Kep

As we step off the bus two things happen: we are swarmed by local “tour guides” hopeful of being selected to show us the wonders of Kep City, and it begins to rain. Our instructions are get off the bus and walk up the hill. With the Gulf of Thailand behind us every other direction is uphill. By road, we have three choices. Trying to step away from the guides, I decide to head back the way the bus came into town, to the Beachhouse Resort we passed moments before.

Arriving at the hotel it begins to rain hard. The concierge invites us into the shelter of his cabana, a combination security post and guest registration office. From here we look out at a group of boys, already wet, who frolic in the waters of the Gulf of Thailand and then peel away layers of soaked clothes that they drop in the mud (er, sand) before returning to the waves. 

As the rain eases, the concierge happily abandons his post to overcharge us for a ride up to the Veranda, a competitor.  The Veranda comes recommended by Kate, another yoga teacher, and our guidebook. It is quite spectacular, though a mix of pleasures and dissatisfactions. Kep is a small fishing village between the sea and a national park of low mountains rising directly up from the water. The Veranda is suspended on the side of a steep hill, backing onto the national park, and overlooking the sea and a string of islands. The open-air restaurant affords views of sunrise and sunset. The view is made more stunning by locating the restaurant (and the whole resort) in the treetops. Mounted on poles, the individual bungalows, bar, restaurant, and walkways provide a multi-leveled maze, weaving among the various trees, rising here to be eye level with coconuts, dipping down to a short stone walk on the ground, before rising again to a small terrace outside our bungalow.

The huts have dark ebony wood floors (boards spaced so you may look down to the ground below), walls of bamboo poles (with spaces), and a thick thatch for a roof (which, during the rain in the night, keeps us dry). The bathroom is made of beach stones embedded in cement and has an open-ceiling shower. The bed is draped with mosquito netting, but has a futon mattress that is at least as hard as cement. In the morning we check out the bungalows of Le Bout de Monde, behind and just slightly higher up the mountain. It is also charming; though not perched in the trees has foam mattresses and the bungalows are more spacious. Its cheaper per night, and the bungalows are further apart from each other and, thus, there’s more privacy. Notes are made.

We are here for only one night. Anna-Marie’s weekend is Thursday and Friday (though in two weeks she starts her volunteer work on Thursdays with the Cambodian Acid Burn Survivors, training staff, physiotherapists, and burn victims about yoga and the benefits it may provide in relieving symptoms of burning and scarring to body, mind, and spirit). 

While it doesn’t rain the whole 24 hours we spend in Kep it threatens, keeping us home bound for most of our stay. We’re tired, Anna-Marie especially, and this break is a needed one from the perpetual demands of being a substitute director at the yoga studio in Phnom Penh. Drinks from the bar are transported back to our room and books are read. 

The culinary specialty of the area is crab, and the coast is lined with crab shacks simmering pots full of the catch of the day. Avoiding rain, we don’t make it to the shacks, though as vegetarians we didn’t expect to do much other than soak-up crab-shack aesthetics. Instead, we set out in light drizzle of early afternoon to climb the mountain. A long hike takes us to what is called the Broken Stairs to the Nuns. There is a local bar called the Kep Led Zep that has posted its own sign at the foot of the stairs - in case y’all have been wondering since the days of your ill-spent youths just where the Stairway to Heaven is, its perched aside a mountain in southern Cambodia. The stairs are a little worn and stop long before you arrive in heaven. In fact, they stop altogether and abruptly, and you find yourself on a worn mud path (don’t all spiritual treks involve a well-worn path?) through jungle that crisscrosses the mountain’s steep face. The path is rough and the cement benches at each switch back are a sweet surprise. Who hauled those up there? The reward is a humble temple atop the mountain, built early in the last century, and a nun with red-black teeth and a lined face who greets us surrounded by barking dogs. She lets us into the pagoda, which is modest, and we both immediately sit and begin to meditate. She meditates with us, at least for the first while, then stands behind us and uses her robes to fan us. Its humid in the pagoda and we’re dripping with sweat, but the fanning is also distracting and we wonder if she’d like us to leave. It is here that we realize that we are sadly ill-schooled in etiquette necessary for a relaxed visit to an isolated nunnery, even if it is in heaven. There may be more nuns, but while pointing and gesturing our single nun gently guides us through and then outside the pagoda, and persistently steers us away from the direction we think the nuns might live. We feel like welcome guests – there’s no pressure for us to leave – but also sense it is a welcome with precise limits.  

With the threat of more rain we descend the Stairway to Heaven and walk back to dinner on the terrace of the Verandah restaurant overlooking the sea, the boiling clouds, and the sunset. The wine and seafood-coconut soup are great, but I order crab in ginger. This turns out to be a whole crab, in shell, covered in extremely hot oil and mounds of diced ginger. It is impossible to hold the crab because of the hot oil, napkins consist of kleenex, and while I am given a cracker with which to break the hard shell my fork is useless at prying the meat out. Back to the vegetarian menu.

(Author’s note, in the interests of full disclosure: given the limited menu, Anna-Marie decided to break a vegan fast of 15 or so years and have seafood. It was interesting in terms of taste, texture and smell, and the meal was ingested and digested without significant physical, emotional or spiritual trauma – at least to her - you’ll have to ask the food how it felt - but she still feels that eating food that had a mum just isn’t her thing.) 

In the morning, killing time until the bus arrives, we walk out to the “mermaid”, which is an oversize cement sculpture sitting authoritatively on one of the piers. (That a mermaid could look authoritative had not occurred to us until the example in Kep, and someone should let Disney know they do more than frolic and giggle.) She has legs and, oddly, a bra made of yellow fabric. Standing in her considerable shadow, we meet a Cambodian English teacher who is on break from proctoring some exams. He taught himself English by listening to the radio and speaks with a delightful Australian accent. We sit for an hour, chatting about customs of polite society in Cambodia and Canada, and he helps us to create a modest Khmer vocabulary, including Tohm Sach, “I’m vegetarian”.