Crabby Kep

by Grace

On a brave adventure for relaxing times at the sea-side.

During my weekend with Alice in Phnom Penh, we decided to go to Kep rather than make the hefty trek up to Siem Reap to see the Angkor Wat. Kep is to Phnom Penh as an extremely sleepy and rural Brighton is to London.  It’s known for chill times by the sea, bad beaches, and to-die-for fresh crab.  All of these things sounded just about right to me in my still desperately jet lagged state, and Alice’s housemate Siena encouraged us enthusiastically with stories of her visit a few weeks before.  Sold, Saturday’s sunrise found Alice and I packing for a 7:30AM bus to Kep.

Four bumpy back-of-the-bus, playing-with-a-baby, Bollywood-feature-film hours later, we were spat out onto the baking hot pavement of Kep.  (I loved the Bollywood film by the way. It was a reincarnation romance with plenty of dancing, fighting, and singing.) The sea was right there, breezy and inviting, so we ignored the throngs of pushy drivers and hotel owners as best we could and made a beeline for a shady, oceanside wall on which to rest our weary selves.

Like I said, not the greatest beaches.

Refreshed, a tuk-tuk driver with excellent English got to us first, and drove us to Rega Kep Guesthouse where we stayed as per Siena’s advice. It was really lovely, with a dripping jungle garden and hammocks in the restaurant, but the rooms were kind of dirty. Unfortunately, the French owners who apparently are just gems weren’t around and the rest of the staff’s English was so-so. (Alice’s Khmer isn’t as good as her Korean yet.) We left again for the “down-town” to find a tuk-tuk willing to take us to a few sights in the countryside. It was nice just to play it by ear and know that no matter what the 3 things we wanted to accomplish would be accomplished eventually. (And if they weren’t, whatevs.)

We found the same driver, Sambo (or a close derivative,) and he agreed to take us around for half the day for $18.  We thought $9 pax was fair because the places we wanted to see were quite far out; closer to Kampot than Kep and gas here about the same price as gas in Canada. We were giddy. We giggled and chattered as Sambo puttered us around, snapping photos of interesting sights along the way.

We were shocked to see a mosque because 96% of Cambodians are Buddhist. We knew that Cham people often practice Islam, but we thought they were mostly gone from this country following the Khmer Rouge. We were told later that there are small Cham populations all over the country, but the Cambodians we spoke to were confused about what a mosque is.

Chillin'! In the tuk!

The place we wanted to see so badly (again as per Siena’s advice) were the cave pagodas. According to a few different sources, there are a few different ones, and we approached Sambo with a few names.  He said that Wat Kirisan, which he pronounced Wat Kirish-la, and Phnom Chhnork are very beautiful. Chhnork has been my favourite Khmer word my entire time here. He vaguely agreed to take us to “the caves”, the pepper plantations, and the salt fields. We just wanted to see the caves, preferably both, but as we went on Alice got more and more excited about pepper plantations. Sambo ended up taking us to Wat Kirisan.

Wat Kirisan. It was an island of a hill in the flat plains.

A few very red, dusty, bumpy roads later we had an entourage of little girls on bicycles, madly pedalling after us with flashlights and a few English phrases. We paid a small fee – it can’t have been more than $2 – and rolled into a shady area just beyond a temple under construction where snack and drink sellers lounged in the shadow of this strange island mountain.  On the way up, we had opportunities to see beautiful caves swiss-cheesing the mountain along the road, smoothly carved by water. On Sambo’s advice, we hired a guide, or the guide to take us around and tell us some stories.

Our guide, 17, who was educated by the monks here as a child and spoke passable English.

The little girls who had followed us and tried to rent us their flashlights tagged along. One in particular actually spoke a surpising amount of English and chimed in with helpful confirmations of her cousin’s They all seemed to belong to one enormous family. The caves are pretty extensive, considering the mountain-hill isn’t that big, and there were plenty of interesting stalagmites/stalactites. One looked just like a turtle, one like a shark, another was an eagle; there were a few bat caves and bat chimneys, although the poor bats were unhappy at our intrusion – poor bats!; and my personal favourite were two large stalactites that rang like gongs when slapped or knocked. We also saw some cave pools and our guide told us how flooded and slippery the cave system gets in the rainy season. (Very.)

See? Just like a turtle!

The most amazing thing about the place though, was the secret garden in the centre of the mountain open to the sky and accessible only by cave, or a set of steeply carved stairs that climb over the rim the “bowl”. It was lush and cool, birds and cicadas were noisy, and sometimes wild monkeys come to eat the fruit from the trees. In addition, the ground had clay deposits that were actually purple! It was definitely a very special place, and the Cambodians knew it because there were idols and incense tucked into almost every nook. Guide said Buddhist tourists who come to Kirisan are forever anointing themselves with the water from this holy stalactite, or this holy cave pool, or scraping shiny rocks off of this sandstone formation. He said it was a problem because sometimes they try to drink it and get sick from “minerals”.

The purple clay held up to my dark blue shirt for colour comparison.

A wall of the secret garden.

One of the shrines just off the secret garden.

During the civil war, the Khmer Rouge occupied the mountain, killing many of the monks who were here, breaking the statues in order to get at the treasure interred inside, and then imprisoning their slaves in the caves. For years they stayed here, even after 1979. One of the highest ranking officials of the area fled a little further, bought a pepper plantation, and is there to this day. Our guide said, “I think he is a good man now. He tries to help. I think he regrets his actions. He is good now,” which I  think is a really interesting thing to say. A very forgiving thing, too. This token of information stoked Alice’s interest in the pepper plantations into a raging inferno.

Reclining Buddha they reconstructed after the Khmer rouge smashed it to steal treasures inside.

A guardian of one of the seven layers of Buddhist hell.

The one part of the story that Alice and I were unable to get straight was that of the “cowboys”.  Sometimes small acts of vandalism are carried out against the busy nooks in Kirish-la, like while we were there, green branches covered with biting red ants were strewn in the bat cave and in the narrow corridor before the exit. And they bit HARD! The guide said,

“You know cowboy?”
“…yes,” we were hesitant because we were unsure as to what cowboys have to do with Cambodia at all.
“Cowboy do red ants.”
“…what?”
“Cowboy bring branch with angry red ants to bite visitors.”
“Cowboys?”
“Yes, cowboys.”

He also mentioned that they live on the mountain itself and dislike noisy visitors. Alice remembers him saying they have cows. We decided they were local squatters who were waging their own war against tourism on their “lands”. Still, though, I might prefer images of marauding wild, wild West cowboys, HEE-YAH’ing their horses to dangerous speeds and then tossing bushels of ant-infested branches into cave openings in south Cambodia.

We paid our guide (“Whatever you think is the right amount”) and his oldest girl cousin who was working so hard (just for encouragement), hopped back into the tuk with Sambo and trundled off to the pepper plantations. We found a road-side sugarcane vendor and bought the best sugarcane juice I tasted in the country.In the late afternoons the incredible heat and humidity of the air creates the most enormous thunderheads. In fact, there are abnormally high death by lightning numbers in Cambodia. No one is really sure why. Dangerous or not, they made for some pretty pictures. We could have used some of the rain though, because the road to the plantation was dusty and construction trucks kept throwing the dust into the air and choking us.

Delicious lemony sugarcane juice.

The road goes on forever...

The pepper plantation was sort of cool, but not arresting in the way the caves were. Just … cool. Pepper grows on trees in little bunches. There were a bunch of other brown fruit (maybe capotes?) and durians also in the plantation. Alice picked up some red and white pepper, and we munched on fresh green pepper, straight of the tree. It’s a lot fresher and more citrusy-tasting than dried pepper we usually use in our cooking. No word on the ex-Khmer Rouge general.

Pepper!

The scale on which pepper is weighed for sale to visitors. Just an example of all the different colours.

After about half an hour at the plantation, Sambo offered to take us to the salt fields which were on the way home. They pump seawater into fields. That’s pretty much it. But if it rains (which it does often) the entire field is ruined; no salt harvest. I’m glad I’m not a salt farmer.

And this is what the salt fields look like when not in use.

We turned our sights back to Kep, plenty ready and hungry for the fresh crab feast that awaited us at the crab market. Sambo advised us to eat at a restaurant (name eludes me) in the strip of attached restaurants just east of the market itself. Alice and I decided to take his advice because we didn’t feel like fending off hawkers and just kind of wanted some peace in which to enjoy our crab. The restaurant backs onto the ocean — so close that waves kept crashing over the railing and soaking the first two rows of tables — so we had a great view of the sunset and we enjoyed watching ladies wade neck deep into the ocean to retrieve crab cages placed there in the afternoon to keep the crabs fresh.

It was Alice’s first crab-in-shell meal and I was proud to successfully remember how to open a crab without any crackers. Thanks Mom! We order crab in Kep peppers and just plain grilled crab. Both dishes were small, but when they came out we doubted whether we’d be able to finish. The pepper crab was good but the grilled crab was definitely the winner. I love crab just for the taste of crab, and these crabs were so fresh and so succulent and so … mm! crabby! Here, check it out.

Pepper crab foreground, grilled crab behind. Note: ocean far background.

I was very pleased.

Alice intimidates the crab. I then made her rip it open with her bare hands.

We waddled out of the restaurant an hour and a half later, walked partway down the boardwalk before I almost passed out in jet lag- and crab-induced exhaustion.  We found Sambo waiting for us at the restaurant, we made plans with him to buy our bus tickets, and went to bed.

Alice had planned to wake up before the sun and go for a long run (she’s training for a marathon in October) but we woke at 440AM to the sound of thunder.  We decided it was a bad idea to run around in a flat city in a thunderstorm and went back to sleep for another hour. This time it was thunder-storming and pouring torrential rain. Alice gave up very reluctantly on her run and eventually we ate breakfast and decided to go for a walk around the guesthouse and check out all the ruined French villas from before the Khmer Rouge. They’re just sitting in their lots, dilapidated and crumbling and protected by their still very strong-looking stone walls. Apparently they were bought almost immediately following the Vietnamese occupation and there might be some plans of Development in the future. With a capital D. We both really enjoyed the atmospheres around the villas.

Aaaaaand a scurrying pointy-tailed lizard I found on the walk.

Kep is sleepy. It’s small and quiet (excluding the drivers and hotel owners jostling for attention every time a bus arrives,) but it’s definitely worth a visit if you want that peace and quiet. I think Alice plans on going back quite soon again.

Also allow me to take this opportunity to pimp her blog.

Until next time!

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