Kampot and Kep, and no Sihanoukville

What Kampot and Kep actually are

Kampot is a river town of about forty thousand people, twenty kilometres inland from the sea on the Praek Tuek Chhu, with a compact grid of French shophouses and a bridge that has been rebuilt several times. Kep is thirty kilometres east on the coast, and it is a ruin.

Kep was built in 1908 as a seaside resort for the French administration and then reinvented in the 1950s and 60s as a holiday town for the Cambodian elite, with a run of remarkable modernist villas by architects working in the New Khmer Architecture style. The Khmer Rouge emptied it, stripped the villas of everything removable, and the forest took the rest. Perhaps a hundred concrete shells stand among the trees, some now being restored as hotels, most not.

Kampot pepper is the other thing. It has a protected geographical indication, it was the standard pepper of French restaurant kitchens before the war, the plantations were destroyed under the Khmer Rouge, and it has been rebuilt from a handful of surviving vines since the late 1990s. The farms are working farms and visiting them is a straightforward agricultural visit, not a shopping stop.

How many nights

Three. One day for the pepper farms and the salt flats, one for Kep — the crab market, the villas, and the national park walk — and one that has nothing in it, because this is the part of Cambodia where doing nothing is the point.

Two nights works if you skip Bokor. One night does not: Phnom Penh is three hours away and you would spend six of your hours in a vehicle.

Most people come here at the end of a Cambodia trip, after Angkor and Phnom Penh, and that is the right order. It is a place to stop, not a place to start.

What is actually here

The crab market at Kep

A row of stalls on the seafront where blue swimmer crabs are brought in from traps you can see in the water. The standard preparation is crab stir-fried with green Kampot peppercorns still on the stem, and it is one of the two or three best things to eat in Cambodia. It costs a few dollars.

The pepper farms

Twenty minutes inland, on red soil. Black, red and white pepper are the same fruit at different stages, and a good farm will let you taste them side by side, which is more interesting than it sounds. We use farms that sell at the farm price and pay us nothing.

Bokor

A hill station at 1,080 metres, built by forced labour in 1921 with heavy loss of life, abandoned twice, and now reached by an excellent modern road. The old casino and church stand in cloud most days. There is also a large and slightly grim contemporary casino development on the plateau, which is part of the honest picture.

The salt flats and the river

The flats east of Kampot work from December to April. The river at dusk, from a small boat, is the other thing people remember.

When to go

What things cost

Photographs

When to skip Kampot and Kep

• If you want a beach holiday. The swimming here is poor — muddy, shallow and full of crab traps. Rabbit Island is better and still not a beach destination.
• June to October, if Bokor is the reason you are coming. It is in cloud.
• If you have under ten days in Cambodia. Three nights here costs Angkor a day.
• If you want nightlife. Kampot has half a dozen bars and closes early.
• If you were considering Sihanoukville instead. So were a lot of people, and we do not go there.

Why we do not send people to Sihanoukville

Between 2017 and 2020 Sihanoukville was transformed by an enormous wave of casino and resort construction, much of it financed from overseas and much of it left half-finished when online gambling was banned in 2019. The town that resulted has serious problems: unfinished concrete towers, poor construction safety, a documented trafficking and scam-compound problem, and beaches that no longer resemble what visitors expect.

Some of it is being cleaned up and some of it is not. We do not think it is a place we can responsibly send travellers, so Kampot and Kep is where our Cambodian coast goes.

Tours that include Kampot and Kep

It is a three-day extension on the seven-day Cambodia route, on the twelve-day Vietnam and Cambodia route and on the twenty-four-day four-country route, added after Phnom Penh.

Questions travellers ask most

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