As a result of my trip to Kep and Kampot described earlier, I’m pleased to announce the further expansion of the AsiaForVisitors guide to Cambodia to include the province of Kampot. The guide includes the usual information about the sights described here, such as the Bokor ghost town and Rabbit island, as well as links to hotel booking sites, travel and transport information.

As a result of our recent stay in Railay, as first described here, I’ve updated the Krabi guide and added a whole new guide to Railay at ThailandForVisitors.com. The new guide includes hotel advice, transport information and detailed descriptions of the main sights of the area.

It’s my last day in Kep. In the morning, we’re off on a motorcycle to the nearby stone hill called Phnom Chosir. The hill holds a small cave with a very old pre-Khmer shrine. To get there, we drive down unpaved country roads, and eventually through a temple. There’s a festival going on and lots of people about. Apparently they don’t get many foreigners visiting here, because as we exit the temple grounds I note that we’ve attracted an entourage of mostly boys trotting alongside the bike. Not far from the temple, we have to park the bike and walk the remaining distance to the hill through rice paddies and farms. This gives me a chance to attract an even bigger collection of groupies.

Getting to the cave requires climbing up some stairs, about three flights in all. Once you reach the top, you notice two things: a great view back over the farms towards the sea, and another flight going down. The cave entrance is more or less on ground level, but the entrance is blocked by a large boulder that you have to climb up and over.

The cave is not much more than a gash in the rock. Just inside the entrance is a small shrine so covered in stalactites that it’s hard to tell where the rock ends and the brick shrine begins. The shrine is a tiny room holding just a very rough lingum on a stone plinth.

From Phnom Chosir, we head back to the main road running from Kep to Kampot, but we don’t go very far. We park the motorcycle again where the mangrove forest meets the highway and get on a fishing boat that will take us to Rabbit Island. This is not one of those tourist boats "like they use for fishing", this is a real fishing boat. A tarp covers a big wad of nets in the middle of the boat.

The boat makes its way through the mangroves and eventually enters the ocean. We make our way along the coast and take about an hour to reach the island. The boat takes me to the small south beach of the island, which looks practically deserted. There are just a couple of shacks used by local fisher-families. A sort of picnic lunch is prepared with the help of a lady in one of the shacks.

After lunch, we walk over to the larger west beach, where most of the day-trippers visit. Here, there are a lot more services, including a few restaurants and even a few shacks you can rent for the night. Facilities are basic, as there is no electricity or, in most cases, indoor plumbing. After lazing about on this beach for a few hours, we head back to the hotel as rain clouds gather on the horizon. Unfortunately, we’ve misjudged things and it starts to rain soon after we leave the beach. It’s an open boat, so I’m soaked by the time we get to the hotel.

See the photo gallery for more pictures of Phnom Chosir and Rabbit Island. For complete travel information about this part of Cambodia, see our updated travel guide to Kampot.

Today I’m off to see the ruins of Bokor, which is one of the main reasons I’ve come here. Unlike the usual pile of rocks that gets my attention, Bokor is not an ancient site. The Bokor hill station was built in the 1920s as a place for the French to escape the heat of the plains. It was more or less abandoned when the Khmer Rouge came to power in the 1970s and now it’s basically a ghost town.

The entire mountain is now a national park, and the only road in is unpaved and very rough, although plans are afoot to improve it. After climbing through the jungle ever upward for about an hour, the car emerges into a hilltop plateau covered with tall grass and flowering shrubs. Soon after, we come to the ruins of the royal palace. At first sight, the small building is hardly palatial, but the long low building is built right on the edge of the bluff. At the rear is a terrace running the length of the house, providing excellent views, weather permitting, of the Cambodian coast and the casino of the distant hill station. Down a path from the royal residence is a much larger building housing the kitchens and a formal dining hall, which also has a good view. There’s also a two-bedroom guest house. Most of the walls here, as at the hill station, are covered with a bright green mossy plant, adding to the post-apocalyptic feel of the place.

Before going to the hill station, we first stop at Popkovil waterfall. Due to the poor state of some bridges, we have to walk the last kilometer or so to the falls. It’s a pleasant walk through a highland marsh bordered by woodlands. I spot a pair of large red squirrels along the way, but they’re gone before I get the camera out.

The falls at first were a rather strange sight. I could hear water falling, but couldn’t see any water running over the stone stream bed leading to the ledge. Only after peering over the edge do you see water coming out of the face of the rock. In the course of flowing to the ledge, the water flows into the limestone and then shoots out of the face. It falls onto another flat ledge, then over another cliff to form a second tier of falls.

 
After hiking back to the car, we drive on to the hill station. The part you catch sight of is the Catholic church, set on a low hill at the edge of the village. We drive past it and up to the ruins of the Bokor Palace Hotel. The grand pile opened in 1926 and must have been quite luxurious for its day, but you have to use your imagination to see that. Doors, windows, light fixtures and even wiring were looted long ago. Like the palace, the hotel sits near the edge of the bluff at the highest point of the station. From the terrace you can get a good view of the village as well as the sea, at least if the weather cooperates. For most of the time I was there, clouds flowed like a sea right up to the edge of the bluff.

There are the ruins of a few other public buildings of the town, such as the post office, jail and another hotel. The whole site is rather eerie, which is probably why it has been used as a movie set.

For more photos of this trip, see the Bokor picture gallery. You can find more information about Bokor and the area in our updated Kampot travel guide.

Now on at the Numthong Gallery / Alliance Francaise:

TAWAN WATTHUYA: Siamese Freaks! A modern courtyard of miracles

Numthong Gallery is pleased to announce the 4th solo exhibition of acclaimed young painter Tawan Watthuya.

Comprising drawings and paintings, his last series will display icons of contemporary Thailand transformed into monstrous Siamese twins.

A fully illustrated catalog will accompany this exhibition.

Runs until 1 December 2007