Koh Rong to Kampot

 

Leaving Phnom Penh after the torrential downpour I stopped over in a coastal town called Sihanoukville-named after the previous king of Cambodia (reigning before and after the Khmer Rouge) and home to Angkor Beer-one of the leading beers of Cambodia. I only stayed the night and then took a boat to Koh Rong (pictured above).

  There I was lucky enough to fall into the right crowd and got invited on a 3 day hiking trip, led by a guy who does hiking excursions for tourists, but was on his vacation and wanted to get away for a bit. (all the locals told me that I was so lucky for arriving when I did, because no one has done something quite like this before.) We started out at the compass, headed north more or less, cut across the island to the west, headed south and finally crossed back over.

 Over the 3 days, we covered most of the island, averaging about 15-17 km per day (about 10 miles perhaps). Our guide pointed out so many insects, animals and plants that I would never have noticed or understood. Here is the world's largest moth (this particular one isn't the largest, but it's of the right family). You can see my shoulder off to the right as I reached around to get a good picture. It was definitely big! I'd say each wing was the size of one hand.

This little guy was trying to hide from us and his camouflage was pretty good, we could see it changing as we watched. He was probably about several hand lengths long. 

Just as I was thinking-I really hope we see some scary, dangerous animals I spied this guy slithering around on the tree. He is a flying snake-a snake that swings from a tree and can fling himself  off and seemingly fly. As we were admiring him, he started up the tree and that might have signaled that he was attempted to fly....at us. So we left before that could happen.

 

I would never have seen this stick insect, but our guide had a really good eye. In general, all of the insects, animals and plants on the island were not for touching or even coming in close contact with. Each time our guide showed us something new it was with caution: "this can bite....this one can spit venom.....this spike is like a fishing hood..." 

Our second day we took a short tour through a village where we were the only foreigners (the beach town I'd stayed in before was mostly foreigners-so this was a nice break). The dogs weren't too happy to see us since our guide and his girlfriend had brought along their German shepherd. But the little island dogs didn't quite want to take on our large one.

I found these kids drying fish outside their house. All the kids here are so polite and sweet. When passing houses you hear, "hello" from several small voices, out of nowhere and all you can do is should a respond and keep going. 

We hiked across an array of different terrain considering it was a fairly small island. Several times we had to decide, shoes or no shoes.  

This mini Africa-like/Sahara desert was located just in middle of the island. It really felt like we were on a safari and we were expecting a lion or cheetah to come racing out at any second.

This was the view out of the tent from our first night camping on the beach.

And this is the sunrise on the second morning from my bungalow. Hammocks are everywhere-on porches, in houses, under houses, on boats, in tuk-tuks and on the side of the road. 

Here's my brag moment of the blog: we took a taxi boat across one bay so that we didn't have to hike the beach (hiking in sand is not efficient). The water was so clear-you could definitely see at least several meters straight down (maybe up to 12-15 feet). 

This might be my favorite picture yet! I took it right after these two little ones had called me over to show me something in the water. I was half afraid that they were going to show me a dead body or something but it was just a crab eating a fish that had caught their attention.

 

 I finally had to leave the island and get back to the real world....well not really, but anyway. I headed to Kampot, a sleepy town down the coast a bit, very close to Vietnam. On my trip from Sihanoukville to Kampot I noticed that there was no rear-view mirror in the mini-van. I feel like that accurately describes the Cambodian (also known as Khmer) people. Despite the fact that they have a horribly dark past, they don't look back and reminisce. They are much more focused on today.  

 Here is one of the traffic circles/roundabouts in Kampot. This statue is a durian-a local fruit known for smelling VERY bad but tasting pretty good. The traffic circles here all have very distinct statues because (as one exPat theorized) in a country where only 10% of the students passed the college entry exam (after the police were stopped from selling the test answers), it was helpful to give directions with statues instead of signs. (remember that the Khmer Rouge killed an entire generation of educated people, so the last few generations have suffered greatly in terms of educations.) 

On a short walk out of town I was able to see people going about their normal lives (Kampot was definitely not highly concerned with tourism and tourists as other places have been).  While the woman carries the chickens, the man is carrying other groceries. 

Here you can see 3 of the major beer companies in Cambodia, on the far left: Anchor (which I think is a ripoff of the one on the far right: Angkor, and in the middle: Cambodia. Beer is consumed on a daily basis and in high quantity here. 

I went with a friend out of town one day to see some old caves. They used to be Buddhist temples until the Khmer Rouge came and destroyed them during the war years. We were accompanied by a local boy of about 10 years old who gave a "tour" which consisted of pointing to rocks shaped like animals such as monkeys and elephants and saying the names of the body parts in English (that was all he seemed to know in English). But I was happy for his company because he took us down some paths that in the U.S. they would NEVER allow tourists.

Guess who learned how to ride a motorbike finally?! It took about 2 minutes to figure it out and then I was on my way. On my first day I did about 180-200 kms/120 miles round trip with a passenger. We went to visit Phnom Bokor (Bokor Mountain). 

This was the view from the top of Phnom Bokor.. Below and off to the left is Kampot and the island in the back is a Vietnamese island. I think we were able to see at least 30 kms/18 miles out.

 

Also at the top of the mountain was a 100 year old abandoned hotel/casino. It was a bit eerie to walk through, imaging what it might have been like a century ago. 

The next morning, since we still had the motorbikes, one girl and I woke up for the sunrise and rode out into the countryside to see the sunrise over some rice paddies. 

 And some beautiful homes.