Kampot and Kep: Pepper, River and the Quiet Coast

Kampot's old quarter mixes French colonial shopfronts with a genuinely slow riverside pace — sunset boat cruises along the Praek Tuek Chhu are the town's signature evening activity, drifting past fishing boats and riverside restaurants as the light fades over Bokor Mountain in the distance. The town has become a favourite base for visitors after several faster-paced days elsewhere in the country, with a small but genuine café and restaurant scene that has grown around its relaxed reputation rather than around any single headline sight.

Kampot pepper carries genuine international standing: it earned European Protected Geographical Indication status in 2010, a formal recognition tying the name to this specific growing region, and chefs and pepper connoisseurs internationally regularly rate it among the finest in the world. Plantations around Kampot town welcome visitors to walk through the vines and see the drying and sorting process directly, giving a firsthand look at why the terroir here — and the traditional growing methods still used — produces peppercorns considered genuinely distinct from mass-market pepper.

Bokor Mountain, rising above Kampot town inside Bokor National Park, holds one of Cambodia's most atmospheric abandoned sites: a French colonial hill station built in the 1920s as a cool-climate retreat, complete with a casino, a Catholic church and a grand hotel, all left to decay for decades and now sitting genuinely eerie in the mountain's frequent, thick mist. The drive up climbs through national park forest, and the ruins themselves — walls stripped bare, the old casino's shell still standing — make for a considerably different kind of sightseeing than Cambodia's restored temples, closer to an abandoned-place exploration than a heritage visit.

Kep, a short drive from Kampot along the coast, is a smaller, quieter seaside town built around one genuine specialty: its crab market, where fresh crab is sold straight off the boats and served nearby stir-fried with Kampot pepper, a pairing considered one of Cambodia's essential dishes. Kep was a favoured coastal retreat for Cambodia's elite before the 1970s, and the ruined shells of that era's villas still stand scattered through town, slowly being redeveloped rather than restored. A short boat ride offshore, Rabbit Island (Koh Tonsay) offers simple, largely undeveloped beaches for visitors wanting a quieter alternative to the Sihanoukville island group further along the coast.