South to Kampot

It still costs nearly the same to get a private taxi down South rather than pay for 4 bus tickets. Kids here pay half price only if they take half a seat, which doesn't quite work for our two, especially on a 3-hour journey. Also by taxi you shave an hour off the trip.

Kampot is a lazy riverside town very close to the coast. It's a good base to see the local area, visit salt flats, pepper plantations, durian plantations, visit different parts of the river. Kep, a coastal town famous for it's crab market, is also a stone's throw away.

Arrived earlier than expected, so has time to stroll around the town before dark. I get the impression that people here live quite better than at Phnom Penh. Everything just seems that bit less run down, and being a smaller town there are more tourists for each local. I haven't been out of the tourist area to see the real part of town, but nor did we leave the tourist areas of the capital. The only things that seem to be missing are the dozens of luxury 4x4s we've seen up to now, presumably belonging to the local millionaires. Also in the city where there was money there were high walls and barbed wire. Here there is less of that but I did notice two security guards who turned up at the hotel for the night shift. We saw nothing of the sort in Thailand (inequality must be much lower there) though here we have never felt unsafe.