Chaly & Jenny’s Epic Roadtrip! Kep / Kampot

“I have never been to Kampot. Or to Kep.” It was tossed at me with as much mindfulness as he gave to flicking his errant hair out of his face every few minutes. Like a practiced habit. He’s probably said those words with 99-percent of the tours he’s booked from the other side of the lobby bar. Travelers come in and order Angkor’s on draft. They toss down $20 for a boat trip to some island for the weekend, while the locals daydream about a day off. Most Cambodians work seven days per week. I hate this fact. I’ve been as guilty as the next person for ordering the beer and the air-con bus ticket and never stopping to think about how it feels to daydream only, never seeing the places on the posters that surround you. Never seeing Kampot or Kep, even though the two destinations are less than three hours away by car and the bus ticket totals $6.

This trip has me noticing local culture in a whole new way, being with the children all day at the school. I’m noticing it so much and with such intensity, I’m exhausted from thinking about the fact that my life is so easy, while another person’s is so absurdly hand-to-mouth, cow-to-plow hard.

I decided last night that Chaly needed to see the next neighborhood over the hill. He deserved to travel even if it was only a short trip. And I desperately needed a break from this town. I booked a private car and told him to meet me in the lobby this morning at 7:30 am.

So began a little somethin’ I like to call:

Chaly & Jenny’s Big Kampot and Kep Adventure Venture!

If you missed my previous post about my first Cambodian Wedding experience (or if you just blocked it out entirely because you sprinkle Ambien on your Cheerios something), Chaly is originally from this little seaside town. We met because he works at the front desk of Ocean Walk Inn – where I’m staying – but we have become great buddies. Ya know … in a delightfully, bizarre, occasionally dysfunctional “You’re a gay, Cambodian 18 year old boy and I’m a 32 year old white girl from Alabama” type of way. We make each other laugh and we always have a fantastic time, whether it’s dancing in some bar or riding around on his moto to the markets to look for underwear because, to quote Chaly, he “wore the wrong ones again.” (At the time of writing this, I still have zero idea what constitutes the “wrong” underwear, but when he met me at 7:30 am this morning, he insisted he had the right ones on. They did seem to get him to Kampot and Kep and back just fine.)

The road to Kampot is about a two-hour stretch, that ranges from nice smooth pavement to rutted-out, red dirt that has sinkholes large enough to pop a tire on a ’78 Chevy … much less the knock-off Hyundai’s they drive around these parts. However, you do get to see herds of Water Buffalo, which are my favorite roadside attraction. I yelled “Look! Water Bufffffffalo! Moooooo!” Chaly rolled his giant eyes and said, “They are not cows. They don’t go Moo. Moo is Cambodian word for mosquito.”

We arrived at Kampot around 9 am. The town’s littered with old colonial buildings leftover from the French occupation, charmingly gritty, wearing a patina of rust on the iron, scrolling balconies, the telephone lines dripping dangerously close to the ground, with motorbikes moving in and out of every available crevice of street space. It’s chaos. If you are an architecture fan – or a photographer – then it’s also paradise.

In Kampot, you’ll find just as many push pedal bikes as motorized ones, retaining that old Asia charisma so many other places have lost. Chaly and I took a stroll in the outdoor market. It’s much larger than the one in Sihanoukville, but it’s still pretty small for Asian standards.

We wandered aimlessly inside the market, looking-only until we ran into a woman making waffles with sugar batter over an open flame.

We split one and felt it was a good enough time to blow off the rest of Kampot for our next destinations, Kep and Rabbit Island, where we could get super tan.

We’d only been back in the car for about four seconds, when we pulled into traffic beside a horse-drawn cart, and Chaly screamed “Look! It’s horse!”

Apparently a horse is to a Cambodian what a Water Buffalo is to an American. I swatted a “moo” and swallowed the irony.

There’s not much to see other than pretty Cambodian scenery on the way from Kampot to Kep (approximately 45 minutes), but when you pull into the outskirts of Kep proper, you hit the most appealing part of the town. The Crab Market – an outdoor hawker stall, food bonanza, with women in colorful aprons, fanning charcoal fires, laden with fresh caught shrimp, squid, barracuda, shark and crabs by the bucketload.

Chaly picked up our lunch tab for some squid skewers, a small flat, bbq’d white fish and two cups of sugarcane juice over ice. We ate rice with our fingers, puddled chili sauce onto the Styrofoam containers and spat fish bones at the pavement. He remarked how beautiful the place was. And it really was. The Crab Market is festive and colorful. It smells like grilled seafood, vinegar and roasting chilies. There are children running past with fishing poles and people catching up on the days news while cracking fresh crustaceans with their barehands and sucking the meat out. It’s a place you can get your hand’s messy under a palm tree. I love places where that’s an option.

After lunch, we hired a boat for $25 to take us over to Rabbit Island. It’s a half hour journey, and Chaly and I splayed out on the orange deck, donning our sunglasses, giggling like idiots. I plugged in the extra headphones to my splitter and we bounced along to Acoustic Roots while laying flat on our backs and staring up at the clouds.

Rabbit Island is very Robinson Cursoe. It’s equal parts charming (we saw a starfish right next to the pier when we got off the boat) and equal parts Disney (the thatched bungalows are decorated with colorful paint and bamboo mats to sun yourself on). The water is a gorgeous shade of deep aqua green. The palm trees have that super-tall, slightly-tilted Bora Bora thing going on down at the water’s edge, and there are a handful of boats rocking lazily. We stayed there for several hours and then ventured home again.

Today was one of my all-time favorite days traveling. I hope it was for Chaly too. I dropped him off at his little house on the outskirts of Sihanoukville around 4pm, met his sisters and hugged him goodbye. He promised to email me his set of photos from the day. I know when I leave my little home at Ocean Walk Inn this Thursday for Burma, I’ll carry today with me more than he knows. Thanks for the road trip, buddy.