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Kep and Kampot – a gastronomic tour

A public holiday for the King’s birthday a couple of weeks ago was a great opportunity for a long weekend in Kampot province; with six French people on board it quickly turned into a gastronomic tour. Our first stop was the Vine Retreat, a guest house and organic farm, which employs local farmers to grow produce including Kampot pepper. This is regarded as some of the finest pepper in the world, and is the only Cambodian product to have a Protected Geographical Identification – like Champagne. The staff showed us around the pepper plantation and the farm – nirvana to an ex-allotmenteer like myself – then we sampled some of the produce during a 2 hour lunch. After a lazy afternoon and a swim in the pool we went to the nearby village of Kep for an evening meal in a restaurant built on wooden stilts over the sea, so we could hear the waves as we ate. We rounded off the night with digestifs in the Kep Rock Cafe (yes, really).

Kep was established as Cambodia’s premier seaside resort by the French, but is now just a small fishing village, though tourism is rebuilding. It is known for its seafood and crabs, so we visited the market in the morning to see the catch being unloaded and barter for our share. We made a quick photo stop at the Big Crab, then took the boat to Rabbit Island, a small laid back island off the coast with basic beach hut accommodation.

Here, we enjoyed a bacchanalian feast of fresh seafood – lunch of prawns, squid in pepper sauce, barbecued clams and grilled squid, a couple of hours on the beach and then evening meal featuring crabs both plain and cooked in pepper sauce. All this cost us about $10 each – about a quarter of the price of one chilli crab in Singapore. We spent the evening with games, guitar and drinks on the beach and retires to our beach huts in the early hours – to discover that the electricity gets turned off at eleven o’clock, so we stumbled to bed by the light of one torch and five phones.

The next day the wind had got up, so initially no boats were leaving and when we finally got away it was a lively trip, with waves regularly breaking over the boat – and us. After a quick change of clothes we headed to Kampot, a small town by the river where we had intended to spend the day – but due to the delay with the boats we barely had time for a meal (!) at a riverside restaurant and a photo stop at the Big Durian, before heading back to Phnom Penh.