Anja, Dan and I left Phnom Penh in the morning for Kampot and arrived in the early afternoon. Kapmot is a small townt that serves most tourists as a jumping off spot for visiting the Bokor national park in the mountains above.

We picked a guesthouse (Mealy Chenda) and moved into a $5 room before walking to town to check out the local market. It was full of unfamiliar and unrecognizable sights and smells - we bought a large durian and cracked it open. Durian is nasty. Inside its hard spiky skin are two sections of gooey, soft, rotten-fish-smelling flesh which taste sort of OK if you can get past the smell. I would have tried to eat enough to get used to the flavor but I had a minor allergic reaction to it. Too bad. After scouring the market for more goodies we headed home with a case of warm crown beer and bellies full of mystery noodles.

Later on for dinner we found a small restaurant and enjoyed a great meal of fried fish and tom yum soup with the help of a Cambodian translator from Tracy, CA.

The main reason for our visit to Kampot was a day-trip into the park to trek around Bokor so we woke early to join a tour run by our guesthouse. It takes about an hour and a half to drive fully into the park, much of it on a one-lane road through dense jungle; I was with most of the group bouncing around in the bed of a pickup truck for the ride. The first few hours of the trip included visits to the black palace (a former vacation-home of the king) and an old abandoned catholic church (which served as a strategic hideout for the Khmer Rouge while fighting the invading Vietnamese).

We stopped for a simple lunch of vegetable curry near the derelict Bokor Palace building. What used to be a busy, luxurious hotel and casino before the war is now riddled with bullet holes, slowly being reclaimed by the jungle. The paint has rotted away and the bare concrete structure is covered in a bright orange moss; through the fog it looks like some sort of ancient ghost-palace…

We waited out a short downpour before moving onto the cathedral and then to the starting point of the hike through the jungle. The three-hour walk took us by a waterfall and along narrow overgrown trails. The people at the front were constantly removing leeches but I was lucky enough to avoid them. No one spotted any “real” wildlife except for some monstrous spiders and a dog carcass, but the park is still home to wild elephants, leopards and tigers (which are now finally protected from poachers by the government). After losing the trail for about 30 minutes, we emerged from the jungle, found the truck and headed back towards Kampot. 15 minutes into the ride, the truck’s brakes failed so we rolled all to town in low gear. Very slowly.

On the way I talked with our guide (who spoke english with an australian accent - not because he was taught that way but because he “wanted to be australian”) about Cambodian food. He told me about a few dishes I need to try, including some cooked with dog meat. I got excited and kept asking about it, so he said he could take me to a restaurant outside of town that serves a good dog curry. When we finally got back to the guesthouse I found Anja and Dan and we all took a taxi to the place.

The restaurant serves only dog meat. Fried, curried, boiled - however you want it, but thats all they’ve got. And they only have it when theres a dead street dog to cook up - they don’t do the expensive farm-raised stuff. We ordered two bowls of dog curry and some beers and dug in. The meat was really good: tender, not too fatty and with a texture close to beef. It was served on the bone and with some skin intact so eating it took some work but it was well worth it. I was a little weirded-out by the pet dogs they had running around, especially when they started begging for our food. No, I didn’t feed them any you sicko. I did pet them while stirring my curry, though.

Then we headed back to town. Our guide friend took us to a good Khmer desert stall, then we watched the kids from the local arts school perform some traditional Khmer music and dance. After a while we wandered the streets looking for a place to buy Anja a farewell drink (she had to leave in the morning) when we were pulled into a raging Cambodian birthday party and danced to loud horrible music while dozens of people smeared cake all over us. They wouldn’t let us stop drinking or dancing - eventually we had to say we were feeling sick in order to exit gracefully. Even then they insisted we take some food and beer… What a day!

After only a couple hours of sleep we all woke early to see Anja off with a sad farewell. With any luck, the three of us will meet up again in either London or Germany this summer.

Dan and I went back to Phnom Penh (got a room at the same guesthouse as before - Narin) to pick up our Vietnamese visas the next morning. When we signed up for them, we were told that we had to specify a border crossing and entry date which was not flexible. Upon picking them up, though, we learned that none of that mattered at all. Our visas are good at any Cambodia/Vietnam border for any time within 30 days. So we changed plans and decided to leave for Kratie the next morning. After that, it was dinner by the riverfront and an early bedtime.

In the morning Dan and I found a minibus - a nice crowded one - to Kratie. The ordeal took most of the day, so we found a guesthouse (Star II) and enjoyed a dinner of noodle soup and puon tia con (more duck fetus!) by the riverfront before going to sleep.

Kratie (pronounced “crotch-eh“) is a nice little town, but so far the most unexpectedly touristy place outside of Siam Reap. The main attraction is the rare Irawaddy river dolphins that live on a stretch of the Mekong river just outside of Kratie, which is the reason we came. We shopped around and got two moto drivers to take us around to several spots for part of the day for 9500 riel each.

We went to get on a boat and see the dolphins first. Being river dolphins, they aren’t as active and exciting as their ocean-dwelling counterparts, but we did see at least a dozen of them on our hour-long ride. With my camera they were near impossible to photograph as they usually only surface for a second to breathe and then disappear into the murky mekong. From there we rode the motos up to the top of hill near town to see the sunset and some nice views of the Cambodian countryside.

That evening we started investigating the possibility of traveling back to Phnom Penh (and then into Vietnam) by boat on the Mekong. Everyone so far had been telling us that it’s impossible but we weren’t ready to give up so easily. We asked a ton of people about it and got some interesting but not too helpful answers. Our options included building our own simple boat and drifting down the river for about a month to reach Phnom Penh (we actually considered this one for a while), paying someone about $100 to take us on a longtail (it would cost nearly that much in gas alone to do it on one of those things), or buying a small boat for $1000+ and selling it in Phnom Penh. We had to give in to the less exciting reality of another minibus trip for the next day, but agreed to seek out the cheapest route possible for the sake of adventure.

Defeated in our plan to get back to the captial on the Mekong, Dan and I went looking for the cheapest way to get back by road. We hit the taxi stand / bus station area of town, launched into some serious negotiations with the touts and ended up in a taxi to Kampong Cham for next to nothing (usually a costly ride, I don’t know how that worked out). From there we haggled our way onto the roof of a packed minibus to Phnom Penh. We clung to the roof-rack like monkeys the whole way, which was actually far more comfortable than riding inside with the 30 other passengers. We went straight back to Narin Guesthouse and planned to search out a boat ride to Chau Doc for the next day.

In the morning we went out to the docks to see about getting on a boat to Vietnam via Chau Doc, but failed yet again. If we had been up earlier we could have caught the $15 tourist boat to Ho Chi Minh City, but that was more than we wanted to pay anyway. We wasted the next few hours looking for any other cheap way to get into Vietnam on the river - we pressed hard - but turned up nothing. Instead, we crammed ourselves into another minibus and hopped off at the Moc Bai border crossing. From there we took another bus into Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon) and arrived around 8pm. The bootleg photocopied Vietnam Lonely Planet we picked up in Phnom Penh suggested Miss Loi’s guesthouse in Co Giang so we got a nice room there then went out to find a bowl of pho bo and a bia hoi joint.

Pho bo is my new food obsession. It is by far the most popular dish in Vietnam, usually eaten for breakfast but you can get some at any hour without looking very hard. At first glance its just a simple beef noodle soup, but somehow makes for an incredibly filling and delicious meal. Dan and I had a big bowl and then walked on to find bia hoi.

Bia hoi = “fresh beer”. The concept was brought to Vietnam by the Czechs a long time ago and since then the Vietnamese have put their own touches on it. Bia hoi is a very cheap, weak locally brewed pilsner that has no preservatives and is only meant to stay fresh for a short time. You can find bia hoi shops all over the country - they’re basically just a bunch of tables and chairs in front of a big steel beer vat. A liter of beer generally costs 3000-4000 dong (25 cents or less) and the Vietnamese treat drinking bia hoi as a very social affair so there is constant toasting and drinks being passed around. We found a suitable place and sat down with an interesting bunch: a rapper from Ghana, his pro soccer-player cousin, a creepy one-armed Canadian expat and a loud Australian. The bia hoi tank ran out at around 1am so we turned in with plans to finally get on a boat headed for Ben Tre the next day.