I was away pretty early today, I guess the old adage, early to bed early to rise is correct 🙂 But fair enough, I had no idea how long anything would take due to the road conditions, so the earlier the better. It was a Sunday, so I expected it to be busy on the coast. So I headed off on the trusty scoot, past the Naga headed statue on the real crap road out of town, past an extremely noisy tent place that was already blaring out the sound, then down the real crap road to the south west. It was only 20 odd kilometres but it was dusty, I really need to get myself a dust mask as it gets stuffy with the visor down.

The next thing I saw was a Rhino statue ❓ Why would they have one of those at a road junction, they surely are not native to here, real strange?

Some more dusty road then I spotted an overloaded truck that had broken down, I saw them pulling the radiator out. I think most of the stuff behind the truck is plastic, meaning not much weight, but it sure does overhang. There are two big wooden poles supporting that extra baggage, you see that a lot over here, but in this case you can see the front is lifted noticeably up off the suspension, that is a lot of cantilever weight hanging back there 🙂

I arrive in Kep after turning right at the white stallion and if I turned right at the 10 armed statue(normally 8, I wonder if this is a mistake) I would arrive at the crab market, but my GPS was taking me straight ahead and around the headland where I stopped for a photo of a big bummed mermaid, weird they did not have the fish tail, but there you go 😉 After that there was a giant blue swimmer crab, the local delicacy, the actual ones I have seen are a bit smaller than this, about the size of a packet of fags 😉

I was having trouble trying to find the entrance to the NP where the cache was and the GPS was taking me to strange places. As usual I am in my own little world, and lucky for me I ride with headlights on as this minibus saw me while I was not paying attention and crossed in front of him, a gross error on my part, lucky ending though!! 😳
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I did find the right track to the correct entrance and enter the National Park(costs a dollar and totally against Geocaching rules) and find the cache location just 500m inside the park called funnily enough Squirrels in the Park. I signed the log and checked out the views, this one would be absolutely spiffing for a sunset 🙂

Where I am standing is a park bench so I stopped and sat there a while and was rewarded with seeing quite a few squirrels and heaps of different butterflies, but no pictures sorry, they are fast little buggers 🙂

I did not stay and play in the park as I wanted to do Bokor Mountain, so I headed back to Kampot, I was totally filthy by the time I got back and gave a quick courtesy call to Greg, the cache owner who had invited me around, to let him know I was on my way. As I crossed the old railway bridge I was following a bike with a few trussed up pigs and these were never going to escape, there was more rope than pig visible and he had his garden with him by the looks too!!!

So, the place I was headed to was the home of Greg and Judy, they had given me co-ords to their place and a description so it was easy to find and I was soon relaxing with some coconut milk drink 🙂 It turns out this couple have nearly been everywhere man, they have been working and living all over the world and have currently been here in Cambodia for 9 months in Kampot and they have ridden many types of bikes over the years, big and small. They have been doing Geocaching for a long time too and as we talked about that and bikes and other stuff, I mentioned I wanted to do the multi cache on Bokor Mountain, well it turns out it is his 🙂 I was intending to do it this afternoon, as soon as I left here in fact, but he soon changed my mind. It seems Sunday is just the wrong time to tackle the mountain, because there is a big Buddha up there as well as other Wats, the locals visit it and are crazy on the roads. I would be dodging cars and trucks and never be able to enjoy the road, so I canned the plan and decided on their recommendation to tackle it first thing in the morning.

After about an hour I decided to go and get some lunch and while taking a photo we herded the two geese into the photo, but they did not take kindly to that and started to have a go at me, it took a broom from Judy and some bluffing on my part with the bike to get away 😆 NB, if you see a goose with its head down, it is about to hunt you down!

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So, I escaped from there intact and headed back to town and a nice fried noodle lunch at the, you guessed it, Rusty Keyhole 🙂 I crossed that second old bridge and this time took a photo from the side of the railway one with battle damage, you can see clearly the old pilings it is resting on and some parts are very old, some are newish.

So after lunch I had an easy afternoon, in fact I started to catch up on the blog, I was seriously behind, by about 9 days and I needed to catch up again 😦 I was planning on leaving tomorrow morning to head to Snook, or Sihnoukville down the coast a ways. Due to the fact I was now going to do the mountain and the cache, that meant I would be here until Tuesday now. I met up with Christine and Clive for the last time at dinner, they were heading to Phnom Penh tomorrow to pick up a SPOT device they had left in Malaysia which had been sent forward. I had the ribs again tonight, but this time I added the chips as I did not need to leave space for my special desert, I wanted to be up around 5am or so 🙂

So, farewell C&C, safe travels, see you on your return to Oz in a year or so at a Horizons Unlimited meeting 🙂

Cheers from Krabpot Kampot
TravellingStrom