After a couple of days in Sihanoukville, Kate and I did a small trek to Kampot. This sleepy town and it's neigbor Kep turned out to be one of the highlights of my whole trip to Cambodia......

Kampot is a very sleepy town in southern Cambodia. During the Khmer Rouge years it was heavily under siege and a lot of fighting went on between the Khmer Rouge and Vietnam in the mountains surounding it. Kep was also very dangerouse and in 1994 some foriegn tourist were kidnapped and eventually killed around there by rebel Khmer Rouge fighters. Now it is perfectly safe.

I met some people on the ride from Sihanoukville to Kampot and we all decided to go to Kep for the day. It is an extremely small town (if you can even call it that) with ok beaches. Their claim to fame now is thier excelent sea food. We all sat down on these wooden platforms complete with mats and hammocks (Cambodians LOVE thier hammocks) and enjoyed the best meal I had the whole time I was in Cambodia! Stir fried crab in a spicey pepper sauce. Other then that, there wasn't much to see in Kep so we headed back to Kampot.

Kampot was equaly as charming and while it is a small to medium sized town, there were still more bicycles then there were cars or scooters. Walking the streets at night was interesting too. Don't get me wrong... it is a very safe town but there are hardly any street lights and almost no traffic after 8pm so it sometimes feel as if you are in a ghost town. I also found another building from the movie City of Ghosts. The govenors mansion was right on the rivier (which was a very beautiful place to be in the morning).

Here are a couple nice pictures of the very dated architecture and almost empty streets.

On our way to Kep we stopped at Elephant Cave Temple. It is a series of caves with a surounding monestary. The monks and little kids of the area make a decent living by giving you tours of the caves (whether you like it or not). The caves weren't that spectacular but it was an interesting experience being lead by a monk and a kid through them and also some jungle paths. The view from the top of the caves was very nice too.

Here is our monk tour guide leading us down into the caves.

Here is the monk and little kid leading us throught the joungle. No land mines thank god!

A view from the top.

Cambodia is almost completely flat with the exceptions of the south and north east. During the French occupation, the French built a luxury resort town on the very top of one of these mountains called the Bokor Resort. The road up to this place was incredibly bad and almost 2 hours from Kampot! We all sat in the back of a pickup and were so soar by the time we got back that I felt it for 2 days. It is a ghost town to the fullest and consists of only abandoned, war ravaged buildings. The main attraction was also a building in the film City of Ghosts! I was not actively searching out these buildings but it must seem that way. :)

The building at the end of City of Ghosts. It was an old casino and probably very amazing in it's day! during the Khmer Rouge fighting, Vietnamese troops camped here and shot at the Khmer soldiers in the Chruch right down the road.

Here is the main ballroom. It is one of the cleanest rooms in the whole place believe it or not.

Kate exploring the basement. It was a little too creepy for me and smelled bad so I ended up going upstairs leaving kate alone. Very chivalrous. :)

The casino was on a very amazing mountain side. Here is the view from one of the windows looking down at the beaches and cliff bellow.

According to our guide, too many people were loosing money and jumping off the cliffs that they moved the casino down the road so it was not so close the the cliffs. This building stayed open as a hotel until they abandoned it in the 50's.

The view from inside one of the many delapitated hallways.

I have a lot more pictures from Bokor but too many to put on this blog entry. It was very weird to be in these grand buildings knowing there amazing and violent pasts. It was probably my favorite experience in Cambodia.