8km from town on the flat and then up a continuous climb of 32km. We rented mountain bikes for the trip, were making good ground and had just 10km to go when Jon's chain snapped! Some locals attempted to help out (with a pair of pliers), but had very uncertain knowledge of rear derailleurs. Despite our best efforts at communication, the chain ended up reattached in a big loop, making pedaling impossible! Luckily freewheeling 22km back down to the main road was more awesome than arduous, and once there Jon hung onto my rucksack and I towed him back towards town. With 1km to go a roadside mechanic was able to 'fix' it (with a lump hammer) in the correct routing. He did a very good job considering - not sure how long it'll last but good enough to give back to the rental shop! To celebrate I ate a huge rack of ribs at the Rusty Keyhole, an event in itself.

Freewheeling down Bokor Hill

Other activities included paddle boarding around mangroves and a spot of rock climbing. Paddle boarding involves standing on a surfboard type thing with a long paddle to maneuver yourself, and is slow, surreal and very fun. We set off on the river in the late afternoon, in time to see the local fishing boats set off for sea. They fish all night and take the catch to market on the way home. The mangroves off the river felt prehistoric, full of huge ferns through which ran little channels of flat dark water. We arrived back after dark feeling awesome.

Paddle boarding

We climbed with Climbodia, a new company set up by a Belgian with a passion for a local cave he first saw last year. He's set up via ferratas, that is, safety cables to clip your harness to while traversing around the rock face and inside the cave, plus abseiling points down chimneys in the rock and a few top-rope climbing routes. He's waiting on a box of rock anchors from customs to expand his routes around the hill but the ones he has already were challenging enough for us!

The cave itself has a few shrines and several wooden ladders and walkways. We were informed that the latter are actually props left behind by a French film production while they were filming 'The White Soldier' recently! Most of Kampot's expats were apparently used as extras, and the locals got the ladders plus cut-price army boots and other goodies after filming. We'll have to see if we can watch it once it's out!

-Kath

Climbodia!

Also around Kampot and Kep...

p.s. We are now famous! Well, maybe a bit. Our pictures are now in the slideshow on Cycling Sukhotai website (www.cycling-sukhothai.com) from a tour we did in October last year. On the slippery slope to stardom.