Travels with Hayley

Day 14

So day 14 and 15 are being updated together as unfortunately Day 14 was a bit of a wash out. I’d obviously eaten something that didn’t agree with me at some point so was up in the night with a sore stomach. With the aid of medication, water and prayer to all and any gods I made it through the 5 hour bus journey to Kampot, but by the time we got there I could barely keep myself upright I felt so poorly – see picture below at the restaurant where the rest of the group had lunch and I napped!

We were due to do a market tour and another sunset cruise that afternoon but I really wasn’t well enough to go anywhere – I’m so sad I missed it but the others gave me all the details so I had to live vicariously through them. I slept all afternoon, woke up to eat a banana (bad move 😳) and then went back to bed. An illustration of how rough I felt was that I have a grand total of two pictures from the entire day! Here they are for your enjoyment 😂

Day 15

I was absolutley determined that I was not missing anything else on the trip so I dragged myself from my sick bed, took all the tablets, swore off food for the day and headed onto the bus at 8am for our full day tour of the Kampot countryside. Exciting things I saw on the way – very frustratingly too fast for a picture – were a group of guys rolling a dragonboat down the road, and a lady sitting behind her husband on a moped with their small daughter wedged in between, checking the little girl’s hair for nits as they pelted down the highway!

Lots of countryside we passed through was strewn with litter which was such a shame – single use plastics here are incredible – every time you buy a drink somewhere, even if it’s a can of Coke they give you a plastic straw in a plastic wrapper and then put them both into a plastic bag. The road was also the bumpiest I think I’ve ever been on – Kom has been a tour guide for 16 years and he says the roads here have been under construction for – 16 years! Thank goodness for the miracle that is motion sickness tablets is all I can say!

A quick Kom stop for him to get some traditional snacks for everyone – obviously I couldn’t partake but the others described them to me – a coconut flavoured, cone shaped wafer with a filling that tasted like meringue – everyone really liked them. They smelled delicious too – what a day to be nil by mouth 🙄

We passed through villages with barefoot kids playing volleyball, a tuk tuk completely covered inside and out with knives (for sale I assume but…who knows here!)) and everything just caked in the thick, sticky orange dust from the earth roads.

Our first port of call was to see salt being produced from the salt flats. Square grids filled with water as far as the eye could see and then wooden sheds filled with vast, enormous drifts of whisper grey salt, banked up everywhere with young wiry guys stripped to the waist shovelling it into bags. They were strictly overseen by the governor, an older lady with the distinct aura of being not to be messed with!

We’ll be taking a short interval here for breaking news in – Small Stories by Kom! When he was young and the farmers would drain the paddy fields, there would always be huge puddles left with fish in abundance. He would creep through the field – if the farmer caught you walking on his rice you were for the machete – and go and catch the fish. One day he was so successful with his fish capturing that he couldn’t carry them all. His genius solution was to empty all of his school books from his bag and fill it with the semi conscious fish! He went strutting proudly home expecting his mother to be so happy he had provided dinner and was thus very hurt when instead she gave him a clout for ruining a good bag and losing his books 😂

He also told us how a lot of houses around here are made from a mix of cow dung and clay. He wants to open a hotel that is fancy fancy on the inside but made of cow dung and clay outside – ‘is my dream!’ He’s onto something you know, I reckon Instagram influencers would flock there for the novelty value!

We arrived at our next stop, a 1,500 year old temple hidden in a cave.

It was suggested we all left our backpacks in the bus to save the effort of carrying them in the heat which was fierce so we headed out with nothing between us. Unfortunately it hadn’t been mentioned to get to the cave you had to climb many, many stairs up and then many down into the cave itself. By the time it came to climb back up the stairs from the cave, the heat and the fact I’d had no food at all in my body for 36 hours was too much and as I started to climb everything started swirling and I just about managed get down to sit on a step before I passed out.

Everyone was so lovely looking after me but because we had all left our backpacks in the van, we didn’t have a mouthful of water between us. I tried a couple of times to get up but everytime someone had to grab me before I fell over – Kom insisted that I sat down while he fanned me and he rang the driver who hurried all the way to the summit with a big bottle of ice water 🥰. While we waited for him and I sat, head between my legs, an enormous group of monkeys swung overhead, fascinated as to what was going on apparently and getting increasingly bemused as to why they were not the centre of attention! When the water arrived I drank a little and then Luigi (nurse) suggested someone dampen my hair or the back of my neck. Now we’d had to wear long trousers and sleeves to visit the temple so I had a pale blue linen shirt on. Kerry got a bit enthusiastic with the neck wetting and poured half a bottle of ice water on me – in a split second I went from being respectful to the gods to the winning contestant in a wet t shirt contest 😂 It did the job though, within a couple of minutes I managed to get up and make my way down to the bottom. I felt like such an idiot – it was a good lesson for us all never to venture anywhere without water again though!

Damp but feeling a little better after a nap on the bus, we arrived to the next stop where we completed the ubiquitous tabletop duo by visiting a pepper farm this time. This was a beautiful spot, very well kept and obviously quite affluent. We had a quick tour of the farm and a talk about how they grow the pepper – I still wasn’t quite with it so the only note I made that I can now interpret and pass onto you is ‘fertiliser is bat and cow poop’ – bet you’re glad I managed to get that gem down!

We sat in the shade on the veranda and were served lemongrass, turmeric and pepper tea of which I was urged to drink 3 cups of for it’s medicinal qualities, and we heard all about the different types of pepper. Facts that I didn’t know included that green pepper is fresh off the plant, you can stir fry it and it lasts a week in the fridge – black pepper is the same plant but just dried in the sun. Red peppercorns are left to ripen on the plant and then dried – white pepper is the same red peppercorns but with the skins removed. They also preserve a lot of the fresh peppercorns in ‘Fleur de Sal’ – you see the occasional leftover influence of the French colonisation pop out when you least expect it!

Next stop was lunch at the beach, there were a load of hammocks so I headed straight there and was apparently absolutley dead to the world for 2 hours. I felt loads better when I woke, sometimes you just have to listen to your body!

Post an elegant scramble out of my hanmock I had an hour so went for a walk along the beach. It was pretty grotty and seedy which was the immediate vibe I had got of the town on arrival at the restaurant yesterday – there’s a lot of tourists here but not the wholesome kind – there were a lot of old white men with very young Asian women and on the beach I even saw a couple of them with children. It was really unpleasant. Kerry used to work in the child abuse unit and her radar was pinging all over the place – so gross. The beach itself was very average, I didn’t want to swim and risk getting dirty water in my mouth (I had enough problems!) so I had a very British paddle with my trousers rolled up to my knees!

We headed a few minutes up the road to a market – seafood and general markety things (with a swift detour back to collect my forgotten sunglasses – I really was not on good form today – thank you Kom for your unstinting patience) and had a browse around. I liked the look of a matching skirt and top set for $6 – I picked up the skirt and stretched the elastic waist to maximum capacity and held it up against me – even the stall holder who wanted the sale couldn’t help making a ‘hmm, you’ll be lucky love!’ face! I left it for the petite Asian ladies and took my Western bulk away from this scene of shame 😂

In snacks I saw but couldn’t try – the group tried another kind of sticky rice cooked in palm leaves (general ‘meh’ consensus) and Kom bought some crabs from one seller, took them to another stall to have them cooked and yet another stall to buy a bottle of home made chilli sauce. According to the others they were gorgeous, they all went in a flash with people really digging out the very last bits of flesh from the shells. Lots of other fascinating looking things for sale – enormous mound of fermented fish paste anyone?

A brief but very confusing encounter at a fruit stall where I was taking photos – the ladies selling the fruit kept loudly saying “cow!” and making enthusiastic gestures towards me. Cycling through the options of a. A nice cow was standing behind me they wanted me to see (there wasn’t) b. they were calling me a cow (not beyond the imagination given the earlier skirt encounter) it finally occurred to me to find out from Kom what the word ‘cow’ means in Cambodian – trousers! They were admiring my trousers 😂

Onto our last stop which was a boat ride through the mangrove forest. This was another one of Kom’s ‘guinea pig’ tours for Intrepid and so we only paid the princely sum of a dollar and 50 cents for the privilege! The enterprise is run by an organisation to raise funds to repair the damage done to the mangrove by deforestation. They are slowly replanting, trying to reverse the ravages that have gone before.

It was just wonderful. The day had been so unbelievably hot and so being out on the water in the cool breeze, watching the sun slowly set and seeing the fisherman head home after a day’s work was the stuff of dreams. We stopped for a bit to walk through a path in the mangrove itself, listening to the loud popping noises of the electric blue eyed crabs that live there (the noise was somewhere between a ‘pop goes the weasel’ type of pop and a finger snap and super loud for such a tiny thing!)

It was glorious and I felt just about the luckiest person ever to be there in that moment, watching shoals of silver fish leaping out of the water like miniature dolphins and watching the burning orange sun sink below the horizon.

Less lucky was the small child who waved hello as we got off the boat – I was putting on foam hand sanitiser and must have clapped my hands together to spread it too enthusiastically because an enormous lump of it flew through the air and landed on her cheek 😂 She was completely stunned and stood comatose as I desperately tried to wipe it off 😂

A quick walk through the market to see the always fascinating food on offer (window shopping very much only today!) with Katja when we got back as I’d missed out the afternoon before while I was lolloping prone in my sickbed and we happened upon the massage place a few of the group had been to the night before and raved about.

I decided a massage was just what my poor wrecked body needed and oh, wasn’t it just. This place was an absolute oasis of calm. Cool and serene, smelling of jasmine and lemongrass with the kindest, gentlest staff ever. First they washed your feet in warm water laced with fresh lime slices and flower petals and then the most glorious full body massage, I felt like a new woman, I was almost crying with gratitude by the end.

The gorgeous woman that did mine was so sweet, quite young and so caring when I told her I hadn’t been well. She gave me extra time over my allotted hour – ‘I take care of you’ – and worked her magic on every sore piece of my broken body. When she did my hands she liked my ring and wanted to know did I get it in Cambodia? I hadn’t, it was £10 from home just for travelling. At the end I slipped it off and gave it to her as a gift, she was so happy. I used google translate to tell her it was made of a special waterproof material so she could leave it on all the time – I showed her the text on the screen but she told me ‘only talk, cannot see it’ and I realised she couldn’t read. Amazingly, there’s a button you can press that will then speak it in Cambodian – technology is really amazing isn’t it, it can open so many doors. I left her showing off her hand to all of the girls there and with a photo of her Facebook page and her enthusiastic instruction that I add her as a friend 😂

Met up with Kerry, Luigi and Juliette at a beautiful seafood restaurant – I took advantage of all of the amazing fish on offer by having two slices of margarita pizza with the cheese picked off but to be honest, that felt risky enough after the last few days!

Meandered back to the hotel through the town, past the enormous statue of a durian on the roundabout (so weird 😂) and back to the hotel.

The hotel – it’s a very weird place. Half of the bedroom wall into the corridor is glass and you have to pull a curtain to cover it up. I don’t want to cast aspersions but it’s directly opposite the double bed too…and there’s frosted glass windows from the bedroom into the bathroom so when the light is on you can see the shape of whoever is inside and there’s a chain on the bathroom door…I get the distinct impression this might be a place frequented by the less than wholesome…

Creepy swingers hotel or not though, I was just very grateful to crash into my bed, saying a heartfelt note of thanks to whomever it may concern that I’d made it though the day in almost one piece and looking forward to tomorrow!

As always, this country never lets you down on the ‘random things seen today’ front so please enjoy the below!

Lots of love always xxx