Kampot, Cambodia: 20th – 22nd October 2009

We took the bus for a 4 ½ hour journey south to Kampot. As usual we were the only Westerners on board. On the way into town we saw lots of old colonial buildings in ruins. Kampot, and its neighboring village Kep (40km down the road), were once the most popular resort towns in Cambodia. All of the wealthy Cambodians and French colonials had holiday homes here and it really was a smart place. However when the Khmer Rouge came to power they destroyed nearly all of the colonial manor houses. Many were completely removed, so all you can see is the old garden walls, but some remaining standing as a shell. In recent years some of them have been restored.

The actual town of Kampot has fared better with lots of the colonial architecture still standing, some of it restored but some still very scruffy. The town is based on a river overlooking the Bokor Mountain, which has clouds covering its top every evening – it’s a picturesque setting and the town has a very chilled out, relaxed vibe – we took to it straight away! Some highlights have included:

- Walking along the river in the evening, seeing all the locals doing their exercise. An aerobics troupe were strutting their stuff to some excellently cheesy Cambodian pop music whilst the sun set behind the mountain – it felt like being in a musical with lots of people dancing around and waving their hands in the air – very good fun to watch!

- Visiting some nearby caves. We paid some local children to be our guides. First they showed us a large cave containing a pre-Angkorian temple and then asked us to follow them on a ‘short cut’. Matt and I were slightly concerned as we scrambled down into a pitch black void, lit only by the Kid’s torches. Before we knew it we were scrambling over boulders with drops of 20 or 30 feet on either side and were pretty terrified, but it suddenly became too late to turn back! Some of the foot holds and hand holds required a lot of stretching to reach and I must admit to have being a bit panicked. An ex- colleague of mine died rock climbing earlier this year, and I thought of him as I was pulling myself from boulder to boulder and was incredibly relieved when it was over. It didn’t help that one of the kids kept referring to me as ‘King Kong’, “come on King Kong, you can do it” - the little git!

- Visiting a lake and having noodles on the shore.

- Enjoying the views of the countryside from our Tuk-tuk. The rice fields are so green at this time of year, and they go on for miles, dotted with homesteads and palm trees, with hills in the distance - really pretty, but it’s hard to get photos to do it justice.

- Chatting to 2 charity workers on the veranda of our guest house – they were both ladies in their 60’s, one American and one British and were working in local schools and orphanages – they told us about some of the corruption they’d seen in the country, and said that the average life expectancy is only 46! We were both quite shocked as we’ve seen poverty in Cambodia but didn’t sense that things were that bad.

Tomorrow we travel the 40kms by tuk-tuk to Kep, where we plan to sit on our veranda and look at the view for a day whilst planning the next stage of our travels – Vietnam!