Another Facebook album link. (This is part of the project I explained about in this post HERE.) Here is a link to my photos from my trip to Kep in 2012. (Kep is right next to Kampot, so this was the same trip as the Kampot photos I previously posted.)
I wrote up some of this trip in my journal, but not all of it. I've down my best to edit out any personal bits, or any bits that contain information about other people, and only kept in the parts that describe the town and the resort. I've replaced proper names with ****** to protect everyone's identity.
It ends rather abruptly because when attempting to write everything about this trip, I got fatigued and just kind of gave up halfway through.
Monday, March 26 2012
Woke up.
Packed for the trip. Ate breakfast at Blue Dolphin.
Took bus.
Bus trip was advertised as 3.5 hours to Kampot, but took longer. Mostly backpackers on bus (lots of trendy hippy clothes, lots of trendy tattoos, et cetera.)
There was an older couple behind me who were very talkative, and they did frequently engage me in conversation and I heard a lot of their life story. They were from upstate New York. He had worked for GE, but when he had gotten laid off in the 90s they had gone to Vietnam to teach English. Then he had gotten re-hired at GE, but he was now retired, so they come out to this region to visit every winter because they like the area and it’s so cheap to travel.
They were friendly enough people, but like a lot of the other travelers you meet around this region they seemed very interesting in telling me their travelling stories and in trying to impress me. I overheard the man say to someone else, “A lot of people go to Vietnam and they only see Hanoi, or Saigon or Halong Bay but there’s so much more to Vietnam they never see.”
True enough, no doubt, but he was at the same time reminding everyone he had seen it, and so trying to gently play traveller’s one-upsmanship.
Anyway, bus ride down was long and boring for the most part, although the scenery was occasionally quite stunning.
The bus swung by Kep first so I got a brief look at Kep from the bus windows. Half of the passengers got out at Kep, and then we continued onto Kampot.
I got a motor taxi and met ****** at Riki Tiki Tavi restaurant.
I would have been game to hang out for a while, but ****** suggested we go to the Villa immediately. He was quite keen to show me the place.
We had a bit of a problem finding a tuk tuk driver, one of the indications that Kampot is a much more sleepy town than Phnom Penh.
“I’m not used to not being harassed by tuk tuk drivers,” I commented to the Dutch women who ran the Riki Tiki Tavi restaurant/guesthouse.
“Here you have to harass them,” she told me.
Eventually we found a tuk tuk.
The Villa ****** is staying at is a bit removed from town and I had a 10 minute tuk tuk ride down a dirt road past some rural villages until we finally arrived at the secluded villa.
The place’s name is Villa Vedici, and it is built in the style of a French Villa (although recently built.) Originally I think it had been built for private use, and then converted into a guest house where you could rent out individual rooms.
On the minus side, it was quite far from the city and quite secluded. (I was hoping to get a feel for Kampot city daily life while I was here.)
On the plus side it was, well, quite far from the city and quite secluded. And absolutely beautiful. A pool overlooked a well kept tropical garden which opened up to the river and there were mountains in the background. From the balcony we watched flocks of white birds fly down the river while the sun set behind the mountains.
“And the best part is,” ****** told me, “We’ve got the run of the joint. There’s absolutely no one else here. That’s the beauty of having the holidays in the middle of the week when nobody else has off.”
It was just us and the Khmer staff. We ordered several drinks and food.
It got dark fairly early on, around 6 or so. Because we were in a secluded area, and away from the city lights, the darkness made it feel like it was actually later than it was.
Went to bed at 10:30.
Monday, March 27, 2012
Woke up at 8. Breakfast.
******** walked down the stairs as I was writing up this journal in a notebook (which I was using to take notes while I’m away from my computer.) “That looks suspiciously like a diary Joel,” he said. “Busted.”
Some debate in the morning about what to do. ******** wanted to go to Bokor Hill Station, an old French colonial outpost on a mountain now abandoned and become a tourist destination.
I was interested in French colonialism as well, but the problem was getting there. ****** was clearly relishing the idea of a scenic drive up on his motorbike. I was without a motorbike, so I would have to ride on the back of a motortaxi, which wasn’t so appealing for long distances.
We talked about the different scenarios for a while, and debated with the Villa Khmer staff about how long it would take. (They were saying Bokor Hill was 2 hours away by motorcycle, ******** was insisting it couldn’t possibly be more than one.)
Eventually it was decided to order a motor taxi for me. The staff told me it would be $15 to hire the driver out for the afternoon, which seemed a bit expensive to me (considering this is Cambodia).
I decided to opt out in the end though. I had enough of my mother in me that I was nervous at the idea of 2 hours on the back of a motorcycle without a helmet. (My paranoia has been increased by the rash of motorcycle accidents we’ve been having at work lately—several staff injured on motorbikes within the past couple weeks.) Plus riding on the back of a motor taxi for 2 hours didn’t sound like my idea of fun. It was different for ****** because he would be doing the cruising yourself, and driving a motorbike is always much more fun than riding on the back of one.
So, I suggested we split up for the afternoon. I hadn’t gotten a chance to walk around the town yet, which was what I really wanted to do anyway. ****** , I think, was somewhat disappointed I wasn’t going along, but we agreed to meet up again at 3 (for the boat ride we had reserved).
So, camera in hand, I journeyed from our villa down the dirt road, past all the village houses. Many of the village people were friendly and called out hello to me. I tried to take a lot of pictures of the beautiful road lined with palm trees.
I got into town, where I walked along the river. I passed lots of restaurants and guest houses for foreign tourists along the river. I briefly walked inland away from the river to see a bit more of the town center.
As opposed to Phnom Penh, I was able to have a pleasant walk without tuk tuks and motor taxis yelling out at me from every corner, although I did encounter a couple of them near the tourist areas.
Feeling tired and hungry around noon, I went up to get some food at Riki Tiki Tavi, where I had met ******yesterday.
I walked in and saw ****** and ****** (from America). They saw me and joked about how even down here they couldn’t get away from people from work.
I sat next to them and we hung out. They had just spent 3 days relaxing at a resort up the river, and were now freshly arrived in Kampot. I encouraged them to stay where ******and I were staying, and also invited them on the boat. In the end, they would turn down both invitations, but I still chatted to them over an hour or so at lunch.
Headed back on foot. Passed more friendly villagers on the road, some of them leading cattle.
Back at the villa, met up with ****** again. ******was raving about what a beautiful drive it had been, but I think I would have enjoyed it a lot less on the back of a motor taxi anyway.
We then did the boat tour at 3:30.
The river ride was absolutely amazing.
Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me. (I wasn’t sure who we wet we would get our how secure our belongings would be, so I just left it behind). Which was a pity because the scenery was just breathtaking and beautiful at every turn.
Actually maybe it’s just as well I left my camera behind, because it allowed me to soak in the scenery without frantically trying to take as many pictures as possible every time the boat went around the bend.
The river upstream from Kampot was surrounded on both sides by tropical jungle. Occasionally the scenery would be broken by a peasant house and a cow grazing, or a rich villa overlooking the river, but it was mostly just jungle along the river for 2 hours. Absolutely beautiful.
This is the Cambodia you dream about seeing,” I said to ******as we watched the scenery unfold.
****** sat up on the roof, and after he encouraged me to join me, I came up on the roof as well.
Just drop dead gorgeous scenery in all directions. What can I say?
The boat cruise had been advertised as going up to a waterfall for swimming, but we never got to a waterfall. ****** explained to me that a Chinese company had bought the waterfall and was now collecting the water, so that it was no longer possible to swim by it. (Or something like that. I’m not sure I understood her correctly, and for that matter I’m not entirely sure she knew what she was talking about.)
We stopped where the river split into two parts. (Or, more accurately since we were going upstream, we stopped where two rivers came together) and swam there.
I, partly to show off my swimming ability, swam all over the place, a good ways downstream and then a good ways upstream. (The current was very gentle.)
We got back on the boat, and started away.
We stopped at another point on the river where we watched the sun set behind the mountains. It was gorgeous.
Several birds were flying up and down the river, and ****** pointed them out to me. “You know back in England people make fun of bird watchers,” he said. “They’re supposed to be a bit eccentric or something. But I really got into it back when I lived in Africa. It’s the only wild life that’s easily visible sometimes, and they’re so colorful.”
We got back to the lodge, where we ordered dinner.
****** was talking about going into town for drinks in Kampot, and I initially agreed, but after a couple beers we felt quite comfortable where we were, and we talked ourselves out of it. (Between the walking around town and the boat cruise, it had already been a full day for me. And ****** had put in a full day as well.)
So we drank beer at the bar.
While we were floating around in the pool, ****** asked me what my plans were for tomorrow. I told her I didn’t have any plans. She told me she had off tomorrow morning and afternoon, and offered to show me around bicycling. I accepted.
She proposed, oddly enough, not meeting at the guest house, but instead gave me directions to meet her down the road. “Turn right, then left, then left,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the coffee shop down the road.”
I was a bit worried I would get lost, but then she confirmed that this was essentially just the main road into town I had already been down today.
Wednesday, March 28
Woke up early.
Ate breakfast.
I ordered a couple cheese sandwiches to go (one for me, one for ******, so we would have something to eat during the day) and rented one of the bikes.
I met ****** right down the road—it turns out she actually lives just down the street from Villa Vedici She pointed out her family house to me, and it was a typical peasant house built on stilts. Obviously she did not come from a wealthy background.
She was at a neighbors coffee restaurant, which was also a typical Cambodian rural establishment—just some picnic tables outside. I ordered a cup of strong Cambodian coffee. Dogs and chickens ran around the place.
Then once we had our coffee, we went on our way.
We biked straight down the road into town, and then a bit beyond.
We decided to head out to the sea first, but there was some confusion about how to get to the sea, so we ended up taking several side streets.
We passed lots of rural Cambodian neighborhoods, and the children would always call out, “Hello! Hello!” to me.
(****** was of the impression I was getting most of the attention because I was a foreigner, and she was probably right. She would imitate the children, and say, “Hello Barang! Hello Barang!” (Hello foreigner, Hello foreigner.)
We passed through many charming rural Cambodian neighborhoods, and if I had been travelling on my own I probably would have taken many more photographs than I did, but I didn’t want to be constantly bothering ****** to stop all the time. So I waited for her to stop, and then I would try and take photos in all directions.
While passing through all these rural Cambodian villages, I would often think to myself that back when I was growing up, in Grand Rapids Michigan, I would never have imagined that one day I’d actually be biking through rural Cambodia and seeing all this with my own eyes.
(Perhaps this is a bit of a cliché thing to think. Every traveler who goes anywhere new probably always thinks this to himself. But cliché or not, this is what I thought.)
Among some of the rural villages we passesd was a Cham village (Cambodia’s Muslim minority). They had a temple in the center of the village, which blended Islamic style architecture with Cambodian temple architecture. (I wish I would have gotten a picture actually, but we kept biking.) The Cham men had on special hats, the women headscarves, but the children were as friendly as in all the other neighborhoods, and yelled out, “Hello! Hello!” as we passed by.
We followed small foot paths through rice fields, and rode our bikes across a small stream over a bridge which was nothing more than a few wooden planks lying across the stream.
As we got closer to the ocean, there were lots of fields that were just covered with water. I didn’t understand what these were at first, but ****** explained to me they were salt fields. They were all covered with ocean water, and then once the ocean water evaporated they would harvest the salt.
While biking around we also saw lots of Water Buffalo lounging around in the mud. And at one point we saw a man leading a whole heard of them through the fields. He was a bit off in the distance, but when I asked about it, ******said that he was probably a Muslim (Cham), since only the Muslims in Cambodia kept Water Buffalos. Although why ownership of Water Buffalos was regulated to a single religion, I never did get ****** to fully explain to me.
Eventually we made our way to where the river emptied into the sea. And stopped for pictures and a rest. There wasn’t much of a beach, but we had made it to the Ocean, which had been one of our objectives for the afternoon.
Near the ocean there were various shell fish and crabs. And several shells that had all been smashed and left in a pile. I assumed at first that this was children who had done this, but ****** told me the local people here didn’t have enough food to eat, and so would resort to breaking open these shells to get the tiny little sea crabs inside. (I guess poverty in rural Cambodia was worse than I had realized.)
There were a couple of empty concrete barrels resting near the river, and ****** crawled into one of them to rest and escape the sun, and invited me to come in. It was a much tighter fit for me than it was for her, but I did manage to get inside even if I was a bit cramped.
She asked me if I had ever been in a barrel like this before, and I had brief flashbacks to my childhood playing in and around the concrete barrels at elementary school. (Funny now to think how easily we were kept occupied as children.)
We hung out there and talked for a while, and then got back on our bikes and started heading back.
We took a slightly different way back than we did there, but ****** claimed to know the area so there was no danger of getting lost.
A man on a motorbike passed us on the road. He glanced briefly at me, but starred much harder at ******. He then sped on, but we saw him a little ways down the road. One of the salt houses had a wooden pavilion, and he was sitting there, and invited us to stop and sit with him.
******asked me if I wanted to stop, and I said sure why not.
The man didn’t speak in English, so he spoke the whole time in Khmer to ******. I didn’t understand a word he was saying, but he would give me a hard stare from time to time which struck me as unfriendly, but it might just have been cultural differences. He also appeared to be really grilling ****** and firing off questions at her.
(He also had the rather disgusting rustic habit of vigorously picking his nose while conversing.)
Since I couldn’t participate in the conversation, I took some pictures of the surrounding countryside while we were there.
The man took an interest in my bike (which was, by Cambodian standards, a fairly nice bike) and ****** translated that he would like to ride it.
“I’m afraid it’s not my bike,” I said, “I’m only borrowing it for the day from the guest house, so I can’t really loan it out to other people.” This must not have gotten translated accurately, because he got on the bike anyway and road up and down the street for a while. He came back and asked me (through ****** translation) how much the bike costs. I repeated that it wasn’t my bike, it belonged to the guest house, and I really didn’t know how much it costs.
When we got back on the road, I asked ****** what all the man’s questions had been. “He asked me lots of questions, and all of his questions were very boring,” she said.
(...and this is, unfortunately, as far as I got writing up my journal on this trip...)
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