And there she was, my lady guide, playing games at the machine of the reception, ready for the trip!
This is either a very good or very bad sign, I thought…

The road to Kampot was long and uninteresting and I kept trying to understand her custom French until I felt asleep…
Kampot was an important city near the Vietnamese frontier that used to have a very colonial French, Indochinese charm. Unfortunately not much remains to be seen today. A handful of good hotels (Rikitikitavi by far the best) and some restaurants for thick stomachs and iron livers, plus the ubiquitous hell-forgotten Westerners that would be long dead had they stayed home, frozen under a bridge. Not my kind of place to say the truth, but still a pleasant river town if you spent your evening at the Rikitikitavi restaurant looking direction river, or the pretty waitresses at least… This was the only place during this trip that wine did not taste like cheap vinegar and espresso tasted like home.
I spent the night excited, hearing the sound of a couple trying to have fun, thinking how I would like to be in his place, until next morning I saw what that would mean and felt relieved…
Soon my guide with her incomprehensible, self-taught French was there, and she brought me to a fish sauce (!) factory, winning the medal for the silliest visit of the trip (she needed to buy like a ton of the stinking stuff for herself…).
I was more or less relieved to see her go in the end. I felt uncomfortable. Either that, or I am getting real difficult…
Nest morning we set off for Kep, the last stop of my trip, presumably to relax and eat seafood.

Kep

Kep used to be a French summer resort for the rich. The pre-war villas still exist, only the Khmer Rouge bombarded them all without exception, and what remains of them has being squatted (it seems they are all sold and waiting to be revamped). The place is sleepy, mildly put, and apart from one or two acceptable restaurants and a French bakery, the rest is insignificant. Famous for its sunsets, Kep gets prettier at the end of the day where all you can do is have another glass of wine, while the usual foreign alcoholic and local resident keeps repeating the same nonsense over and over again, at the limit of becoming a real nuisance: this is as far as night life gets in Kep…

Some say the beach is beautiful in Kep. Well, those who say this have never been very far, have they? But not far from the city lies the Rabbit Island, where the scenery is really idyllic and exotic. This is where I passed my second day, trying to understand if this trip had created in me some sense of nostalgia; some Heimweh, Saudade, longing for home. As usual the answer was not clear.
But I wanted to stay more…
My hotel was Kep Lodge, Swiss-owned and Swiss-mounted, nice view and actually the Ur-hotel for this kind of place. Helpful personnel, nice coffee and pizzas, nice swimming pool, it made it hard to leave the place and seek better. The only handicap were the free bicycles, with barely any brakes…

I spent the last morning venturing around the mounting surrounding the village at what is called the Kep trek.  It was a risky business, alone and all and with insufficient water but I just could not keep going. This is the closest to dehydration that I got, but thankfully after 2 hours of walk I found water and a lift to my hotel by a young guy that kept telling me he had no job…

The road to Phnom Penh was long, and the flights even longer. But I made it through and landed in the frozen déjà vu of Brussels like a zombie, took my suitcase from the belt and headed to my office, where I hibernated for the first working hours before starting the count-down to getting used to our kind of life that for weeks seemed so alien…

The pictures

The postcards

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