Kep and Kampot - where the pepper grows.

Spending a week in Sihanoukville left only four days to our Cambodian visa, so we got ourselves Vietnamese visas and headed towards the border. (The Vietnam visas we got very fast from the consulate next to our guesthouse, apparently the cheapest and quickest place in the world to get them.) On the way we spent two nights in Kampot and one in Kep, lovely small towns that used to be French holiday locations in the colonial times.

From Kampot we hired a tuk-tuk for a day to visit countryside, including salt fields, caves, crab restaurant, fruit orchards, and most importantly, a pepper farm. So we've now officially been to where the pepper grows and can start heading home. Eventually. It was really nice to tour the countryside on tiny sidestreets, as we got to see a lot of regular life. The farmers here seemed much more prosperous than in Siem Reap; the fields were green with vegetables and there were numerous chickens, cows and pigs roaming about.

The pepper grows here!

In both Kampot and Kep we also hired scooters to explore the area on our own. Especially Kep is a sleepy little village with many deserted colonial French villas, all funnily surrounded by new walls and gates although the buildings themselves were derelict. There were obvious signs of developing the area, as Kep had six-lane streets and the pot-holed two-lane road between the towns is being complemented with a railroad, so perhaps it will get busier in future.

Photo (c) by Boyfriend