A Visit to Kep - a well Kept Secret!

Time in Sihanoukville has been a bit marred by my picking up a nasty respiratory infection - easy to do here where there are all sorts of bacteria floating round in the dust.  Felt quite ill for a few days, but a visit to a local clinic ruled out anything sinister and as soon as the antibiotics kicked in I began to feel better.  It is no joke having a fever in temperatures of 35 plus and humidity touching 90%.

Neil got the opportunity to go to Kep, a very unspoilt fishing village on the coast towards the Vietnamese border.  It’s being turned into a tourist destination for rich Khmer, Russians and more middle class Europeans - particularly the French.  They are determined it isn’t going to become a back-packers’ destination like Sihanoukville. 

 
I was feeling very groggy in the morning, so wasn’t able to go, and spent the day in bed. When Neil’s day trip turned into an overnight, late in the afternoon, I got up, feeling slightly better and took a taxi ride to Kep.  The journey was quite gruelling - 3 hours on dirt roads in the dark with pot-holes you could put an elephant in! About half way there it began to rain heavily, the second or third time it’s done that since we arrived in Cambodia, despite assurances that this is the dry season - it never rains.  But it does now.  Apparently the weather is all over the place here too.

Getting to Kep was worth it though.  Neil had booked into a guest house in the hills called the Veranda - one of the tourist fictions, but a very welcome treat for a rather bedraggled invalid!  For the price of a Travelodge in the UK, we had a suite - sitting/dining room with views out over the rainforest,

 a gigantic bedroom,

and a bathroom big enough for an entire Khmer family to live in.

Kep lived up to what we’d been told.  Lovely beaches with very few people on them.

Neil chilling out on the coast

 It’s clean, picturesque and the seafood cafe’s are safe to eat in - everything caught fresh and cooked immediately.  We had fried fish, crab and spicy prawns and it was fantastic.

One of the beaches in Kep with Rabbit Island on the horizon

Freshly caught crabs and fish

The cafe where we ate them

I didn’t want to come back, but we have to move with the family.   We’ve definitely marked Kep as an area we want to explore next time we come to Cambodia.