Kampot and Kep from Phnom Penh: Pepper, Crab and a Ruined Riviera

South of Phnom Penh the country changes completely. No temples, no Khmer Rouge sites - pepper, sea, and the wreckage of two French projects.

Kampot is a low river town of French shophouses under Bokor mountain. The pepper grown on smallholdings around it carries a protected geographical indication, the first Cambodia registered, and you have been eating it all trip without being told - it is what makes the lok lak dipping sauce work. The farms are visitable and the difference between green peppercorns picked that morning, still on the stem and cooked whole, and the grey dust in a shaker is not marketing.

Kep, half an hour on, is stranger. It was built as an elite seaside town, first under the French and then by the Cambodian upper class, and the modernist villas were gutted in the war years. They are still standing - roofless, trees through them, scattered through scrub nobody has decided what to do with. Its crab market sells blue swimmer crab taken from baskets sitting in the shallows and cooked with green Kampot pepper while you wait. It is the best meal in the country and it is not close.

Bokor Hill Station above Kampot is a French retreat abandoned in the 1940s, reoccupied, and abandoned again in the 1970s, with a casino shell that sits in cloud most mornings. The road up is good now and there is new development on the plateau, so temper the ruin-porn expectations.

Phnom Penh to Kampot is about 150 kilometres and three to four hours, most of it getting clear of the capital. Kep is another thirty minutes. Back is the same.

That is seven to eight hours in a vehicle for what will be four or five hours on the ground. A day trip leaves at six and gets back after dark.

Can it be done? Yes, and it is sold that way. What fits: a pepper farm, lunch at the Kep crab market, a walk among the villas, and back. What does not fit: Bokor, the Kampot river at sunset, the caves, or anything unhurried.

Is it worth it? If your dates are fixed and this is the only way to see the south, yes - the crab and the pepper farms are genuinely worth a long drive. If you can spare one night in Kampot, do that instead and the whole thing stops being an endurance event. People who book two nights in Kampot routinely stay four.

The train is the other option and an underrated one: Cambodia's rehabilitated railway runs Phnom Penh to Kampot and Sihanoukville a few days a week. It is slow, it is cheap, and it is a much more pleasant way to cover that ground than the road. Check current days before planning around it.

The pepper farms are the part most day trips rush and they are the most interesting stop.

Kampot pepper is a protected geographical indication - Cambodia's first, and it also carries EU protected status. That means a defined growing area, defined varieties and defined methods, and it is why the name is worth something.

The four colours are one plant at different stages. Green is the unripe berry, picked and used fresh - this is what goes in the Kep crab and it cannot be exported easily, so tasting it there is the point of going. Black is green, dried. Red is the ripened berry, sweeter and more aromatic, picked when it turns. White is the red berry soaked and the skin removed, leaving the pale core - sharper, cleaner.

Red and white cost more than black and are the two worth carrying home. Buy at the farm, not in a Phnom Penh market.

The plants climb poles to three or four metres and are shaded; the farms are quiet, green and completely unlike a field crop. Most welcome visitors and several have a tasting.

Salt fields line the road between Kampot and Kep - shallow evaporation pans worked by hand, best seen in the dry months.

One night turns this from a drive into a destination.

Kampot in the evening is the argument. The river runs wide and slow under Bokor, the sunsets over the water are the best in the country, and an hour in a small boat through the mangrove channels is the most restful thing in Cambodia.

Bokor needs a morning. The plateau is often in cloud before ten, which is exactly when the abandoned casino is worth seeing.

The caves - Phnom Chhnork and Phnom Sorsia, between Kampot and Kep - hold pre-Angkorian brick shrines inside limestone caves, seventh century, with a local child guiding you through by torchlight for a dollar. Completely off the standard circuit.

Rabbit Island (Koh Tonsay), a short boat from Kep, is a simple beach with basic bungalows. Not a luxury island; a quiet one.

Onward rather than back: Kampot and Kep sit on the way to Sihanoukville and the ferry to Koh Rong, which is 35 to 50 minutes by fast boat. That is the shape of our ten-day Cambodia itinerary, and it is a much better trip than driving back to Phnom Penh the same night.