APAD 083: When getting lost is half the fun…

Four years ago, I was assigned in Kep for a big rural ICT project. Kep was a sleepy coastal town in the southernmost part of Cambodia. I lived there for 6months and during weekdays, I was busy with work, traveling from village to village spread across three communes in the district of Damnak Chang’eur. Weekends, however, was a different story. With no other means of entertainment, my husband and I took this opportunity to visit nearby communes and explore places that were rarely visited and were off-the-beaten track.

We found the sign (above) on the main road. On the right is a logo of UNDP Seila Project and, on the left, the Ministry of Tourism’s. We were convinced when we saw the logos and followed the trail. Some 45 minutes later, we were still nowhere near Phnom Chhngok cave. It was nearing noon, and hot and humid, and my butt was getting sore from the bumpy motorcycle ride. But we were glad we persisted in going. We stopped by to ask for directions with my sparse spoken-Khmer skills, had a chitchat for a bit, and enjoyed fresh coconut juice bought from a local roadside stall. The sight was a marvelous yellow and verdant green carpet of rice-field as far as our eyes could see. The coconut and palm trees, on the other hand, jutted out into the sky like skyscrapers.  When we finally arrived at the place…  we saw a limestone cave; small, but a beautiful one nonetheless. Inside it was chilly and there were stalactites and stalagmites here and there. But the main attraction there was the shrine (or remnants of what was once a shrine) inside the cave believed to be pre-Angkorian, around 1,500 years old. Some pictures on the way there can be found here at CambodiaMaps.

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