 Kampot, one province to the east of Sihanoukville, is the black pepper capital of the culinary world, though they've also instituted a thriving seasalt operation near the coast. Get your famous salt AND your famous pepper! Total domination of tabletop spices. I was extorted by a thug of a taxi driver when I went, and was forced to stay at the guesthouse he took me to. Someday I will be strong enough to face confrontation, but that day has not yet come. I would rather lose a few dollars than argue with punk Khmer cabmen with huge arms and a glare in their eye.
 Feeling upset by a day of being hassled, I wandered the town of French colonial architecture left to ruin. A lovely man who teaches English at the local junior high approached me for a chat and then took me out to see some famous caves. Salaries are low, so he supplements his salary on vacations by being a tour guide on moto. At the mouth of the biggest cave, there is a small 6th-century Hindu temple. We crawled through the darkness on hands and knees and on slippery rocks for about 15 minutes, only to find a holy man who was living there for the entirety of the rainy season. He had a hammock set up near one of the altar-like places for Buddha, at a place where light streamed through from above.
 Other than caves and pepper, the only real attraction is the Bokor Hill station, inside a national park that is under threat of illegal logging. The ride up was 2 hours in the back of a pick-up truck on a crazy dirt road. We saw monkeys along the way, one of which broke off a chunk of a branch and waited until we passed underneath him to drop it. Angry monkey.
Bokor is a mini-town atop a hill where the French used to work and play before the war, and now it's crumbly and ghostlike. The church walls were covered in graffiti, and the hotel had chamber after chamber of broken-tiled rooms coated in dirty rainwater. It would be the place to set a horror book, atop a hill haunted by ghosts of colonists past.
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