It is our last full day in Cambodia and we have decided that we had such a great day the day before on the motorbikes that we are going to rent them again.

Outside of the city of Kampot there is a large plateau up in the hills known as the Bokor Highlands. In the early 1900s a hill station, a church, a casino, and a variety of other buildings were built up on the highlands. The highlands are about 1000 meters above sea level, and even though it is in the tropics the temperature is about 10C cooler than the coast during the hot season so Bokor Hill Station became a place for well to do foreigners and Cambodians to come to escape the heat of the lowlands or the bustle of Phnom Penh.

The highlands was a busy place for decades until the Khmer Rouge era when it was abandoned as a vacation spot around 1972 and used by the Khmer Rouge as a stronghold during their conflict with the Vietnamese. Today the highlands is home to a huge new casino megaproject that will add golf courses and housing developments in future phases. Some of the original buildings still remain though and after years of abandonment leave haunting reminders of a forgotten time. This of course all adds up to an adventure for us to go up to the highlands for a nice long ride, and look around at the old ruins.

The trip to Bokor from Kampot is about 50km and in addition to a good vertical rise to the top, the road is quite twisty with a lot of curves and switchbacks, so this makes for a fun ride. As we enter the park we are surprised to find that the road was fully replaced/upgraded by the casino project and we are now riding on what is probably the best road in Cambodia and with almost no other traffic! As we climb up the mountainside we are rewarded with some incredible views down to the coast and also over Kampot and the surrounding rice fields.

It is low season here, and we know that the skies are not going to be clear and sunny all day, but we have been watching the mountain for a few days from the city and know we are highly likely to encounter some clouds and maybe even some light rains along the way. As we get about halfway up the mountain we start to ride through small patches of low-lying cloud and it is quite interesting to be ‘up there’ in the cloud cover. What we are not prepared for is the amount that the cloud cover increases in density as we get closer to the top. By the time we reach the highlands the visibility has dropped to about 20 feet and we are riding through the pea-soup fog!

We are starting to wonder if maybe we should just turn back as the temperature has dropped a bit and we wonder if we will actually be able to see anything but I had read that some of the old buildings look even more eerie when the fog is around so we decide we have come this far we might as well go on for a bit farther.

We come to a roundabout and one of the roads leads off to a waterfall so we decide to go there first, and oddly as we round a few corners the fog clears off completely and we are riding across the highland with relatively clear skies. It is still a bit cooler up here than down at sea level, and when we see what is clearly going to be a huge housing development along the road I wonder who would actually choose to live up here given the crappy and swiftly changing weather they have for at least half the year.

Towards the end of the road we reach the waterfall and are surprised to see what looks like a fairly large conference center type building and an outdoor sitting/eating area, but not another soul around anywhere. We go down to have a look at the waterfall and initially are a little disappointed – the waterfall does not look like much more than a bit of rapids and we are getting ready to wander off when we spot a rough trail off to one end of the viewpoint. We get about 20 feet into the jungle and this is where the real falls are! Just past the public viewpoint the riverbed drops off a cliff and down into a valley below. The drop is probably 100 to 150 feet and the river cascades through a couple of pools to the bottom. The edge is pretty sheer and Mrs. Columbus sounds the warning tone as I try to get out closer for a good picture – unfortunately the pictures will never show it as well as the real thing.

Now it is time to go back towards the main part of the highlands to the original hill station and casino. As soon as we get back near the main roundabout the fog closes back in and the visibility drops off dramatically again. After a bit more climbing we are down to about 10 feet of visibility and moving pretty slow to make sure we don’t suddenly meet something bigger than us on the road.

I know there is a Wat up here somewhere and after a few more kilometers in the fog we can see the gate to the temple. It seems that this side of the highland pretty much drops almost straight down to the lowlands and the temple is built on the high point of the highlands and right on the edge of the cliff. When we are standing at the wall along the edge of the grounds with the thick blanket of mist that is everywhere it feels like we are right on the edge of the earth with the great nothing just steps away. It is very hard to describe how it looked and how I felt standing there, but in some ways I am happy that the fog is there and the illusion it creates instead of what is probably an equally awesome view on a clear day!

With the light wind and the misty fog, and rain that could start at any time Mrs Columbus decides that it is time for her to break out her rain poncho. She hopes that it will also help to keep her at least slightly warmer for the rest of the ride. I am not sure about any of that, but at least the sound of the thin plastic flapping in the wind allows me to know where she is when I am riding in front 🙂

I am still hoping to see the old casino and some of the other old abandoned buildings so we get back on the road to look for those. It soon becomes clear that we are not going to get any break at all from the fog, and the visibility is so poor that we almost cannot see the road signs anymore. The road we are on suddenly ends and on our right side is an old building – probably a large house at one time – and on our left side is a large new house. We can only see them because they are built right next to the road, if they had been built another 20 feet or so back we would have never known they were there. It is quite a stark contrast between the new and the old, and I wonder a bit why the new house was built there as the view out the front door looks a bit like a Detroit slum.

We take a few minutes to wander in and around the old building and it is quite creepy exploring it in the fog – kind of like being in a Stephen King movie, but I can tell by her chattering teeth that Mrs. Columbus is still cold, and starting to not have fun anymore, so we turn around and head back. I tell her that if we see the casino on the road we will stop otherwise we can start down the mountain. As we are working our way back down the road – again fairly slowly because I almost can’t see more than about a bike length in front of me – I see a guy sitting by the side of the road?! I could have easily not seen him at all in the thick fog, but I stop to see if maybe he can tell me where the casino is. It turns out that he is a security guard who’s job it is to watch the casino site. The casino is apparently a short walk off the road but we can’t even see the faintest indication of it through the fog and the guard basically tells us that the fog is so thick that there is not much to see today. I would kind of like to explore a bit, but my companion is getting a bit antsy, and I figure that if the fog keeps getting thicker that the ride down is going to be even trickier, so I guess we will leave this exploration for another trip and it is back to the bikes and down the mountain we go.

(these are not my photos, but are what we would have seen if the visibility was not sooo bad)

The ride is a bit iffy for about 20 minutes and then almost like there is a gate or something we ride out of the fog and back into clearing skies – very weird indeed. The rest of the ride back down the mountain is quite fun, and by the time we are about half way down we are all dry again and warm enough for Mrs. Columbus to take her rain condom off. It was interesting to watch her ride with it on though because from behind with the plastic flapping in the breeze she looked a bit like a superhero 😉

It has been a good day overall – the ride on the good mountain road was quite fun, and as we return to Kampot it is time to start thinking about dinner and getting ourselves packed up for our departure tomorrow.

For dinner we have decided once again to return to the Rusty Keyhole 2 – a nice little pub that serves homemade food all prepared by a fellow from Manchester and his Cambodian wife. The food is really good and this is our third time here, but it seemed like a fitting spot for our last night in Kampot.

I am not sure if Mrs. Columbus has a bucket list, but if she does it one of the items on the list would definitely be riding a motorcycle. We talked about this briefly last year when we were over here, and even took a class when we got home to get familiar with riding motorbikes.

Well today is the day that she will be able to actually cross that item off her list! We have decided to rent motorbikes here and ride out to Kep for the day.After breakfast we make our way into town to one of the shops we have seen that rents scooters and hook ourselves up with a pair for a mere $5 US per day each. The bikes are delivered empty, so our first stop will be at a filling station, but after that it is out onto the open road to feel the wind in our hair and the bugs in our teeth.

Kep is right on the coast and used to be a very popular resort area for wealthy French and Cambodian families up until the Khmer Rouge era when the owners of some of the big properties had to strip them down to the bricks to exchange anything of value for cash so that they could buy food that was smuggled in from Vietnam. What remains is a small little seaside town with a bunch of old colonial style French mansions in serious states of decay.

Kep has a reputation for it’s seafood, and when we stop at the waterside market there are lots of women working right at the waterside bringing in basket after basket of crabs that are trapped less than 10 feet from the dock. From the water they go straight to the vendors who either have a stall selling fresh seafood, or have a stall selling fresh cooked seafood. It is quite a busy place with lots of activity crammed into a fairly small area, but Mrs. Columbus is not a fan of seafood, so she is looking to move on. On the way out of the market she does manage to spot a vendor selling waffles, so that warrants a stop. After some interesting haggling between a woman who only speaks English and a woman who only speaks Khmer we walk away with some things that look, and hopefully taste, like waffles for about 50 cents.

The drive around the coast of Kep is quite scenic as the road mostly follows the coast with the road built on a seawall, and in the main town there is a long stretch of beach that seems to be quite busy with local people. We don’t often see locals at the beaches, but because it is low season I suspect there are not many tourists about, and because it is a Sunday I think many of the local people are out with their families.

Once we get to the town-site we fork off the main road to go in behind the town – this is where all the old mansions are. The area is slowly starting to see a bit of rebuilding, but there is yard after yard of large plots of land with big stone or brick walls and decaying buildings inside. The whole scene is very interesting and a bit eerie all at the same time, and I’m sure a director of  ghost movies could have a ball here.

While riding around the back of the city we find a couple of side roads off into the hills and decide ‘why not’ and off we go on our ‘all terrain’ motorbikes. The first road leads up the hillside to a temple. The temple site like much of the old city seems almost like it is abandoned and initially we think that once the main pagoda was built that the people just walked away from the rest of the building, but as we are standing there looking at some of the buildings, the requisite Cambodian looking to be our ‘guide’ and a handout wanders up out of nowhere. We have been down this road before and are getting better at just dismissing them, so we take our time to look around and then back down the dirt road to our second off-road adventure.

The second road leads up into a valley, and according to the map there is a butterfly farm and a small resort at the end, but what we find at the end is a bit of a surprise. The Jasmine Valley Resort that marks the end of the road is totally abandoned! There is not a sole around, and as we walk through the place it is a bit creepy to see something that was once an active resort be completely vacant of any people. We see some printed materials here that indicate that there were guests here as recently as February or March 2014, but it is clear that the jungle moves quickly if not managed because by just looking at the place you would think it had been abandoned at least a year or two ago. At this rate, the remains of someone’s dream will soon become an Indiana Jones movie set!

Back to the town-site and time to start moving on, we start down another road on the map that should link us back to the highway, but just because it is a road on the map does not necessarily mean it is passable. A couple of kilometers into the journey the dirt road becomes unmanageable on our little 125cc bikes, and we are forced to turn back and go through the city. The main highway loops around the peninsula that Kep is located on, and pretty soon we are heading back in the direction of Kampot.

After returning to town we still have a few hours of daylight left and looking at the map there are a couple of spots that seem close enough to check out. To the north of town there is a place called Tuek Chou that appears to have some sort of waterfall and a national park, and to the south there is an island connected by a causeway with some marked roads, so we will go as far as we can before hunger or darkness sets in.

We ride about 5-10km up the small valley to the north first, and after paying our entry fee of $1 ($0.50 each) we go in search of the waterfall. It turns out that the only waterfall that we can see is created by a hydro-electric dam on the river that was built and run by a Chinese company. As we get towards the dam itself a couple of guys in fatigues gesture to us in the international sign of “you can’t go there mate” so we turn around and head back down the valley.

As we start to turn around we can hear a noise like rushing water and Mrs. Columbus asks what the noise is. We are close to the river and the dam, and I think it is just the sound of rushing water, but it turns out I was wrong! In a ‘you hear it before you see it’ moment we turn our heads at the same time and see a cloudburst moving down the valley. The noise of the rain coming down on the jungle is surprisingly loud, and before we can even start down the road the rain overtakes us – we zip down the road to cower under the nearest tree before we get too soaked, and wait the requisite 10 minutes before the rain passes, and the heat is back again. We start off towards the island south of town, and are actually dry again before we even complete the 8km back to the town.

The island is about another 5km or south to the south from town, and is not a tourist spot at all. The land area is covered with rice farms, salt farms, and a couple of villages, and lots of fishing boats. A couple of marginal dirt roads mostly circle the island and it is a nice little ride going by places that clearly don’t see a lot of white people on motorbikes as we stand out just a little 🙂 Lots of waves and shouts of ‘hello’ from the children as we pass by.

Finally it is starting to get towards the end of the day, and hunger is starting to set in so we head back to Kampot to turn in our motorbikes and sit down for some dinner. Mrs. Columbus is giddy like a schoolgirl from her day on a motorbike, and we are already talking about going out again tomorrow. It only cost us $5 for the bike, $4 for fuel for the whole day, so some pretty good entertainment value!

I would have thought that it would be hard to do less than nothing, but it feels like over the last couple of days that is what we have accomplished. Not to say that is a bad thing as we are on vacation after all, and sometimes you need to just relax and take in the surroundings.

The weather here in Kampot is working against us (or for us if the actual plan was to take a few days off), and the rain has set in. We are used to rain in SE Asia that typically comes in short downpours, but this is the socked in, I’m sticking around for a while kind of rain, and any sort of day trip or anything that we could do would just end up with a bunch of crabby people in a van looking at things from the windows.

We spend these couple of days reading books, having some video chats with the kids back home, and just generally hanging around at our hotel. They have a big sala down at the riverside with a few big basket chairs and I have discovered that they must have been designed with reading a book on your Kindle in mind.

The good news is that it is supposed to clear in a couple of days so we are planning trips to Kep and Bokor Hill station if the weather co-operates. The bad news is that it is supposed to actually get worse after that, and one of the forecasts I read for our next stop in Sihanoukville is for ‘torrential downpour’ for a few days. Based on that forecast we have decided that maybe we should move on from Cambodia for this year and spend our last week back in Thailand where the weather forecast seems a bit more in our favor.

All is not lost here though, as we have had a nice couple of days to relax, and we were able to use the downtime to make the arrangements for the next leg of our trip.

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.

After our active day yesterday, it is on to some more leisurely adventures for the next couple of days.

Our friend Richard that we know from Thailand is engaged to a girl from Cambodia, and Vanna lives in Phnom Penh, so we are lucky to be able to re-connect with a friendly face and get some additional help figuring out what is worth seeing and what we should skip.

It seems like Vanna knows everyone here, but I suspect that is mostly because she is from a large family, and we are lucky enough to meet most of here sisters and her father 😉 We manage to get out for dinner with them one night, have a nice time talking with them – Vanna doing a lot of the translating because her father and cousins do not speak any English.

Our next day trip is to go out to the temple at Udong. Most of Cambodia is flat – so flat that you can see for miles and miles in most directions, and it is this flat, fertile land that allows them to produce 2 and sometimes 3 harvests per year. The countryside seems like mile after mile of rice fields, and when the rice shoots have grown it would be like a sea of bright green everywhere. Someone we were talking with from here described it as ‘a green so unique that even Crayola can’t duplicate it’ – true to form the scenery is magnificent and we are not disappointed.

But I am getting ahead of myself a bit…

Outside of Phnom Penh about 50 kilometers is one of a small number of ‘mountains’ that rises up out of the otherwise flat plains. It is not much of a mountain in our terms, but more of a hill that rises a couple of hundred meters above the plain. At the top of the mountain there is a fairly modern Buddhist temple along with some old stupas that were apparently built a couple of hundred years ago.

Like so many other temples we have been to this one also has some stairs involved 🙂 There are over 500 stairs to the top, and like so many other times we look all the way up, and then start making our way to the top.

Accompanying us to the top are a couple of teenagers from the local village, offering helpful tidbits of information as we make our way up the stairs. We had read a bit about this on the internet and how the kids would come along and then expect some money when you were done, so it does not come as a complete surprise. At one point they even mention that they will carry us up if we get tired – I should have said yes just to see the expression on their faces, as I probably could have eaten both of the little guys for breakfast!

By the time we reach the top we are a little short of breath, and I think the young guys are worried that I might expire as they grab a fan from a little girl and start to generate a breeze around my head. Little do they know that this is not my first rodeo, and while I may be sweating enough for 3 people, we have conquered far more rugged ascents than this.

All our efforts are well rewarded though as the views from the temple are awesome. We are at the highest point for miles around and it feels like we can see all the way back to Thailand.

After looking around at the temple and the Buddha statues kept there, we climb back down the stairs to jump back in our tuk-tuk. We tip the teenagers a dollar each which was less than their asking price, but I figure we did not really hire them anyway, and I certainly did not make them carry me so we are all good.

The tuk-tuk ride to and from the city was almost as entertaining as the time in Udong. The distance was only about 50 kilometers each way, but the trip takes almost 2 hours each direction. Along the way we see all sorts of interesting things including houses built on stilts, many of the weird motorcycle combinations in my previous post, and a variety of things that just made us go ‘hmmm’. All in all a great day, and quite an uplifting change after our previous day.

On our return to Phnom Penh we reconnect with Vanna to setup our arrangements for the next day. We are moving on to Kampot in the southern part of Cambodia, and Vanna knows all the right people to get us bus tickets, tips on where to stay, and what to see while we are there. Thanks Vanna for all your help, I think we owe you one!