Cambodia's up and coming seaside towns

As the sun sank over the tree-lined Kampong Bay River, Kampot, a town on Cambodia’s southern coast, stirred to life. The locals, who’d spent much of the day hiding from the heat in their homes and shaded alleys, emerged into the atmospheric streets, where sun-stained, mustard-colored French colonial shop houses provide the backdrop to the rhythms of daily life.

Old men with fedoras and graying sideburns gathered at a corner cafe to play chess, triumphantly thwacking hand-carved pieces against thick wooden boards. Small groups of boys fished on the banks of the river with homemade bamboo poles, while groups of teenagers with mussed and shaggy haircuts and wearing glittery T-shirts yelled “Hello!” and giggled at strolling tourists, who are a small but growing presence in this largely unexplored corner of Southeast Asia.

My wife and I had come here to escape the grit and bustle of Phnom Penh, where we live, and to show my visiting mother-in-law a slice of authentic provincial life. With crumbling historic architecture, largely unspoiled countryside and specialty regional cuisine, Kampot and Kep, seaside towns separated by a 30-minute car ride, are unlike anyplace else in Cambodia.

Although tourism has taken off in the past decade — for much of the 1980s and ’90s, the area was off limits due to the presence of the Khmer Rouge — the two towns have avoided the dizzying and sometimes tacky growth of places like Siem Reap, where busloads of visitors swarm the ancient Angkor temples, and Sihanoukville, which caters to backpackers looking for a cheap alternative to coastal Thailand.

Instead of mega resorts and budget dives, Kampot and Kep have attracted a smattering of boutique hotels, bars and restaurants that draw on the area’s history as a stylish retreat in the last century, when the French and Khmer elite spent weekends here soaking up the Riviera-like vibe.

Now, a new wave of expats and tourists is discovering the place. Ben O’Reilly, an Irishman who runs Mea Culpa, a guesthouse and wood-fired pizza restaurant set in a shady garden in Kampot, arrived as a tourist in 2004 and never left. “It stole my heart,” he said. “The stunning beauty of the people and the area makes it stand out unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been.”

A large part of the area’s appeal is its time-capsule quality: While much of Southeast Asia has been eager to demolish remnants of the past and modernize, Kampot and Kep have preserved a century of Cambodian history in their streets and surrounding hills. As we rode into Kampot with our taxi driver, a 56-year-old local named Eav, we watched the past flash by through the windows of his Toyota Camry.

There, on the left side of the road just outside town, Eav pointed out a salt plant built by the Khmer Rouge. “They exported salt to the Chinese in exchange for arms,” Eav said. Farther in was the columned and pleasingly dilapidated governor’s mansion, a symbol of colonial power, and its necessary counterpart, the French-built prison, which is still in use. Next came the Chinese school with its elegantly curved roof, a reminder of the sizable influence of the entrenched Chinese-Cambodian community here.

Source = washingtonpost