Kampot
After all the walking, climbing and hassle, a chill out sessoin was in need. So we hopped on a "Luxury VIP" bus to Phnom Penh on which they seem to have invented a new form of torture, an extremely loud and repeatative music videos blaring through the bus. No relaxing going here.
As soon as we got to Phnom Penh we jumped straight into a shared taxi heading south. We had negotiated a fair price for us to take all the seats in the car and to leave straight away, but the driver seemingly had other ideas. He sneaked in 2 other passengers on the front seat before we could say no, and so left the back seat free for us to feel guilty on for the 2.5 hrs of our journey. He drove like a maniac spending most of those two and a half hours on the wrong side of the road playing chicken with anything that had the audacity to be coming the other way. Just look sideways was our mantra as looking forward was way too scary. By the grace of God, Buddha or who knows who we made it in one peace, and so we checked into the best hotel in town (ie. the only one with hot water).
Kampot, which was our destination, was a similar town to Battambang, albeit a smaller version, and so we immediately liked it, even though it did insist on raining for almost the entire time we were there. There was not much to do in the town itself, so when we met Sam, a friendly and smiley moto driver, we got him to show us the local sites. These involved riding through the countryside and walking barefoot across padi fields chatting with a dozen local kids showing us the way to a temple hidden in a limestone cave. It also included a trip to the old resort town of Kep, filled with atmospheric empty buildings slowly being recolonised as the town recovers from being one of the last stongholds of the Khmer Rouge. The highlight though was probably a trip to a monastary where the monks could speak great english and took the time to explain to us the story of Buddha, and to let us quiz them on the life of a monk. They day ended with Sam taking us to a local restaurant where we had Khmer soup. At first we asked what some of the ingredients were, but soon we learnt that ignorance is bliss.
There is another "ghost town" near Kampot, an old hill station called Bokor. It was a bit of a pointless trip as we did not see much, but the 2.5 hours trip up (& back down) on the worst road in the world on the back of a 4x4 pick up truck was a great fun, if a bit painful and the old casino hotel where we stopped for lunch was amasingly atmospheric. Misty rain being blown through old windows into the carcus of rooms. We took lots of photos. The evening was spent with a couple ot American Peace Corps volunteers stationed in China who had run away to the relative comfort of Cambodia for a week.
We really did enjoy Cambodia but it was time to say good bye. We packed up and via one night in Phnom Penh we headed back to the luxury of Saigon.
As soon as we got to Phnom Penh we jumped straight into a shared taxi heading south. We had negotiated a fair price for us to take all the seats in the car and to leave straight away, but the driver seemingly had other ideas. He sneaked in 2 other passengers on the front seat before we could say no, and so left the back seat free for us to feel guilty on for the 2.5 hrs of our journey. He drove like a maniac spending most of those two and a half hours on the wrong side of the road playing chicken with anything that had the audacity to be coming the other way. Just look sideways was our mantra as looking forward was way too scary. By the grace of God, Buddha or who knows who we made it in one peace, and so we checked into the best hotel in town (ie. the only one with hot water).
Kampot, which was our destination, was a similar town to Battambang, albeit a smaller version, and so we immediately liked it, even though it did insist on raining for almost the entire time we were there. There was not much to do in the town itself, so when we met Sam, a friendly and smiley moto driver, we got him to show us the local sites. These involved riding through the countryside and walking barefoot across padi fields chatting with a dozen local kids showing us the way to a temple hidden in a limestone cave. It also included a trip to the old resort town of Kep, filled with atmospheric empty buildings slowly being recolonised as the town recovers from being one of the last stongholds of the Khmer Rouge. The highlight though was probably a trip to a monastary where the monks could speak great english and took the time to explain to us the story of Buddha, and to let us quiz them on the life of a monk. They day ended with Sam taking us to a local restaurant where we had Khmer soup. At first we asked what some of the ingredients were, but soon we learnt that ignorance is bliss.
There is another "ghost town" near Kampot, an old hill station called Bokor. It was a bit of a pointless trip as we did not see much, but the 2.5 hours trip up (& back down) on the worst road in the world on the back of a 4x4 pick up truck was a great fun, if a bit painful and the old casino hotel where we stopped for lunch was amasingly atmospheric. Misty rain being blown through old windows into the carcus of rooms. We took lots of photos. The evening was spent with a couple ot American Peace Corps volunteers stationed in China who had run away to the relative comfort of Cambodia for a week.
We really did enjoy Cambodia but it was time to say good bye. We packed up and via one night in Phnom Penh we headed back to the luxury of Saigon.
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