Kampot and Sihanoukville.

We left Phnom Penh in the most horrendous traffic jam ... I can't tell you what kind of life you see from the height of the bus , everything is piled onto the back of 'the moped ' ... we saw a young girl holding her own IV fluid bag up, whilst hanging onto the guy in front, coming home from hospital... life is very raw here..
As we were behind time, the coach driver , whose life and ours quite clearly depended on him getting to Kampot on time , put his foot to the metal, ( no excuse needed for that over here ) ... It was horrendous, the overtaking alone was ridiculous, it had been raining heavily and the holes in the road meant people were driving on the wrong side and there were many land slides .... it was inevitable then when we eventually were hit by a huge articulated army truck and the wing mirror was taken clean off ... I was sitting that side and saw it happening in slow motion, and threw myself over Brian's lap .. all very dramatic, you half expected to see Tom Cruise running very fast in a singlet at any point...   Everyone was very dazed after it and we limped into a very damp Kampot...

Kampot is very famous for its wonderful pepper which graces most French restaurant tables  , ( try it, crunched black peppercorns, salt and lime juice ) as a dip for your chicken skewers yum yum... it is also famous for Jack fruit.... this fruit is adored over here, you also see it on the streets in London .. It smells like vomit ... and is of a custard  consistency and is very sweet.. have you finished retching yet ... they love it here.. so much so ... they decided to make a statue of one.. this is in a town where most of the buildings are still burnt out from when the Kymer Rouge were here !!!

It rained and rained whilst we were here... We had booked ourselves into the Kampot Diamond Hotel... Brand new , looked nice enough and was reasonable.. if only we had known it was run by a collection of kids from some kind of Rudolph Steiner School.. but hey made the stay more entertaining ... We spent a lot of time at Rikitikitavi , which amused me , just the name alone .We found an amazing restaurant called The Rusty Keyhole - thanks Kate and Dave , they do the most amazing ribs , so after a big amount of meat and red wine, and chatting to 2 guys who were doing Cambodia on Mopeds they had bought, who were really interesting we ended up on a sunset river cruise ... it was lovely whiling away a couple of hours on a boat , watching this sleepy riverside towns world carry on , men washing their cows in the river,  kids swimming and waving, it seemed with the weather we had been experiencing with the amount of rain even the clouds were giving us the 'up yours '... Not much else happened in Kampot .Skyped and emailed everyone, wrote letters and updated blog... chilled out

Well that's once I had finished scratching myself to death.. I have become a walking blood bank for mosquitoes, a restaurant for these nightly feeders... She !! comes in the night , alights on an exposed patch of flesh... the head lowered posture of a sprinter. Then she plunges her stiletto mouth - parts into my skin.... bitch ... I feel like I need a dose of Frontline....

We left Kampot for a fairly uneventful journey to the seaside resort of Sihanoukville, where our residence was Coolabah Hotel .. it is lovely and very friendly ... the beach is / was beautiful but has been ruined by so much hurried development .. concrete poured into sandy foundations and being washed away... grungy bars all offering the same grungy wicker chairs and happy hour cocktail, blind singers , hawkers selling anything from bracelets, massage, lobster, leg shaves !! pedicures !! it was awful... Raw sewage being pumped into the sea, and people gorging themselves on crab ! ( bottom feeders !!) lovely.. we feel desperately sorry that a country in such a race to glean our Greenback,( US dollar rules over here)  an environmental disaster is waiting to happen, with so much development going on mainly by Russian/Chinese investors, if the basic infrastructure is not in place it will become another scar on this already scarred country... our days here have been spent going to different beaches, Victory beach had a bar called aeroport , ( one should be open here in Dec ) inside this bar was a real Russian Aeroflot
Airplane that you could climb up into and flick its switches and dials and pretend to fly...  today we got a tuk tuk to another beach and asked the driver to come back if it rained .... now he must have been sleeping as we had the most dreadful squall... I decided to make a dash for it whilst we could .. no driver... so made Brian walk the whole 4km home along the most beautiful beach.... we are leaving Cambodia tomorrow,  It has been the most emotional experience so far, the beauty of Siem Reap and the orphanage, the horrors of the Killing Fields, the optimism of the beach resorts, the friendliness of the people, and the rawness of the poverty have made these weeks an unforgettable memory,  I am delighted to have seen it in its infancy, this county can only succeed as it has all the right ingredients, unfortunately exploitation and greed always muddies clear water ....