Bamboo beach-hut, fresh crab and silk

What a week! Cambodia is vastly different in each area, and the farther outside the tourist attractions we get, the nicer everyone is. The children come to stare and wave at us in the small villages and say hello and there are dogs, cats, chickens and cows everywhere. In the touristic provinces we spoke English with the locals who are used to having tourists around, but now it's a question of sign language and a lot of pointing and smiling, with some broken English and French in between. In Sihanoukville we snorkeled, spent a night in a bamboo hut on an island where the restaurant opened especially for us, made friends with very sweet puppies on the beach, saw thousands of tiny little crabs, arranged our visa Vietnam (the only one you can't get at the border, I definitely recommend getting it via an agency so you don't have to sit at the ambassee for a whole day) and chilled out in hammocks. Then we took the bus to Kampot and Kep, where we have seen a womens prison, visited pepper plantations, ate crab straight from the sea via the barbeque onto our plates :) Yumm !, we arrived at Bokor Hill, a ghost town on top of a mountain with great apes who were having lunch in the middle of the road, ate ice cream next to a beautiful waterfall and went past a restaurant run by deaf people, who also organize art projects for the local kids. Epic Arts Cafe has awesome food at good prices, is cozy, the people are wonderful, they have a cool system with a list so you can let them know what you want to order and upstairs is a workshop-area / little shop. In Phnom Penh we ate at the night-market on carpets on the floor and took the bus to Kompong Cham, where we first saw some 'new' temples with beautiful murals and enormous kitsch gold leaf and flower motifs, and an old French lighthouse next to to the much-larger-than-I-ever- imagined Mekong River. We wanted to take the bus to Kratie but fell asleep and missed the bus stop, so 2 hours later we got off at the next stop, which was in the middel of nowhere. A friendly dude with antique (read: shitty) moped brought us to Stung Treng: 20 minutes with 3 people and 2 big backpacks on a dirt road, it was hilarious!

Here is little to do, but it is a cute riverside village. This morning we went to a silk 'factory' where a group of women get child care and medical care, while meanwhile keeping silkworms, dying the silk, processing it, and then weave it into the most beautiful products. Everything by hand and very impressive! Tomorrow we cross the border to Laos' 4000 islands where we can hopefully spot some brown dolphins and do a tour of a few days on a motorbike through the southernmost province. I am really trying to store all the impressions and anecdotes, take lots of pictures and write down everything. Already a very memorable trip, and still so much to do and see!

#cambodia #kampot #kep #phnompenh #kompongcham #stungtreng #rei #sihanoukville #asia #travel