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.

Posted by michael under Just back from...