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Coasting in Cambodia

I left Phnom Penh a week ago and travelled by bus to Kampot, a small town that used to be Cambodia’s main port before the construction of the port at Sihanoukville / Kompong Som in the 1950s.

Thankfully, this meant that I was not in Phnom Penh when a stampede during the Water Festival resulted in over 375 deaths and many injuries.  The latest news around here suggests that the stampede may have been caused by the police inexplicably using a water cannon on the crowds crossing the bridge.  Other rumours suggest that it was sparked by electricity cables coming loose and electrocuting a number of people on the bridge.  Whatever the cause, it is a real tragedy and a lot of the people that I was with at the time the news broke (a mix of Phnom Penh resident expats and Khmers) were very shaken, upset and angry.

Kampot is a rather sleepy little place, with very little going on other than tourism only it isn’t entirely clear why tourists go there…  There is no beach as the town is actually a little way up an estuary.  There is some interesting colonial architecture but it isn’t particularly special.  I guess the Lonely Planet people needed to fill some pages…

I only stayed a couple of nights and spent my only full day in the area at Bokor National Park.  Interestingly, much of the national park is currently a construction site.  A huge swathe of the land has been bought up by a private investor who is bulldozing the primary forest to build hotels and golf courses…  The French had built a hill station at the top of Bokor mountain in the 1920s for colonialists to take a holiday from the heat and experience cool weather similar to that of their home country.  You can now visit the derelict remains of a hotel/casino, the Bokor Palace Hotel, and an abandoned Catholic church.  It was really interesting walking around in the empty shell of the hotel (straight past the ‘danger, do not enter’ signs), imagining what it must once have looked like. 

It is strange to think of people wanting to go somewhere cool/cold for a holiday (other than, of course, a skiing/snowboarding holiday).  I can’t say that I particularly want to head back to London weather right now.  I see they are forecasting temperatures around the zero degree mark.  Today, I was scuba diving in water 29 degrees warm.  It was in the mid-thirties out of the water.  I’m spending tomorrow on a beach.

From Kampot, I went to Kep for a four day yoga retreat.  I’ve been trying to take yoga classes when possible on my travels and when I went to a drop-in class in Phnom Penh they were trying to fill the last couple of spots on a retreat.  We stayed at the Vine Retreat, a lovely little hotel set on a farm which produces vegetables for the hotel kitchen and fiery Kampot Pepper.  I did between 3 and 5 hours of yoga a day, lazed around in the shade, ate really good khmer food and met lots of really interesting people:  an Australian novelist (her book, The Danger Room will be released in the UK early next year), UNIFEM’s country coordinator for Cambodia who had previously been the country coordinator for Afghanistan, a Norwegian dietitian working on a research project in Cambodia (where she had actually been born before her Cambodian parents fled the Khmer Rouge as refugees when she was only a couple of years old) and people working for various NGOs.  The yoga teaching assistants were two young girls that had been rescued from sex trafficking and were being cared for, taught English and trained as yoga instructors by an NGO… It really was fascinating speaking to them all and once again I am reminded that one of the best things about traveling is the people that you meet.

I’m now in Sihanoukville, Cambodia’s third biggest tourist centre.  I haven’t made it to the beach yet.  Instead, I went scuba diving.  The visibility wasn’t great and the coral is pretty badly bleached, but there was plenty to see.  Countless little fish and large sea urchins, giant anemones, sea cucumbers, a cuttlefish, a crab, several nudibranches and scorpion fish, loads of lovely soft corals… It really was great to be underwater again.  As mentioned above, I’m spending tomorrow on a beach but at the weekend I’m heading out diving again.  I cannot wait.