In Kampot we stayed on the best hostel 'mad monkey' must opened, pool,air conditioned rooms, hot showers, balcony's, roof top bar, was like a hotel after 'roughing' it on the island!! Enjoyed a delicious dinner of chicken with mushroom & kampot pepper sauce, mash potato and salad @Rustys!! Stayed here 4 days, our longest stop to date!! :) unfortunately Edda was pretty sick which gave me the excuse to have one very lazy day, chilling by the pool and one day on the bike, visited Kep with Andrea from Switzerland and some new Yorker dude,

!! Kep is one quiet and slightly strange place,.. It's so spread out, we saw a sign welcome to Kep only to drive another 6km before seeing anything! Kep is famous for crab, and there is no shortage it, we watched the fishing women haul in stuffed baskets from the sea!! We drove further on to the beach, where had my first experience of some old lady stand next to me and stare, yes I know I'm white!!!! We decided against changing into bikinis and taking a dip when we saw the huge group of monks on the beach in addition to being the only westerners on the beach!! So we returned to the market and feasted on fried crab with black pepper and some squid, I really thought I wasn't a fan of crab but this was amazing, not elegant to eat so was a lot of animal eating sounds from our table ;)

The next day we set out on our mission to find pepper fields (Edda works with spices so this was an important mission as she on the lookout for a new supplier) we visited farmlink which is ex pat ruin business, purchasing pepper from the local farmers, drying, sorting, packaging it and exporting it to 10 different countries!! On meeting the owner he put us in touch with a travel agency that organised for us to do a tour the following day!! We were brought to a pepper farm about 40 mins outside Kampot! Although the farmer spoke no English, the guide had great English and was very knowledgeable! The farm we visited supplies farmlink with their produce! They produce green, white, black and red pepper! Green is the youngest and has to be eaten in a few days of picking so not to be found in Ireland unless you find a pickled version! Black is more mature and and the most popular!! It is harvested when the pepper berry starts to mature and turns yellow, it turns black during the drying process! Red is the fully mature berry, spicy in taste and white is when the red berry is put into hot water taking off the outside layer!! The inside white core is dried!! This is different to the white pepper that processed from black pepper! Pepper growing started in the 18th century! It turns out the pepper field area was once a huge battlefield so pepper growing was almost abandoned until the mid 1990s! While Khmer rouge people still living the area peace has been restored and tension no longer exists!! Always amazing to how fast the people forgive and move on!! The government supports local farmers especially those setting up and encourages people to move back to the area!! There were also mango plantations.. Yum :) so it was an informative morning out!!! There are salt fields also nearby but unfortunately all salt has been harvested so not much to see there!!

After the tour it was lunch of dumplings... Again... Before catching the bus to Phnom Penh, our final stop in Cambodia!!!