Today we had our own taxi hired to take us to see the Bokor. He came to pick us up at ten. It was about an hours' drive from Kampot to Bokor as now the good, new road is ready. All the places to see are in different locations, so the driver took us from one place to another. An unfortunate thing is the new megacasino, which opened coupla months ago, built by the chinese, who bought very much land from the middle of a narional park! The casino looked sooo awful! Everything's for sale, if you just have the money. :( AND other thing which was a disappointment; the old casino, the famous old Bokor Palace, wasn't the old ruins anymore!! Damnit, we were about a year late. Now it had already had a new cement layer on top of it, and you cannot wander around it, in it stories because it was full of construction workers! :( The same chinese are gonna restore it to the sane shaoe as it was on the 1920's. I would've had wanted to see it, like it was in its reddish ruined walls, and like it was f.ex. in the movie "The Ghost City". But I couldn't. Well, then, no. You could still see the old, big fireplace etc., and the steep hill, from which gamblers used to throw themselves down, after losing a fortune. It was so steep, that it was a certain death.
The church was still the same, very nice looking ruins (it's in the cover picture).
We also visited a little buddhist monastery on one hill, left some money and an old man gave us inscent sticks and told us to pray. :o) So we did ask for a good fortune fir the rest of the trip, and left the inscents burning outside the temple. The water fall and a lot of other sites we did see on the four hour tour that the taxi driver took us. Gotta say, that it sure was eorth the money spent (30$), for the sheer convenieness to have exactly your own pace everywhere. I recommend. I also tvink that these were the last times to see the Bokor before it'll be totally ruined by the chinese plan to make it a small "resort town"(!). They had alteady started to build new things everywhere, so if you wanna avoid that, go NOW! And, like I told you, the old Bokor Palace, was ruined already.
We came back at about two o'clock and half past our tuktuk-guy, Vannak, came to pick us up, to take us to Kep.
It took about 45min to drive to Kep, and to our next place to stay, the Nibbana resort. The last 800m of the riad there was very bad condition, but he drove us all the way to the front door.
-- From the Nibbana resort in Kep I cannot say more, than it was the wirst where we've been to so far(!), and did not match what it looked like in pics in booking.com. Smelly sheets, very smelly room, bugs on the floors (dead & alive)!! You can read out full review from TripAdvisor, our nickname is "Badideapolarbears".
We just left our luggage to the cottage and took a tuktuk to centre. Ut was a good 3 km away, so had to took a tuktuk, not so a walking ditance anymore, in slight rain. Hmm..I have to say, that Kep left me totally cold and unimpressed. A little city with no real "centre", things too much apart, and there wasn't really an atmosphere. There was the sea, ok, and a row of little resraurants at the beach, famous from their crabs and seafood. But that's all. Niina had a vert good crab in one of them, they go and pick it up from the sea as you order it. Can't be more fresh than that, can it?!
But me, for I don't care for seafood, I ordered grilled chicken with pepper sauce. The good part was the Kampot pepper sauce, and that was all. The chicken wasn't dry, ok. But what can you expect from a town that it famous for its seafood?! To have decent other food than seafood?! Nooooo! We tried also another restaurant, where we ordered chicken amok, but got fish amok. Which was s***, basically. And more expensive than in Rikitikitavi! Can you imagine?! So a conclusion, overpticed compared to its "standards", do NOT stay in Kep, not much anything to see or do. Stay in Kampot and come to ser Kep on a day tour from Kampot, to eat the crab, if you want. And see a bit of the sea. That's plenty enough time for Kep. On the way, at least if you take a tuktuk to go there, you'll also see some of the ruins of the French villas, which gloried before the Khmer Rouge and which were destroyed by them. (Meanwhile they captured and killed the people who lived there 'cause they were intellectual.)
So for me, after an "about eadible" meal, we just went to bed, 'cause tomorrow it'll be a long way to travel to Battambang. G'night, you all.