Michael Batson

The sleepy provincial capital of Kampot is located at the base of the Elephant Mountains and a few kilometres up the estuary on the banks of the Prek Kamping Bay River. With its smaller coastal neighbour, Kep, and the larger tourist town, Sihanoukville, this former haunt of the French colonial elite makes up what is sometimes referred to as the “Costa del Cambodia”.

The town was established as the main port town in the late 1800s to serve the needs of the French Protectorate of Cambodge (Cambodia). Kampot remained the main port for Cambodia until the 1950s, when the main port was shifted to Sihanoukville, just along the coast, to accommodate the deeper keels of larger vessels.

Nowadays Kampot’s claim to fame is as a sleepy provincial town noted for the charm of its colonial architecture which lines the side streets of the riverfront promenade. Its also the jumping off point for Bokor Hill Station and national park, with its views out over the Gulf of Thailand to Phu Quoc Island and Vietnam.

To get to Kampot from the capital Phnom Penh by bus costs US$5 and takes 5-6 hours. These days it takes longer to negotiate Phnom Penh’s increasingly congested streets. Modern black SUVs compete for road space surrounded by swarms of motorcycles, and heavy vehicles overladen with freight dodge pedestrians and lines of roadside stalls.

Foreigners are invariably placed in the suicide seats at the front of buses, affording a view of all the near misses, traffic irregularities, and exposing the senses to the incessant horn-blasting of the driver, karaoke entertainment of the on board TV, and the violent movies on offer. Today we had Jet Li in “Romeo Must Die” set in LA but dubbed into Khmer.

Somewhere before the obligatory restaurant stop the driver lost third and fourth gears. Cambodian buses pull in front first into the restaurant parking, barely a metre from the entrance. When it came time to reboard, it was discovered that the reverse gear had gone also. In other countries a mechanic would have been called for, or at least another vehicle. Instead, the driver extracted an array of spanners, changed his shirt and was soon elbow-deep in grease and oil.

In the meantime I watched the traffic on Route Three including exhibitions of van surfing, otherwise known as passenger overcrowding, which goes along with putting passengers in the driver’s seat along with the driver.

An hour later we had found reverse, but not the other gears, so headed off down the road accelerating from first and second gear into fifth.

An irate Englishman, aggrieved at this unforseen delay had demanded his money back,  by laying his hands on the driver’s assistant and poking the young Khmer repeatedly in the chest. When this wasn’t forthcoming he had marched off down National Route Three in the blazing midday heat, only to be allowed back on the bus when we finally got going. He alighted at Kep, in the same rude fashion.

South of Ang Tasom, one of the last strongholds of the Khmer Rouge, the bus turns onto Route 31 which goes to Kompong Trach and onto Kep, There half the passengers alight into the waiting arms of the local tuk-tuk drivers. Kep is small and scattered, businesses are on average one-kilometre apart, and with some odd qualities that strangely shine through like empty houses destroyed by years of war, trails and deserted beaches; alright for the romantic or the downright loner.

Cambodia’s infrastructure is still a work in progress. All main routes are now paved, a fairly recent occurrence in some instances but many bridges are old and dangerously in need of repair. The further you get from the streets of Phnom Penh and around smaller, more isolated towns and the roading becomes ragged, like a thin tarmac ribbon it frays, and becomes full of holes. If Phnom Penh is the heart, then the provinces are drip-fed, the circulation squeezed. Money for upgrading vital links either doesn’t exist or has been siphoned off to somewhere or for someone.

According to the locally-produced free, and I expect expat authored, Kampot Survival Guide (KSG), potholes are a Kampot invention and still the town’s greatest export. Initially devised for traffic control, the KSG claims, popularity has soared with Cambodia’s adoption of “free range golf”, a game where you hit a golf ball in any direction with the intent to end its travel in a pot hole.

Witty, but I’ve been in towns with far worse infrastructure than that found in Kampot.

The town is awash with hotels and guesthouses, the terms largely interchangeable. The Paris Hotel is modern, close to the bus station, and rooms were US$7 with fan “But US$15 if you want to use the air-con, because the electricity very expensive,” said the young lady on the desk. She didn’t have change for 20 dollars, or, even as it turned out, for 10 dollars. “It’s OK,” she said, “you can pay later, when you check out.”

The day I hired a push bike from the local information centre, the young man said pay now or pay later, “up to you”. He just asked which hotel I was staying in, and I rode off on a rickety mountain bike with the brand name “Good Luck”. When I brought the bike back I paid a different man one dollar, though some hotels rent bikes for less than that per day.

After checking in and having missed lunch due to all the gearbox excitement I wandered off in search of food. The Rusty Keyhole is on the corner by the old market, which is in the process of being rebuilt or demolished, I couldn’t tell which. I had stir fried shrimps with pepper, which Kampot is famous for, served in its natural form, small green pods on the vine. Here I watched Kampot go by to the sounds of Coldplay, Howling Wolf and Lou Reed.

The Keyhole is famed for its pork ribs, having been voted the best in Cambodia by the Phnom Penh Post, twice. The keyhole is owned by Christian, a boyish-faced, rotund Mancunian usually accompanied by his large Labrador-cross, a canine unique in these parts not for the breed so much, but by its healthy coat, not being flea-ridden and having scratched itself raw.

Pepper in Cambodia is undergoing something of a revival. Kampot pepper was once the choice of high-end Parisian restaurants during the heyday of French Indochina, but its production, like many other things in Cambodia, fell into decline due to the Khmer Rouge and more lately, rogue traders. Now with some entrepreneurial farmers and a little government protection such as geographical indication, which brands products according to the region for which they are famous, like Champagne, pepper is on the way back.

Wandering the streets of Kampot (or “Pot” to the local expat community) is to step back in time to the colonial era. Here and there are grand old French colonial buildings. Along the riverfront and small side streets are terraced colonial-era houses, some either being renovated or demolished. Given the rate of work being carried out on these structures it’s sometimes a little hard to tell in which direction construction is travelling.

The colonial buildings are all one side of the river, and on the other the corrugated iron dwellings. The town is joined by three bridges; the old dating from the French era, the new, and a rail bridge. Near the new bridge I was struck by a petrol station located under an apartment block, the bowsers barely a metre from the living quarters.

Two blocks over from the main street and I stumbled upon the town’s prison, a decaying collection of buildings dating from the time of French rule, the walls of which are topped with that security invention of the 20th century, razor wire. Apparently, there are at least two Westerners incarcerated therein at any given time.

On the wall of one of the out houses there was stencilled a large blue kangaroo, like you’d find on the tail of a Qantas jet. I went to take a photo and came face-to-face with a Cambodian policeman heading in my direction. Being a government building, and a secure facility at that, I took the diplomatic path and asked if it was OK to take a photo. He took a drag on his cigarette wagged his forefinger at me and gave me a polite but firm English “no”.

Actually, he hadn’t come out to see me. His wife was waiting on a motorbike, presumably they were heading home for lunch and two of their children were chasing chickens about the forecourt. She gunned the engine and they were off leaving me standing there. He didn’t seem concerned that I may already have taken a photo and he didn’t ask to see if I’d already taken any, which I had. However, I didn’t want to argue. Looking at that institution, I think “grim” would only begin to capture the conditions found therein.

The prison is a bit of spectacle apparently, and not just for its fading colonial architecture. “Well worth a look” according to the KSG, “see just where you can expect if you seriously cross the line.” Taking pictures is usually OK they say, but I pays to ask first, especially if there are guards in the crumbling watchtowers. The next day I returned to get a photo of that kangaroo but didn’t as the two guards at the gate put me off. They confirmed that yes it was a kangaroo, but my Khmer couldn’t gather the reason why it was there. Walking along outside the walls past the tethered grazing cows I took pictures of the walls and towers. When I got to the end of the road I turned and realised that there had been a guard there all along, I’d failed to see him, as his head was down below the parapet, but he just stared at me, and I was too far away to glean what his expression was.

Eric Karatau “from up Auckland way” runs the Bokor Mountain Lodge, a beautiful green and yellow colonial building on the waterfront. “Kia ora mate,” he said in his black polo made by Canterbury clothing. “Been coming here for years, love it, the lifestyle. Got a wife and kids in Phnom Penh. I love New Zealand but I go back home and last about 10 days, say hello to the family and friends and them it’s back here.”

He invited me to the 2012 Waitangi Day hangi in Phnom Penh, “this year we got about 350 people.” Eric was about to start up a hydroponics business in Kampot, the first of its kind in Cambodia, but it had been slow going so far. But then everything in Kampot moves that way.

The Kampot Survival Guide has a glossary of its own useful terms:

Pot pat® – expat living in the Pot
Snook – Sihanoukville (along the coast a ways and the biggest metropolis on the Costa del Cambodia; also known as Kompong Som, where Pot pats go to die)
Repeat offender – tourist or Pot pat that keeps returning to the Pot.