23. Kampot Scenes 

Sea salt, fishing boats and relaxed rural beauty

One evening I hired a boat for a sunset cruise up the river. One passes by the bamboo huts of the guesthouses, sometimes build into the river on stilts, and lots of untouched banana trees and coconut forest. These guesthouses along the river all advertise that they have a "pool", meaning people can swim in the river. Although the water looks OK on superficial inspection, and no industrial settlement upstream do exists, I am typically careful with things like that. I rather stay in the boat. Swimming in the river in town is not recommended because of underwater obstructions.

Guesthouses upstream from Kampot

Fishermen going towards the coast

 At around 5 p.m. many small fishing boats travel down south to the mouth of the Preaek Tuek Chhu river and the Gulf of Thailand to spend the night on sea. These small ones are typically manned with two people, one who takes care of the nets, the other the captain, machinist and navigator.

The railroad bridge

Sweet doggy at my guesthouse, one of five. They play all day in the sand of the little private beach. What a tough life.

In town one can also see some larger fishing vessels. They are manned with 5 to 8 people, and have a large engine. After the ice and the fuel is loaded they are heading out. They leave much earlier in the day than the smaller boats I saw on the river, meaning they must travel farther out to sea.

The little sleepy town has four bridges: The old iron bridge, the new concrete bridge, the railway bridge and this one below, which connects the mainland to Fish Island, the location of Kampot sea salt production.

Colorful Wat on Fish Island.

Sea salt drying pans. One can see the "Fleur de Sel" on the left edge of the photograph. The mountains in the back are already deep into Vietnam.

Fleur de Sel.

Salt pan and barn.

The sea salt here is coarse and wet. It is a straight forward process of hand-scarping and collecting the dried salt from the basin ("pan"). The salt is stored in long wooden barns. The entire southern half of Fish Island is covered with the salt farms.

Farmer in his lotus pond.

Sea salt from Kampot

The roads around here are unpaved.

Salt storage barns.

Images below: Water buffaloes cross the road often all across the country. They are gentle, big creatures with a nice face, the proud possession of the farmers. They move rather slow, but one cannot be completely sure. Sometimes they seem to be in a hurry and start running unexpectedly - towards the other side, or towards you. Since this is a massive animal, the less massive motorcyclists has to give them the right of way.

Below is a young calf. It was noisy, seemingly complaining about something, a sound I haven't heard before. I waited until I was sure that it wouldn't start to run across.

This is how it is done: A few 2x4's under the rear seats of the mini-bus, a few ropes and the journey can begin.

This is my plant: The "Traveler's Palm", actually not a palm tree exactly, but in the family of the Bird of Paradise plants.

The last airplane flying into Kampot, a C-47, the military version of a common Douglas DC-3 of Cambodia Air Commercial was shot down on approach by the Khmer Rouge in October 1972. The aircraft was operating a passenger flight, all nine people on board were killed. Since then, the old runway is left to its own devices, the brush slowly engulfs the facility. I was told that at night on weekends it is used as a drag strip for the souped-up scooters of the younger population.

Old runway at Kampot airport

Restored row of colonial shophouses, now B&B "The Columns".

Kampot bus station.

The French engineers and their fascination with cast-in-place concrete structures.

Communal sport stadium Kampot.

Very close to Kampot on the road to Bokor Hill Station and Sihanoukville one passes by a brand-new, clean and appealing hospital compound. There are few health centers in and around town, and the referral hospital in Kampot, but the place to go for emergency and other care is the "Sonja Kill Memorial Hospital". There are no other facilities of that kind which provide international-standard medical care such as this clinic. Especially in light of the child mortality rate in Cambodia (about 10 of 100 children don't reach the age of 9 years.) Because of the difficult medical infrastructure in this part of the world it is also good if one doesn't have an accident in this area, on motorcycles, or otherwise.

Sonja Kill memorial Hospital Kampot

The hospital is named after the daughter of a husband and wife physician team from Germany, who died at an early age in a traffic accident. Dr. and Mrs. Kill's hospital foundation started with an initial, privately funded budget provided by the Kill family of 16 million Euros, yet more funds are needed especially to enlarge pediatric care.

The hospital is managed by Hope Worldwide, a medical charity out of Philadelphia. I will visit the hospital when I return in December.

22. Chemin de Fer de Cambodge Stations

The railway stations in Sihanoukville, Kampot and the rural station at Tuek Thla

One last look at the remaining structures for the Cambodian railway, designed and build by French engineers and architects during the second French protectorate period. Today the stations range from being in a restored, good, to an acceptable state, such as the central railway station in Phnom Penh (recently closed to visitors, since it is the staging site for military riot police) and the station in Battambang (closed) (Both: See earlier posts), to the structures in a severely dilapidated, yet salvageable state, such as the stations in Sihanoukville and Kampot, to the ones which are lost forever. Of those I saw only the rural station in Tuek Thla, some 17 kilometers west of the town of Kampot. I am sure there are many more, more to explore during a next trip!

Sihanoukville

An excellent, interesting and environmentally fully adapted building, influenced not only by le Corbusier's architecture, but maybe also by Kahn and his engineer August Komendant's Kimbell Art Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas; although the hiring of the architect and the design of this building was only begun in 1966. 

The Sihanoukville railway station was designed and built by Georges Kondracki and Guy Lemarchand, and completed in 1969. It was the last of three major train stations built as part the construction of the Phnom Penh - Sihanoukville rail link constructed between 1960 and 1969. A barrel vaulted concrete roof covers the entire building and gives it a strong 'Mediterranean' feel. The vaults form also a secondary roof layer, providing lower heat loads on the actual roof below. They are open for transverse airflow. The main hall is semi-enclosed by a full-height steel grate structure which allows the breezes to cool the interior. There is no glass used in the enclosure. The hall is a simple rectangle with an architectural staircase at one end providing a focal point as well as access to the railway office functions on the second floor.

Today the building is in part being used by poor squatter families who occupy the former platform offices, facing the tracks.

Today families live in the former platform offices.

Ticket counter

Kampot

I mentioned the Kampot station in an earlier post, but since it is such a good building I thought it justifies showing some more images. The symmetrical layout has a pyramidal roof structure in its center, indicating the main hall which is fully open to the breezes. The sheet metal covering of the pyramidal roof is heavily corroded. Originally, there must have been rolling gates, or a steel door system enclosing the ticket hall, however only traces of the former tracks can be found in the badly damaged tile floor today. The station is closed, there is no passenger train service out of Kampot, or Sihanoukville, since 2006. The building's two folded-plate roof wings house the former support functions and freight offices. All of those are boarded up. 

Former ticket counters.

Rural train stop and former station in Tuek Thla, Kampot Province

This is a hard to find station in the countryside, some 300 meters off Highway 3 from Sihanoukville to Kampot. There is no path or driving access from the highway, one has to hike through the bushes to find the ruin. This makes also for interesting encounters with bugs and fire ants which fall miraculously from the branches and like to latch on to your skin. They are easily brushed off, though.

The building design is very simple yet beautiful. A thin cast-in-place frame, previously holding a flat roof forms the main arrival and departure space. There was most likely no enclosure. The elongated hall is followed by a compact walled set of simple rooms for the railway office functions. On the far end are the toilets. Window openings have additional separated, permanent cross-ventilation slots added on top. This is a detail which can be seen throughout French designs in Cambodia, for apartments or in this case for offices.

The setting is actually quite beautiful with Bokor National Forests and the mountains in the background.

Window, most likely formerly englazed, with top ventilation slot.

21. French Seaside Dream, 1960s

Kep

In the 1960s the small seaside town, only a few miles west of the Vietnam border, must have been the dream of many prospective real-estate buyers from France and developers alike. The land along the coast was pretty much all parceled off according to French urban planning, and today one can see here again the lonely property walls and now rusted, grand iron gates, familiar from Sihanoukville. Only very few completed 'dream villas' can be found today. 

Those who were the first to act, buy the land, hire engineers, architects and contractors and build a residence "in the colonies" lost the most. First the Lon Nol regime, and only a few years later, the Khmer Rouge put an end to the dreams, the sites were left abandoned, and some of the finished villas were used for rocket target practice by the communist "farmer-guerrilla", and this is still the state we find them in today.

Very few can be seen in a good condition, recently restored, and occupied. Many, even the one's in the most splendid "million-dollar-view" locations are home to squatters, extremely poor families from the countryside.

The entire seaside town has the most fabulous beaches, the whitest sand, and, -at least now during the dry season-, the best climate.

This 'modern architecture museum' with the few remnants of the French modernist villas is one of my favored sites to see in Cambodia.

Except for the local Khmer weekend tourists from Phnom Penh, tourism is almost zero. The onslaught of the dreaded Chinese tourist groups hasn't happened yet, but eventually it will, of course.

Now it is just beautiful here.

I like this picture: Kids and their mother live in this ruin.
The location characteristics are similar to the French coast at the Cote d'Azur, near Cap d'Antibes, where such a house and its site would run in the double digit million Euro range.

Nice Le Corbusier inspired design of a vacation villa from the 1960s, one of the very few completed.

French "milestone graveyard", Kep.
Another picture I like a lot. It reminds me of the "Chabert & Guillot" Montelimar nougat in the cardboard milestone boxes my dad used to buy when we drove to Southern France for summer vacation.