Just got back from a great trip to Cambodia on Monday. I decided to check out the Kep coastal scene, which I've been hearing about.

Flew into PP Thursday night, and stayed one night at the Bouganvillier. I only got a standard room, which was nice but at the back. I did get a peek into the large front rooms the next day, and they look very nice. Almost as big as the Amanjaya, but the bathrooms are nearly as good. Still... for the price.

The hotel in Kep arranged for a car to pick me up on Friday and take me there. The drive is about 2.5 hours. The road is pretty good, but there are quite a few one lane bridges. Lots of rice fields and simple but nice farm houses.

The Champey Inn sits on the side of a hill forming a point at Kep, just across a road from the ocean. There are just 16 rooms. I got a real case of deja vu when I first saw the room. The design idea is the same as Tamarind Village in Chiang Mai - painted concrete floor, simple wood furniture and a thatch roof. They do pull it off a bit better, with start white walls and a vase of flowers. The french doors are also bigger, giving you a nice view of the pool and the ocean beyond.

There's no real beach at Kep. Just a few yards from the Inn is a row of seafood huts selling the local specialty, crab. Around the point is a small beach, but it's not very good.

Kep was 'the' seaside resort back in the colonial day, and the road around the cape from the Inn is lined with the shells of old villas that were abandoned when the KR took power in the 70s. It's a nice walk around the cape at sunset. Around the beach are more restaurants and small hotels.

For a good beach, you have to take a boat to Rabbit Island, about 20 minutes offshore. There is a beautiful beach here with several food stalls and even a few basic accommodations (no electricity). Unfortunately, rumor has it they're going to start construction of a casino on the island.

On Saturday, I went up to see Bokor mountain and the abandoned hill station there. The mountain is now a national park. The entrance is only about 1/2 hour from the Inn.

The road up the mountain is very rough. It was paved once, but now it's like driving up a stream bed (in an Camry no less). The jungle around the road is sometimes quite dense.

After about 20 km you get above the jungle to an area covered with grass and a lot of flowering shrubs. Not long after that we got to the first stop, the ruins of the royal 'palace'. It's definitely not palatial. It's little more than a stone cottage. Down a path is a larger building for the kitchen and dining room. There's also a guest house. Most of the walls are covered with a bright orange moss, which together with the landscape gives everything a very post-apocalyptic look.

The next stop was a waterfall. We had to hike in to see it since some wooden bridges on the road were in bad shape. It was only a 20 minute walk. The waterfall was quite unusual. You pass over a stream on the way there, but as you approach the falls the water is just a trickle. Most of it seeps into the rocks, and then comes out the face of the rocks below the edge of the falls. I'll post pictures later this week.

Last stop was the hill station, at the top of the mountain. It was built by the French in the 1920s to let them escape the heat. The centerpiece was the casino, built at the highest point, at the edge of a cliff facing the ocean. There was also a church, post office, hotel and other houses and businesses.

The casino is rather eerie, with only a few signs of what it must have been like. Doors, windows, wires and anything else of value was looted long ago. There's a couple of food stalls at the Casino where most tours stop for lunch.

I'll write up more details and post photos in my journal later this week.

Great report. Kep/Kampot are great places to relax in and not get too pestered by hawkers like you can at Sihanoukville. Entirerly different from PP and SR more like the real Cambodia.

I shared a car back to PP with a guy who said the beach hawkers in Sihanoukville were the very worst in SE Asia. He also lives in Bangkok and has visited Bali a lot, so that's saying something.

Here is a related article from New York Times you might find interesting:




http://travel.nytimes.com/2005/04/24...mp;oref=slogin

Got most of my photos uploaded. you can check them out here:
http://chiengfa.com/gallery2/main.ph...g2_itemId=1225

Interesting reading - thanks for the photos. I was there in 2002, and it doesn't sound like it's changed, except maybe better accommodation! The road sounds just as bad. I found the buildings at Bokor pretty eerie, but when the clouds cleared the views were great.

Great photos! And coincidentally, here is an article from the New York Times Travel Magazine, out today:


http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/11/18...?ref=tmagazine

Michael,

Thanks for the pictures. I saw a film in the past year where they shot some of it at Bokor, the abandoned villa at the top of the mountain... wish I could remember it...

Did you eat the local crab dishes? Are these crabs that eat coconut or sea crabs?

The film was, I think, "City of Ghosts".

The crabs are from the sea. Coconut crabs are only in the Andaman, I think. I didn't try any of the local seafood, as I'm allergic.

very interesting pics....i appreciate what lengths you go to...glad the rocks held up

I don't think I saw that one.

Allergic to seafood? Wow, and I thought my chili pepper & sesame oil allergy was a problem. I have to learn how to say I am allergic to chili pepper in Khmer. I know how to say it in Thai.

Do the Khmer use sesame oil (in the way that Thais, Chinese & Vietnames use it) in their cooking?

I know they use a lot of chili pepper.

Michael,
I've posted a query for good French restaurants in Siem Reap with no response so far.

What non-Indian & non-Khmer restaurants do you recommend in Siem Reap?

What are the good French ones? I don't want to spend every night eating at Raffles. I'd assume there are some good French restaurants in REP. The HDLP restaurant is far too trendoid for us.

Soup Dragon is upstairs, so that is a pass for me.

Firstly, don't assume that Cambodian food is as spicy as Thai. Most of what I've had was not very spicy, but it was very delicious. The best meal I had in Siem Reap was at Viroth's.

A close second was Les Orientalistes, which serves French, Mediterranean and Khmer food. I had French when I ate there and wasn't disappointed. Nice portions. I think I paid around $12, which is pricey by Seam Reap standards but a real bargain for westerners.