Holiday with Tess - Part IV - Kep and back to the Penh

First up let me say, Kep is the bomb. The beaches are nice but not great but the place is so laid back and the seafood divine. Sihanoukville is the beach town but its got too many stinky backpackers in it.

We stayed at this place called Verandah which is just stunning, like a giant treehouse. But it is pretty expensive so next time might stay somewhere else, unless you are shouting :)

We arrived and went straight there and unpacked in our bungalow and headed out almost immediately for Rabbit Island. Half an hour on the boat and we were there, hopped on the wooden platforms and ate crab, swam and read books. Nice J I attempted to do some snorkeling but didn’t find much. I had to at least the snorkeling gear I had lugged all the way from Oz in the water some time! The time went by, and by and by and we then realized it was 5:30pm (having organized to meet our Lon, our tuk tuk driver, at 5pm. After scrambling around the island looking for people we eventually found a boat and headed back. .

At our bungalow we had cheese and French champagne (not too expensive :) ) that we had smuggled in from Phnom Penh


The next day we met up with some Norwegians we had met the previous day and they convinced us to go visit some caves about an hour away at Kampong Tralach (totally to our plan of doing absolutely nothing) . About ten kids went with us an tour guided us around the caves. After visiting the main ones, they said they wanted to show us more so we went and did some hardcore (by my standard!) caving deep into the mountain. One particularly interesting bit was a cave deep in the mountain that had Vietnamese writing in it. Apparently, the KR came to power a Vietnamese family fled into the caves and wrote the date and some messages (but there were no Vietnamese speakers in the area so no-one knows what it says.)

After that, we decided to go over the mountain. This mountain was pretty steep and lots of jagged peaks, but we got to the top incident free which was quite amazing but a lot of precarious climbing and thank god the roots of the trees were strong enough to hoist ourselves upward ! Of course I decided that there was not enough drama in the day so I followed the leader of the group while everyone else went to the other peak. I quickly got myself stranded and went to jump from my jagged peak to what I thought was flat ground about 1 metre below. I quickly found out it was not flat ground, but leaves masquearing as flat ground and another jagged peak was below it. I fell through the leaves up to about my knees and rather sheepishly extracted myself to find I had cut my toe open. It wasn’t huge but there was tonnes of blood and the older guy felt really guilty and tore the collar from his shirt to tie it up…awww :) So the whole way down I had to endure every two minutes “are you ok?” It was lots of fun though.

Tess tried some of her Canberra coolness on the kids, not really sure how they felt about the whole thing :) [oooh i am a dead man now :) ]

We arrived back and counted the number of wounds to our feet, legs, knees and arms from various misadventures…there was a lot!

That night we went (I hobbled) down to the crab market and had a simply divine dinner of black pepper crab and a squid dish overlooking the ocean. The crab was so fresh we saw a guy swim out to the crab nets about twenty metres away to get it. Kep is Cambodia famous for its crabs! We then returned to the bungalow and watched a spectacular thunder storm from our balcony.

The next day we hopped on our bus (after Tess had decided to go swimming local style – fully dressed) and off to Phnom Penh.