Scooters in Kampot Cham

We arrived in the afternoon at our next town along the Mekong river. Kampot Cham is the third largest city in Cambodia. However I wouldn't class this as a city. The area is off the tourist route and so has little to offer In terms of infrastructure. We loved this. It felt like a proper Cambodian town with cows roaming the streets and local markets and shops selling to the locals. It was definately cheaper here, as we found out when  buying fruit and petrol off the locals.

On our first day we arrived and we're starving. After checking into our hotel on the rivers edge, which has a huge balcony overlooking the river and sun set, we hit up one of the only restaurants open on the river front.

Here we met some of the nicest Cambodian people on our trip so far. They told us all the local places to go and how to get around including a hand written map. They even offered to rent us a scooter at a discounted rate. We spent £3 renting the scooter for the day. The owner even showed me how to ride it. With map in hand a my scooter skills being better than expected, we headed out into the Cambodian countryside.

The road rules are a little different here than what I'm used to. For a start everything is on the opposite side of the road. Always need to remember to have the road on my right and side! However this isn't always the case as the locals will drive on the left if it is quicker for them to do so! The general rule is to give way to bigger vehicles.  With buses ruling the roads. There arn't many cars to worry about and the scooters allow for easy movement between other traffic. The saving grace here is that the speed limits are so slow that you struggle to get over 25kph. Traffic is fun as it comes to a standstill when multiple people are heading in different directions, so roundabouts and cross roads are done at a snails pace with no indicators! I go with the local
rule that I'm heading in this direction and others will move around me. Suprisingly this organised chaos works very well, and we have yet to see any road incidents in Asia.

Once out of the city we head out to the countryside to see some mountains, temples and killing fields. Our first stop is an old watch tower looking over the city. Situated on the rivers edge it looks across the city and stands tall over the hand built houses below. Inside the tower is a near vertical staircase that takes you to the top. With only one bannister I was starting to get a bit of vertigo having only gone up the first set of stairs. Safe to say we didn't make it to the top, especially when the see through gaps in the stairs got bigger!

After taking a few photos we hit up a few temples in between two mountains, locally named man and women hill. The temple hosted loads of monkeys that were scrapping over food and causing mischief.  We could see the mountains on either side which hosted the killing fields for the local area. Covered in deep forest and mines we decided not to treck through.

We still had the scooter for the rest of the afternoon so drove along the rivers edge and out into the countryside. The houses got smaller and looked more rustic in the way they were built with local materials. We passed a few local schools and temples. The locals were very friendly as we drove through their villages, they waved and smiled and asked where we were from.

As the afternoon came to an end the petrol tank drained empty and the rain came down. We decided to head back and hand the scooter into our restaurant where we grabbed some dinner. We are packing our bags tonight as we heading on to our final stretch and destinantion in Cambodia. We are getting a bus to Siam Reap tomorrow and will be spending two days in the famous Angkor Wat temples.