Exploring the Kampot Countryside

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Exploring the Kampot Countryside

Today, Monk and Nellie booked themselves on a tuk-tuk tour of some of the sites around Kampot. Monk shared the tour with a fun English couple, Nigel and Lettuce.

For much of the journey, the tuk-tuk bounced down bumpy dirt tracks. Past small villages with thatched wooden houses built on stilts. Chickens, goats, ducks and dogs running around outside. Children shouting 'Hello' as we waved and shouted.

At Phnom Chhnork we walked across fields and past bright green vegetable plots tended by the monks where lettuce and other unlikely crops grew standing out against the now dry and barren rice paddies - the growing of the crops only made possible by the existence of a nearby water hole.

We were joined by a group of 3 young boys who act as unoffical guides with their amazingly good English. In the cave we descended in the half darkness down more than 200 steps, stopping on the way to try to make out the animals we were told could be seen formed by the stalactites and stalagmites - a strong sense of imagination was the order of the day. At the bottom of the cave we found a small temple - and lots of bats.

Next stop, out in the depth of the countryside, was a pepper plantation. Kampot is renowned for its pepper and we picked green and red pepper from the trees and tried for ourselves the hot and spicy, soft, young peppercorns. The farm also had mango trees, jackfruit trees and trees on which the pungent durian fruit grows.

In Kep we explored and then had lunch together in one of the restaurants where the famous Kep crab is sold. Monk could not resist the delicious small crabs cooked in the Kampot peppercorns he'd just seen growing out in the countryside.

Nigel had a thing about bats and asked the driver to stop at another cave where bats should have been in adundance. We climbed the steps to the temple of Phnom Sorsia and explored the nearby White Elepahant Cave and the Bat Cave. We saw only a couple of bats, however, monkeys leaping from tree to tree made up for the lack of bats.

On our way back to Kampot we stopped at a salt pan where sea water is left to dry in shallow earth pans until the sea salt crystals form. The salt is then labouriously scraped into pyramids and and carried off for cleaning and packing.

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