10. Kampot - This and That
16.09.2023
Day 4 in Kampot. I haven't undertaken a day trip so far as it was raining a lot. I have been working on my website andI got a feel for the town where to buy what. I am thrilled, though, for tomorrow when I will go kayaking – one of my favourite activities since I bought a cheap, inflatable kayak last year and subsequently explored several creeks, rivers and lakes in Brisbane. To get to the boat ramp I will need to hire a mountain bike that will cost me USD $3.00-5.00/day, depending on its condition and if it is from a well known brand such as Giant or not.
What are my impressions of Kampot? - It is definitely a town catering for foreigners from Western countries. There are a lot of places offering burgers, pizza and other typical Westerner food. At lunch time more than half of the people in the cafes and restaurants around the city centre aren't locals. Prices are still affordable but multiple times higher than what you’d pay for traditional Cambodian dishes in simple restaurant not tailored for tourists. The median range for a meal is USD $4.00-7.00 unless you are going for things like seafood or steak. I haven't eaten any local dish since I arrived which is a bit sad, but on the other hand I was stoked to see that many businesses advertise vegetarian/vegan options and then I didn’t care what nationality-relations the dishes had.
Kampot seems to be popular among younger alternative folks being into yoga, tattoos and eco-style clothing. There are also a lot of older expats around.
I have to retract my initial view on Cambodian architecture – I have found plenty of buildings in colonial style or with colonial style inspired decorative elements - and they are as beautiful as the ones found in Vietnam. Below are some random, not entirely representative street impressions from the inner city of Kampot.
A women running a Portugese restaurant in the city centre told me that road traffic is relatively quiet right now only because it is rain season attracting less tourists and that the capital Phnom Penh is more comparable to what I am used to from Vietnam. I'll take her word for it and find out for myself in a few days.
At night time Kampot is almost a ghost town apart from a few spots where live music is played. I am shocked and mesmerised at the same time by the tolerance of Vietnamese and Cambodian people when it comes to enduring abysmal karaoke performances at full blast late at night. I am no expert regarding the tone scales of traditional Khmer music but I can surely identify if someone is off-key. Those karaoke enthusiasts have no shame in terrorising the entire neighbourhood with their absence of musicality.
There are a lot of dogs on the streets of Kampot and at night time – just when you thought you had survived the acoustic massacres committed by the above mentioned karaoke villains – those dogs howl and bark for minutes without interruption.
My hotel is mainly supervised by a teenager spending 90% of his day in a hammock playing online video games on his phone. Even when I am showing him what I want or need via google translate I can be sure his answer is : Okay! - followed by no reaction or gesturing that he has no clue what I mean and how to deal with my requests appropriately. Example: Me:“I have ordered something online. The delivery is supposed to be today. Has the parcel already been delivered?” Him: “Ok!” - It’s like pulling teeth. Argh!
I needed new towels and toilet paper and wanted to book the kayak trip that was advertised at their reception, I hoped to get the wifi password (Him: “No wifi!” ...although I clearly see a router installed on my floor that also is showing up with good signal strength in the available network list on my phone) – everything becomes a struggle with that boy who continues to casually play his games while I am trying to formulate my questions in the simplest way possible on my tiny phone.
Summed up, let's just say: the hotel is lacking considerably in the service department – his mum or older sister (I can never reliably tell the age of Asians), is very friendly and helpful, though, WHEN she is around, which lamentably isn’t often.
Change of topic: Yesterday I had one of those “It's-a-small-world” moments. Last time I had such an experience was in Australia in 2001 when I booked a three day sailing trip around the Whitsunday Isles. After a few minutes of chatting I found out that the guy serving me at the travel agency had lived in the same suburb as me for 20 years just a few streets away from my home. He deescribed places in detail that had become faded childhood memories for me until that conversation resurfaced them as flashbacks.
Here’s yesterday's story: I navigated to a cafe a bit outside of the town centre.
I was the only customer apart from an older guy sitting in yogi position on his chair. I chatted with the manager who owns the place together with her sister who’s in charge of the kitchen. When I mentioned that I am originally from Germany she pointed out that the other guest across my table was from Germany, too. I started a conversation with him and he turned out to be in his early 60s, living in Cambodia for 20 years, now running a farm. Before that he was an English teacher in Japan. Mark’s story was quite intriguing and his views on life aligned with mine in many ways. We steered our chat towards how Germany was back in the days. I mentioned that I was born in West-Berlin. He said: “Me, too.” “In which suburb, I asked?” “Zehlendorf”, he replied. Me“That's the suburb I went to school.” Well, you see where I am going with it: of course we went to the same school and despite him being 17 years older than me, we had the same sports teacher and director. He told me about the history of the school and how certain things I had experienced during my 7 highschool years had come to pass.
How strange to learn things about an institution and people working there you had nothing to do with anymore for almost 25 years. I felt a wave of nostalgia flooding my brain and for him it seemed to be the same. What are the statistical chances to bump into someone in a cafe in a small Cambodian town who had the same teacher decades ago in a location over 9,000km away? If the cafe owner hadn't pointed out that Mark and I had the same nationality, he would have remained a total stranger to me. It makes me wonder how often it happens that we have something rather unique or specific in common with the person sitting or standing right next to us - food for thought.
I sincerely regret that I forgot to take a photo together with Mark but sometimes I am enjoying the moment without thinking: I should get a selfie with that guy because readers of my blog might be interested in that. :-D
The stairs of my hotel in Kampot deserve a shout-out: As an architect/engineer that staircase is a big slap in my face. It goes against any imaginable regulations/building codes – even in Cambodia I believe. Each flight of stairs has a different amount of treads which isn't illegal or too odd, but what makes the use of the stairs dangerous, especially at night time when the lights aren't on apart from those green emergency exit ones, is that every tread has a different height....AND depth. It seems like they guestimated a tread height and then built it with rule of thumb tolerances. And when the flight of stairs reached the next floor level they simply added whatever tread height was needed. There is zero consistency and no system to it.
I am ill-at-ease walking down those stairs blindly (or carrying something that blocks my view) because my brain is accustomed to precalculate how far I need to move my feet to reach the next tread and how far my knees have to bend, etc., etc. . On my “evil” hotel staircase I stepped on thin air already several times when I was expecting the next tread to be there. I fell almost over when the tread was shorter than I thought and my instinctive reaction to step even further forward and down to land on the following tread proved to be a fail, too. The height of the treads varies by up to 10cm and the depth of the treads by up to 5cm which doesn't sound much but it makes a potentially ankle breaking difference. I learned all of the legal requirements of staircases in university and then revisited them by studying the building code of Australia in 2015 but it is a totally different story to experience in person what it is like to walk on stairs that deviate so much from the standards. I hate to acknowledging that all those pesky regulations somehow make sense. Change one parameter and people will adjust, change two parameters: height and depth at almost every step and things become unsafe very quickly.
