Close to the Thai-Border is a mountaines area, the Cardamom-mountains.
What a relief to get there after all the beach-life :) Green and fresh and cooler.
In the Town of Koh Kong Camilla and I seperated ways after a last lunch together. She headed home, I stayed in town for a couple of days.
After Camilla was taken to the border I spent the rest of the day wandering around, checking about tours to the mountains.
I was walking along the river and finally came to a village, a muslim village as I figured pretty soon (a hughe mosque in the middle). What a dity place! Pretty much asian, but a real shock after all the touristy beach-places.
The kids in the village hadn't seen a white person for a while, so after a couple of minutes I was sorrounded by kids shouting "hellohellohello" at me and running screaming off when I answered :)
On the way back everyone on a motorbike was offering me a ride (not that unusual here in Cambodia), even when the bike already was packed with 3 people. I wonder how I could fit as the 4th person there, but obviousely everything is possible..
Next day I rnted a motorbike and drove to the Ta-Tai-waterfall. It's the dry season right now, so there is not that much water, but for me that made the waterfall even nicer. I could walk through the river, bathe in the small pools and get a shoulder-massage from the falling water.
From there I drove to the mangroove-forrest. Very impressive with the low water. I could see all the roots and the swamp, which at other times is under the water. Lots of small crabs- purple and blue, making strange noises.
The Cardamom-mountains is still an area where there is very little tourism, no big roads and resorts. That makes it to a great place to explore> wide and green and unexplored.
Third day I went on a kayak-trekking-tour. The kayaking was fun (mostly because it's a thing I don't do that often), even though we had to drag the kayak behind us once in a while due to the low water.
The trecking through the jungle was mostly climbing up bog rocks and later on jumping down again. Great fun!
I think I could've easily stayed one or two more days, but I'm kind of running out of time here. So I took the bus back to Phnom Penh to continue to Kompong Thom the day after. Nothing special about the bus-ride, just that I woke up because of the noise from the TV in the bus. There was a car-chase going on, not an actual CAR-chase, but a TUC-TUC-chase- haaaaaaaaaha! Twice as loud as a car, I can tell you :)
Coming back to Phnom Penh was nice. Everything seemed so known, places, prices, everything. I got a massage by the blind to recover from my hurting shoulders (due to the kayaking, jaja), spent an hour on the market, strolled along the river, had some indian food..
The bus to Kompong Thom the next day was full of lady-boys, what a pleasure! Giggling, waving their hair, having a good time.
Kompong Thom is out of the touristic circle and you can tell already after a couple of minutes. Almost no guesthouses, street-stalls instead of restaurants and few speaking english.
I had a great day in Kompong Thom. Drove the moto to the temples, temples even older than Angkor Wat! Walked around, chit-chattedwith the kids.
I then drove to an active temple (close to Kompong Thom), which is settled on the top of a "mountain". 111 stairs lead up to the temple, quiet a challenge in the hot sun, but beautiful. Both sides of the stairways lined with figures holding the dragons tail- all the way up (and down). There were even some of these fellows scattered around at the temple-site.
Great views from the top.
Like in other non-touristic places before, in the evening I faced the problem of getting food. Not only that it's hard to find someone who's serving veg-food, but some of the places just don'tserve food all of the time. And some are so scared of talking english (or AT ALL talking to a foreigner), that they rather say "no" than to make buisness.
It's a sad story when I really get hungry and nobody will serve me, so I end up eating at a fancy restaurant or a western place (there is one in town- american..)
Anyway, not much to do in town, time to update the blogg :)
I putsome more pictures in the "Cambodia" folder.
