The Original Harmony

Hi everyone.

Two days in a row is pretty good. The town slows down quite a bit here at night, and the internet cafe is just down the block from our hotel, so its not hard to come in here at night and send off a few emails.

You may have noticed by now, I am not proofreading these posts. Sorry, but it takes long enough just to spell check this stuff. I have more great pictures, but no way to upload them at the moment, sorry.

So....Where to begin, today was a VERY full day....As I write this I am also watching four white geckos run around on the opposite wall.

The guidebooks mostly suggest that Kampot is a nice place to stop when you want to visit the nearby towns, but also point out that there is more to do in or around town than most people think. We decided, since we had already had enough trouble getting to the national forest (Bokor national forest is a very nice one 40 km away) and we had seen enough resort towns (Kep is a small but growing town about 20 km away), to visit some of the sites nearby.

We rented a motor bike for the day for $8 and asked the people at our hotel for directions. They recommended we visit the caves first, and then go to the zoo later. So that's what we did. The caves that the guidebook recommend are supposed to be about half way between Kep and Kampot...Unfortunately the odometer and speedometer were broken on our bike so we didn't know how far we had gone and we ended up going all the way to Kep. We stopped in at the "Led Zep" (yes, Led Zepplin) that was run by a French expat. Fortunately he was also cartographer as well, and had detailed maps of the whole area all around the cafe. We decided to check out the sites around Kep (after all, it is recommended) and then went back to the Cafe for breakfast. He only served burritos, pizza and pancakes, so we went with the pancakes; they were great.

After breakfast we reviewed the maps one more time and went back about 10 km on the same road we had come from. Now that we had landmarks it wasn't hard to find the caves, although we still drove past it by about 100 feet. When we got to the caves we were stopped by a group of children (8-12), who had run over from the school across the street. They didn't speak much English, but they knew enough to offer their services as guides. We hired one and ended up with two. The took us all through the temple caves of Phnom Sia, showed us the rock formations known as "white elephants", pointed out all of the holy man and Buddha statues, and clapped to make the bats fly. They seemed to know only a little bit of conversational English (hello what is your name? and what is your job?) as well as all the words they needed to be good cave guides. They strung some pretty white flowers on a piece of grass for Kelly, and asked only $1 for their services. I gave both of them a dollar, but as it turned out the one who did most of the talking didn't like this very much; I was only supposed to pay him. So, to make it up to him, I tipped him an extra 1000 Riel, about 30 cents.

At the base of the steps up to the temple and caves, there was a group of monks. I asked to take their picture, and they were happy to pose. They asked me where I was going next, and offered us pleasant dreams and safe travels.

The Frenchman had also suggested another group of caves that were not in the guidebooks, I think it was Phnom Chhnork (don't quote me on this, I'm just not sure). When we got there, we were greeted by another group of kids, and a few teenagers. The knew exactly what we were there for, and offered their services as guides as well. Kelly thinks they were a family, there were a lot of them, all boys too, but I guess its possible. They took us into the caves even though we didn't have flashlights (a mistake?). The start wasn't so bad, they showed us some of the interstice features, stlagtights and nights, as well as a huge rock that was stuck in one of the cave openings, making for a very interesting hanging boulder. Next the took us deeper into the cave, this is where things got a little interesting. A few of the younger boys had blue led flashlights, but they did very little; we relied mostly on candles of which the older boys had two. I also had the lighter that I had bought a few days ago to sterilize the only knife I could find (a small pen knife, not large enough to cut fruit). We squeezed through cracks in the rocks and entered some more interesting, tighter caverns. The walls in this area were all crystal limestone, glistening with the little light we had (the boys were calling it "rock diamond".)

After exploring these caves for a while they took us back to our motorbike, and one of them offered to be a guide to another set of caves about 3 km away. He drove us both there, uncomfortably hanging on the back of the bike. The caves were honestly less impressive, but they housed a small stone Khmer temple (deep inside) that was built in 1668 (NOTE: I just looked this cave up, according to one site its actually a Pre Angkor ruin from the 4th or 5th century). An old man there asked us our nationality and seemed happy that we were American.

After all this it was only about 1:30 when we got back to Kampot, so, we went over the river (on a very crowed bridge) and up the main road north to the Zoo. Unfortunately despite all our searching we never did find the guinea pig or dog that was mentioned in the guidebook. We did however find the numerous bird species, lizards, elephants, tigers, lions, civets, otters, bears, monkeys, gibbons, and other fascinating animals. All of the animals were in cages that one could stick their hands through if they dared (we didn't), and most of them had learned to beg for food from passing visitors. We did buy some sugar cane from a vendor, she told us the elephants would eat it; so, we took our bundle on over to the two small Asian elephants. It was quite fun feeding them, their outstretched trunks sneaking through the gates onto the cement barrier that was on one side of their pen. I had always known elephants were skilled with their trunks, but their dexterity still amazed me. They were able to grab the sugar cane, break it up, and chew it no problem with just a few flicks.

It was somewhat sad walking by some of the animals, begging for food (especially the otters) but they seem well fed, and their coats were healthy looking; I think all the begging was more like a dog at a table than a truly hungry animal. The bears were quite funny too, coming right up to where were were standing, climbing the walls of their cage and sticking their paws through. suprisingly these bears were housed with a primate of some sort, they seemed to get along well....well the bear didn't seam to mind the monkey climbing on his head to reach for food.

All in all the zoo was pretty good, for a Cambodia zoo. It is privately owned, and relies on donations...Mostly from foreign investors. It had clearly seen better days, and most of the park was in ruins (closed carousels, run down buildings, rusting cages, and empty fountains) but the actual animal pens were well maintained, and as I said most of the animals seemed healthy. A few of them were missing body parts, but even those were still good looking. I was quite impressed. However, walking through the park, with the occasional empty cage, and broken down fences I couldn't help but shake the feeling that I was at a place like Jurassic park, and half expected one of the missing tiger cubs (all grown up) to come pouncing out at us.

After the zoo we came back to Kampot. We rested in the hotel for a bit, and tried to dust off (like I said most of the roads are dirt...A sticky, dusty, red dirt). After our brief rest, we went out to one of the restaurants recommended in a guidebook. It was a neat little place on a covered dock on the river. Again we ate with the setting sun (this time over the mountains of Bokor National Park). My crab was delicious, but as you might imagine, its very hard to eat a hard shell crab with chopsticks. Kelly also enjoyed her chicken with mushrooms.

That brings us to now. And its about time to go....

One last note though. This is a much happier place to be than Sihanoukville. part of it is the more calm atmosphere, but another large part of it is all the friendly children. Everywhere we go they are so happy to see us, they wave and yell Hello. We must have yelled hello back more than a hundred times today.

Bye for now.

-Tim

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 6:46 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.