.....fall

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After a pretty crazy 10 days in Sihanoukville it was once again time to recharge the batteries and slow down on the party front. So I booked a minibus to the sleepy riverside town of Kampot. Kampot is famous for it's pepper, it's known to be some of the best in the world although I'm unsure as to how exactly you rank pepper.Managed to find a sweet twin double room in a brand new hotel for a tenner a night which I split with a 60 year old English guy I'd met the previous night whilst watching the mighty Swindon Town destroy Wigan on local tv!

Luckily for me the hotel was right opposite 'The rusty keyhole', an expat owned restaurant that serves the best ribs in Cambodia, which I sampled twice. After weeks of surviving on rice and veg with a sprinkling of meat I was dying for some protein and I was not to be disappointed! I very rarely eat rips at home and they tend to be a chunk of bone with some meet thinly spread over the top. These rips were essentially a joint of tender pork sat atop a few rips, cooked on a BBQ and liberally coated with a lovely, sticky BBQ sauce. I'm salivating just thinking about them now. If you're ever in Kampot you have to try them!

After a day of wandering around and taking in the town, and it's overly aggresive dog population, we decided to take a day trip to Bokor Mountain, some 1000m up a hill from Kampot. The french once had a grand hotel and casino up there and it was it's own little town with a church, post office and houses. This was all deserted when the Khmer Rouge came to town and the place essentially became a ghost town. So it should be an interesting and eerie place to visit. Wrong. The place has been purchased by a Chinese company (The cambodian government have sold off virtually all of the countries assets to foreign developers) and they are buliding a 5 star hotel and casino complex, a 3 star hotel and are aiming for it to be a gambling destination to rival Macau or Vegas. So the place is now a large construction site./ You can't enter the famous Bokor hill station as thats being renovated and the derilict buildings you can enter are now littered with mattreses and rubbish as the local workers live there. We somehow spent 2 hours there before heading to the next stop, a waterfall....



....That had no water as its the dry season! So we spent an hour or so looking at some rocks, although someone did see a snake. After the dramatic sight of the impotent waterfall we headed back down the newly tarmaced(at a cost of $20 million) road, into town to board a boat for sunset river cruise. Nature decided to continue the theme of the day and there wasn't really a sunset to speak of, more some lightly coloured clounds. Still was good to have a day doing something other than drinking, eating and sleeping!

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