Kampot

Fairly Boring Fictional Cooling Down in Kampot

When I got into the car, I checked with the driver


"Next stop, Kampot?"

"Yes."

I could figure by his vague, mono syllabic answer that his English wasn't good, so I knew he wasn't so much lying to me just giving me an incorrect answer.

There were several stops - to pick up more passengers.  By the time we got there, there were four men (including the driver and myself), two women and three kids jammed into a regular five seater.  The driver controlled the wheel and the pedals from the lap of a smaller man.  Poor guy must have had a seriously dead leg by the time we made it to Kampot.  If I was less hungover I may have offered my lap to one of the kids to give one of the adults in the back a break but seeing as I paid $13 (presumabley more than a Khmer would pay) and felt like the sky was falling down I didn't take that responsibility on.  I did however teach a seven year old girl some English as she counted to ten and forgot eight, I even had a go at teaching her the lyrics of Tool 46 and 2, a ridiculous feat as the weird and wonderful song is not just complicated, but contains a lot of vocabulary an adult English as a second language speaker is unlikely to know.  The kid knew pretty much every word to Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmas Time so I kind of liked the idea of her going back to her presumabley ex-pat teacher and singing Tool to her.  If one of my Catalan kids had done that in Sant Cuigat it would have blown my fucking mind.

Such a surreal justaposition compared to the drunken lechery that had gone on in the week in Sihanoukville. The journey lasted for about 2-3 hours and eventually stopped at Kampot Market.  Everybody got out except the driver and I.  I asked him if we could go to a hostel called Arcadia that many backpackers had raved about.

Again the old lack of English/selective hearing proved to be his ally and he didn't bring me to Arcadia which was a little bit out of town, instead he brought me to a guest house called Orchid a few streets away.  I decided to try it anyway but it was full so I went across the road to Blissful.  I couldn't be bothered looking too hard for a nice place as lugging around a 16 KG rucksack is a pain in the ass.  Blissful seemed nice though.  I walked into the bar first as it was closer to the reception and checked if they had any rooms.  I was greeted warmly by a pretty cool crowd, two English backpacker girls, a dreadlock sporting Swede and a petit American bar maid.  They had rooms and I was invited to join a poker game that would be kicking off around 8 pm that night.  Seeing as I didn't get my poker game with the high rollers in Sihanoukville's casinos I was delighted to be invited.  I went to the reception and was told it'd be $4 a night by a Mancunian who dare I say it looked a little bit like a crack/crystal meth head.  Again, not wanting to lug the bag around I agreed to the room before I even saw it.  He insisted that I check it out first before making any rash decisions.

When I saw it I was happy enough, though I should have checked out the bedding as the mattress was very thin and made sober sleeping difficult that night.  I moved into a room with a better mattress the day after.

By the time I got settled into my room it was quite late in the afternoon and there wasn't much to do that day except maybe walk around the town.  It felt a lot more natural than Sihanoukville - not particularly busy but definitely lived in by an older, more settled Khmer populace.  They had a fairly simple grid system with a few roundabouts thrown in just for good measure.


Any of the activities one goes to do in Kampot other than live could wait until the next day. This is normally checking out the scenic beauty by motorbike.  As nightfall was an hour or two away, I decided to wait.  Nope instead I do what I always do when I don't want to move too much - hit up an internet cafe and read up on the crap of the world.  I'm definitely an internet junkie, this much is obvious.

I also grabbed some food from a Khmer barbeque place on one of the main roads.  This should have been avoided as I got a plate of ribs for about $1.50, they tasted nice in the mouth but Khmer meat is more miss than hit and I found it to be very tough to chew and swallow.  I'd have been better off going to the market to grab some roast pork which is often succulent and well marinated.  Truth be told, I prefer Vietnamese food as it's typically cheaper and better. 

Walking through Kampot is odd.  It's dirty not as much as Hanoi but more so than Ho Chi Minh or Sihanoukville.  It's very flat too.  Thankfully you aren't hounded by tuk-tuk drivers or street walkers trying to push their wares everywhere.  In fact the noisy experience I had there was when I went to use the computers of an "internet cafe" (I don't know what you should call them as they don't always sell coffee, just internets and cheap international calls) - there the Cambodian kids seemed to be listening to some sort of weird dubstep/happy hardcore/clown music hybrid.  Maybe if I ever find myself on crystal meth at a circus I'll want this music played but I can't attest to it being my usual cup of tea.  After sufficiently grabbing my fill of youtube, facebook memes and route planning I slipped back to the guesthouse for a few cocktails and beers as I waited for the poker game to begin.  The characters involved in the bar all could ahve formed the cast of a weird sitcom that I'd call Expats.  Along with Charlie the professional poker playing Swede, the English chicks and our American hippy barmaid, you had a few other characters.  "Bad Grandad" - a 71 year old American who could still and smoke weed and drink beer like the rest of them.  Andy the thirty something cockney bar owner.  His financial partner George, a single Brit in his early 40s and another single 40 something year old English chap called Paul - who seemed to quietly have his life figured out - work your balls off for a few years then do as little as possible in a place where it's cheap to live.  Also passing through was Alejandro - an Argentinian stoner architect who sat at the bar sculpting faces out of clay aided by some Macbook computer programme.

Typically my favourite was Gabriella, the bar maid - a cute Burning Man festival attending former massage therapist who had lived in Pnom Penh and operated on a basis that customers would pay only what they could afford and what they thought it was worth.  She decided to walk away from the job when responsibility became too much.  She'd found out a customer had cancer after several months of providing therapy and apparently massage makes this worse.  She also found out that another customer whom she believed had recovered somewhat from depression committed suicide.  She was all in all a sweet girl who lived the hippy dream.  When she was on her last $20 she asked the hostel owner if she could sleep on a hammock on the lawn for free.  The bar owner offered her a room if she took care of the bar, a deal she took straight away.

All in all I had a fairly well behaved time in Kampot, staying away from all of the regular temptations which to be fair weren't as obviously available as they might be in Sihanoukville or Koh Rong.  Apart from a few drinks and low stakes gambling where I lost a total of $4 (a fair price for a night's entertainment) I was a good man. 

The next day I got up, got some cheap but delicious noodle soup with an amazing coconut milk base, did my usual internet crap and rented a motorbike (scooter) for $5.  I took off on it pretty easily, despite never having ridden one by myself before it was pretty intuitive.  Kampot was the perfect place to learn as the roads surrounding it are flat, relatively quiet and relatively free of potholes.  I refueled the bike twice but probably only needed to do this once, just at some point the engine seemed to struggle.  Not that it's expensive to buy plastic bottles of petrol from family run stalls at roadsides.  I went as far as Kep, took a brief stroll on the beach and headed to and from Kampot a few times, failing to find my hostel which I knew was just around the corner.  Despite my lack of direction I felt like a stone cold bad ass with my helmet, sunglasses, vest and backpack on.  This feeling soon disappeared when I realized how sunburned my shoulders were.  The $5 litre bottle of 30 SPF sunscreen which I bought in Sihanoukville had failed to protect me.  It seemed like a knock off brand in the first place and was probably just scented moisturizer.  For about a week they scabbed up and looked like a complete mess.  I was really more dumbass than badass by the end of the experience, though I'm pretty sure I hit top speed on the scooter - it was hard to tell as the spedometer didn't work but I had the throttle at full pelt on roads that went on for miles.  The pitch of the engine wasn't shifting much after that.

For lunch I had a slightly more expensive lunch in a cafe called "Cinema Club" or something.  The $4 fish amok was pretty tasty and  I spoke for a while with a middle aged English expat and the Australian restaurant owner.  He liked the town as the expat community was relatively small.  He loved the Khmer people, his wife and kids were Khmer and he despised some of the scumbags who came to ruin the place, making our old friend Gary Glitter look like an angel.  He also spoke of a class of Khmer woman known as the 'bar girl', often single mothers who preferred white males as Khmer society was so patriarchal that spoilt brat sons grew up to be either emotionally and physically abusive or likely to shirk their responsibilities when they'd knock a girl up.  As a result the Western progressive male was more appealing for being more appreciative, gentle and typically richer.  These girls sought husbands not as gold diggers but just looking for a better life for themselves and their offspring.  They would however often give sex for free either just for the enjoyment and appreciation from someone who wasn't going to abuse them or as a way of attracting a lifelong mate.  Whether this was accurate insight or not, this wasn't the first time I'd hear this - Bad Grandpa gave a similar assessment. 

After I rode off and attempted to bike up Bokor mountain in vain, not actually finding the correct entrance to the national park I got stuck in thick muddy trenches which I struggled to get out of and came to a disused railway line.  As far as I know Cambodia hasn't had a working railway since before Pol Pot.  The rusted tracks must have been there since before the 70s so it was strange to find such an antiquated evidence of transport.  I returned to Blissful, smoked a pot pipe with the peculiar Argentinian guy and Gabriela.  Later I'd talk her round a few cocktails which I came up with on the spot, though with slight influence from a few old classics - for your drinking enjoyment, here's the recipies

Purple Drank (later renamed Wonkey Donkey) 
Ingredients
- 1 shot dark rum
- 1/2 shot triple sec
- 1/2 shot peach schnapps
- 2 shots grape juice
- 1 squeeze of lime
- 1 wedge of lime

Preparation
- Put all ingredients into a shaker with ice, strain into a tall glass and garnish with a lime wedge

Orange and Cinnamon Russian
Ingredients
- 1 shot Kahlua
- 1 shot Cointreau
- 1/2 shot vodka
- 2 shots milk
- cinnamon powder

Preparation
-Shake all ingredients but the cinnamon powder in a shaker with ice, strain into a rocks glass with ice, add cinamon powder and garnish with orange peel.

Former colleagues of mine will know which inspired these drinks but they are still partly mine.

Not much happened that night worth reporting - Holland beat Mexico 2-1 in a mutually shameful display of diving and I talked nonsense with all of the expats before an early bed time.

The next day I left Kampot by bus after another bowl of pho, some internet and scribing some of these fictional journeys.