Trip to Kep...The Beach

This past week the girls were out of school and Shawn was on vacation.  It was Water Festival here which  commemorates a tribal naval battle on the Mekong River several hundred years ago. The festival includes wooden boat races of 400 boats and 20,000 rowers.  The population of Phnom Penh doubles during this time so we decided to leave!

This picture is actually of a frigate boat (non-racing kind) decorated with scaffolding for the festival.




We headed to Kep.  The ride down there was quite the adventure.  It was a traumatic event just getting out of the city as we had to dodge motos and cars and people and tuk tuks and bicycles and dogs and children and cows and I could go on but I won't.  These are some of the things we passed on the road.

Yes that is a pig on the back of the moto.  From the back it looked like there was only one on the bike, but once we pulled along side and passed the guy, this is what we saw:

Yup, two pigs, nestled in to have a perfect fit on the back of the moto.  We traveled on a fairly decent road for a while.  By decent I mean paved with the occasional pothole.  We still only averaged about 30 miles an hour though.  Then we hit dirt.  Red dirt to be specific.  We were on this road for what seemed like forever.  In fact it was around 2 hours, give or take.   It was very hard to see at times, but the local people every now and then would water the road to cut back on the dust.  We heard they were working on the road to widen it and pave it eventually.

The road eventually got better and we made it to Kep, which is a small town by the beach.  Our hotel was beautiful.  It had a big pool, a great view and they let us bring Vesta with us!  The first night we got there was Halloween.  So because trick or treating was obviously out, we decided to have our own mini version of trick

or treating. 

The girls dressed up and asked a few of the workers for candy...we attempted to explain this ahead of time to the workers and children, then we hid candy around the grounds and they went in search.  The people there must have thought we were crazy when Princess Leia, Batgirl and Supergirl came running up to them.  Greta was a skeleton.  We did the best we could and the girls got candy which they were happy about. It goes without saying that the Buddhist do not celebrate All Souls Day and therefore did not develop the accompanying holiday Halloween.

Good times for all.

The next day we got up and went to the beach at Kep.  The sand and water was comparable to Galveston, which is not that great, and we were more of a tourist attraction than the real attractions.  There were no other foreigners on this beach so we really stood out.  At one point I looked up at the sea wall and there were about 30 people just staring at us.  They were not being rude, just curious, and they really love the kids.   Phoebe had to pose a couple of times for some people who wanted her picture.    Needless to say we only stayed at the beach for about 30 minutes then went back to the pool. 

The next day we hired a guide and headed to some caves, a pepper plantation and took a drive to the Vietnamese border.  The plantation was really neat as we had never seen how they grow pepper...on a vine like grapes. 

We also played a fun game of hide and seek here.   After the plantation we headed to the caves to a place called Wat Kirisan.  This Wat is a Buddhist temple built at the foot of a mountain that is riddled with over 100 caverns and passageways.  You walk in an underground passageway, check out the bats along the way and come out in this vine-draped hidden valley.  There is a reclining Buddha here, and various rock formations resemble various animals...turtle, dragon, eagle etc.  We didn't get to go all through the caves because many of them were flooded as we are at the tail end of the rainy season.  We also got to feed a some wild monkeys that lived on/in the mountain too. The kids liked the mama monkey and her babies.

 

After the caves we decided to drive to the Vietnam/Cambodia border.  Why we thought this would be a cool thing to do we have no idea, but we did it anyway.  It was only reported to be about 10 miles from where we were, but when you are traveling 4 miles an hour it takes a while.  The road was so bumpy that you really couldn't drive any faster.  Bumpy really isn't the word...gaping holes and/or craters that we had to manuever around would be more appropriate.  The drive itself was beautiful as we passed little villages with all the houses on stilts, some salt flats, water buffaloes, rice fields and beautiful palm trees. 

This section of the road wasn't too bad, and it was really beautiful.  The guide said that they wanted to expand the road which would mean they would have to cut down all of these palm trees.  I hope they don't do it.

Here we are at the border.  The bamboo pole painted red and white and a single guard was our gate that led to "no man's land" for about twenty feet then Vietnam. The Cambodian in the picture was our guide and a really nice guy, his Cambodian name was Rot but Emma kept calling him "that cool guy".

The Cambodians don't need a visa to go back and forth to Vietnam so the people were loaded down with items to sell.  We marveled over the fact that some of these vehicles could still run!

You have to look closely for the truck underneath all the stuff.

We also passed a rural gas station.  We learned that one of the drums had the better quality of gas.  We're not sure which one though!

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to which gas is better? Yellow or greenish? Now that we know these contain gasoline, we have seen about every color under the rainbow including green, red and brown. Our guide told us that the locals put some water in the gas to make a little extra money. He said its not a big deal as the engines just seem to miss/sputter a second or two and then get going again when some of the good stuff comes through the engine.














The next day we took out to Rabbit Island.  This place was full of islanders and foreigners and we had a wonderful time.  The girls did NOT like the boat ride out there and hung on to us for dear life.  It wasn't rough at all and they had on life jackets but they were concerned about sharks.  I don't really know why, but they were.  The beach was beautiful and the water clear and we had a wonderful day. The inner tubes were just like we were at Johnson's Creek.

The next day we went home.  It seems that no matter where we go or what we do we see neat stuff.  Here are a few things we saw on the drive back to Phnom Penh.

Not even sure what to say here but it looked like a converted tiller engine attached to a tractor of sorts. Whatever it takes, right? 

This was a dentist's office that we passed.  That was it.  Clearly no waiting room.  It was the best that they could do under the circumstances and we were amazed they managed to get the real chair and all!  I guess dentists the world over have a thing for blue chairs.


...Open....(I wondered about the swish/rinse/spit since no running water at this one).






So we made it back to PP without killing anyone and we had a wonderful time.  We're not sure where we'll head next, but we will write more soon.  We move into our house in a few weeks so I'm going to take pictures of it soon. We ventured back into the Russian Market which is really neat and you will want to see for yourselves when you all arrive. Thanks for reading and have a great day!