Kampot is a MUCH smaller town than Phnom Penh and is located on a river about 150km south of the capitol and about 15km inland from the sea. We have taken a minibus from Phnom Penh, and aside from the slow progress trying to get through the traffic leaving the city the rest of the ride goes quite smoothly. The minibus even has WiFi for most of the trip so I am able to catch up on a few things and before long we are in Kampot.
The minibus drops us off at a central bus station, and there is immediately a bit of a scrum with all the local tuk-tuk drivers ‘helping’ us with our bags in hope of a picking up a customer. We are not exactly sure how far away our hotel is, but there is now way I am schlepping our increasingly heavy bags more than a block or two, so when a guy offers to take us for $2 it is a no-brainer. Our hotel is a nice quiet place just on the edge of town, so easy walking distance to all of the restaurants and shops, but far enough away from the center to be very peaceful in the evenings. It turns out the $2 was well spent as we are about 1km away from the bus station and I would have been more than a little crabby if we had tried to walk it with all of our stuff.
Of course on the trip over our driver has used the opportunity to talk us into a day trip for the next day. We are not sure how long we will stay in this area, so I suppose it will be good to get some things accomplished early in case the weather turns or we decide to move on.
After checking into our new room and getting our stuff settled, we take a nice walk along the riverside to watch the sunset and find a place for dinner.
The next morning we have our breakfast and get ready in plenty of time for Mr. Bon Loung to pick us up at 9am for our trip out into the Kampot countryside. The plan is for us to be gone for about 5 or 6 hours and make a stops at a salt farm, a pepper farm, some caves, and a few villages and temples. The trip is pretty good – we are riding along in the back of an open air tuk-tuk with good views of everything we pass, and the driver will stop wherever we want to answer questions or to take photos.
Our first couple of stops are at a monastery and a fishing village. The monastery has about 25-30 monks that live there and is surrounded by a small village with a school. The temple is fairly ornate for something this far out of the city, but we have seen a lot of temples in SE Asia so unless they have something special to stand out, many temples seem alike sir. The temple does have some pagodas that were built a number of years ago, and some of them house remains from a small killing field of the Khmer Rouge era – a grim reminder that the regime left it’s legacy everywhere… Back in the tuk-tuk and we stop at a small fishing village. The village itself is built along a small creek that barely looks like it has enough water to float a boat let along a whole village of fishermen, our driver informs us that the village is about 10km to the sea, but because Cambodia is so flat the creek is tidal and the boats come in and go out when the tide is high. It is oddly quiet at mid-day in the village, but the driver explains that the fishermen go out in the evening and fish on the open ocean in the small boats all night and then return in the morning, so they are all sleeping right now. I can’t even begin to imagine being out in one of these small, rickety, old boats in the ocean in the dark, but they do it every day.
Kampot is a major hub for the production of salt for use all across Cambodia – a small amount is exported, but most of the production is sent to other parts of the country. The salt here is ‘farmed’ during the hot season by flooding small fields about the size of a rice paddy with sea water, and then letting the sun evaporate the water leaving the salt behind. The whole cycle takes about 14 days to evaporate the pond and harvest the salt, and this is done over and over again for the roughly 6 months that the hot season lasts. The small fields go for miles in all directions, and the harvested salt is stored in ‘barns’ that are all over the area. The salt is just stored in piles like sand until it is sold and then a crew comes out and fills 100 kilo sacks by hand to be loaded onto a truck and sent to their destination. Because we are here in the low season we can’t see the production of the salt, but we are lucky enough to come by at a time when they are loading a truck and we are able to walk right inside one of the barns to see the huge mounds of salt and the bagging process.
Our tour now leaves the main road and heads off onto some side roads and our next stop at a couple of caves. The side roads vary from gravel roads in decent shape to some single lane dirt trails that are in sad need of some attention to deal with some pretty big potholes! We are bouncing around pretty good in the back of the tuk-tuk for most of the journey, but this is SE Asia, and the norm for all the people living here, so it is just another part of the adventure for us. The scenery more than compensates for the bumpy ride, and we are rewarded with views of rice and corn fields and locals working at the planting as we ride through the countryside.
The caves are a bit of a letdown compared to some of the gigantic caves we have seen in Thailand. The couple of caves we see take only a few minutes a piece to see, and the climb up the stairs probably took longer than the actual exploration of the caves. As is the norm though they do come complete with a couple of teenage boys who insist on inviting themselves along as ‘guides’ and then shaking you down for a ‘tip’ at the end. We have seen this at pretty much every cave we have been to in SE Asia, so are getting used to the process.
After some more time bouncing along through the countryside we come upon a lake known as Secret Lake – not really sure why it is called that because it is clearly on the tourist circuit and has a bunch of salas along one shore where you can sit and have lunch, which we do. The setting is quite relaxing and there are hammocks in the sala where it would be easy to take an afternoon nap, but the lunch itself is a bit of an experience! The restaurant staff does not speak any English, and we don’t speak and Khmer, so our driver who speaks a bit of English tries to make sense of what we are asking for and explain it to our server who I suspect will try to remember and relate it to the cook. After it is said and done we end up with fried rice, which was quite good, and a half chicken – which was literally half the chicken, all chopped up bones and all and served in some sort of chili sauce. We each try a few pieces of what can only really be described as chewing on an old tire before Mrs. Columbus discovers the feet and some organs on the plate that that is enough. Fortunately there are a few dogs scavenging about and we manage to fob off the rest of the chicken parts to them so it looks like we actually finished the whole thing.
After lunch we get back in the tuk-tuk for our final destination, a pepper plantation. Supposedly Kampot is one of the best pepper producing regions in the world and while much of the fields were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, over the last 20 years or so the farms have recovered and are again producing Kampot pepper in quantity. It takes about 6 years for a pepper plant to be mature enough to produce pepper corns, and then it will produce for about the next 6-8 years before you have to cut the whole thing down and start over. We also learn that all pepper corns (black, white, red, green) all come from the same plant, and the only difference is from when they are harvested and how they are dried and processed.
After the pepper plantation it is back to the city and our hotel room where we will wander off into the town to see what we can find for dinner. Overall a good first day in Kampot, and I think I will be happy with our time here.