Kampot

We arrive in Kampot in 2 hours which is good considering we are a little squished and sticky in our little minibus!

Rather than staying in the main town, we read that Olly's Place 1.5km out of town was a great spot along the river. Great place to chill out...

ollys place

Our first day in Kampot we decided to take a Tuk Tuk and do some sight seeing....
The road starts of in not bad condition. However as we continue further out towards the countryside the gravel disappears, leaving mud and massive holes, the road becomes narrow and at time non-existent!! This doesn't appear to phase our driver to continues regardless and we bounce up and down in the back!!!

First the Phnom Ch'nork Caves
We arrive at the caves and our driver points and says 'Caves'. Helpful. At this point we realise his English is as good as our Cambodian!!!

Lucky for us some kids were hanging around trying to earn some money!!! We agreed to one of the boys show us around the cave...... and paid the entrance fee... then realised we forgot our torch!!!

The cave was so dark, and at times we were climbing up and down really steep rocks, god knows what the drop was if we had fallen..... we were relying on this 15yr old to keep us safe!!! The kid was great actually... he showed us lots of shapes and things about the cave that we would't have seen on our own...

Temple..

Elephant..

We tipped the boy $3. His English was pretty good, had a great sense of humour and climbed through the cave with ease.

As we went through the countryside there were acres and acres of rice fields....

Next stop the Pepper Plantation. Again our driver told us 'Pepper' and pointed to the plants!!!
We showed ourselves around the plantation...

And then went into the shop where we were able to read some information... helping us to make sense of things!! Also good view of the scenery and accommodation..

We passed a secret lake on the way to Kep our next stop...
The lake is hardly a secret...

So next stop was Kep... an abandoned town.. which took about 40mins in our Tuk Tuk. Kep is a seaside town that the rich used to visit for their holidays..... no more the place really was deserted!

The only thing keeping Kep alive is probably the crab market... we stopped at one of the finest restaurants in Kep for lunch...
Very good seafood... Alive in a tank - served fresh! And obviously served wit Kampot Pepper!

On the way back to Kampot we visited another cave - but quite frankly this ws a waste of time.... we couldnt really go in and the boys just kept telling us "people die in here... they fall down". Needless to say we didnt go in far!

The salt fields are suppose to be thriving... however due to the floods we didnt see any salt!

Evidence of Salt from the fields before the floods..

We paid our Tuk Tuk driver once he had returned us home safely.. A bumpy ride in the countryside and a busy day with some interesting and some not so interesting things!

Next day we wanted to rent a motorbike and drive up to the mountains (Bokor Mountains) but there was torrential rain overnight that continued into the morning so that plan failed instead we looked around the town, ate pie and ice-cream and sat drinking beer at the riverside once the rain had stopped.

Kampot and especially Kep were very quiet little towns with not much happening at either! Next we head for the Vietnam border.