Let’s just be honest…
Let’s just be honest… Is what i said to jay this morning when I suggested we lie to our hotel in Kep, Cambodia about why we needed to stow our bags tomorrow but didn’t need a ride anywhere. We are moving to a fancy resort 150 meters away, and it seemed like an honest story to tell them that we didn’t know someone else had arranged for it as part of our honeymoon. Jay pointed out that lying to them was not actually being honest … I suppose….
And it is a bit hard to see why we want to leave. The resort we’re in is beyond lovely. The view from our balcony is worth abandoning our day jobs for, and they brew coffee as delicious as any we’ve come to enjoy in Cambodia: so dark and rich that adding milk does little to the colour, but the intense nutty flavour is amazing either way.
But we did have one incident that makes moving appealing… And again requires some “honesty”. Jay suggested that we come clean with the hotel that one of the mugs in our bathroom was already broken after there was a violent skirmish with an unwanted guest.
Hard to see him clearly, but this mammoth cockroach gave jay a run for his money! There was so much noise and then the sound of breaking porcelain I wasn’t sure who had won the epic battle. In the end, we reclaimed our bathroom, the roach went for an eternal swim and only the mug suffered any permanent damage.
Having said farewell to our guest, it was time to head out.
The next victim of our ‘honesty’ was the first tuk tuk driver we saw who offered to take us to the pepper plant for $15. Wanting to make sure he knew we weren’t just some easy tourists, we told him we’d been offered $12 the day before (this was a lie… It was $13). I figured this gave us some room to negotiate, but for $12 he was in. And so, with another ‘honest’ lie we traveled through fields and rolling hillside to see a pepper plant.
So that’s where pepper comes from. It all starts green and some ripens into red at harvest time. The green gets sundried into black and the red gets the skin peeled off to make white. The 4 varieties all taste a little different. Fascinating!
It was time for lunch so we headed back to the crab market. And for a $30 splurge here had a seafood feast.
I can honestly say the seafood here is some of the best we’ve eaten, and for insanely cheap. Seafood fresh out of the water and onto the grill is even cheaper, but we decided to save that for another day.
And while I could lie and say that the image below was a lunchtime treat, I can honestly (actual truth) say that I could have taken this photo any day of our trip! It’s hot enough that cheap, cold, local beer is good enough for Sir Kogan. 😉
And perhaps as much as he is loving a cold beer with lunch, my husband with a sweet tooth and diet similar to the lead character in Elf, has discovered Sugar Cane juice.
Literally sugar cane squeezed by a hand crank contraption with a twist of lime. For $0.25 a whole glass of this sugar watery sweetness can be yours… And at that price, Jay often has 2 (the sugar high may prevent him from ever sleeping again!)
It would be actually honest to say that Kep is absolutely amazing and quite possibly our favourite place so far. It’s almost hard to imagine all the other places we plan to travel to, because it would be so easy to just stop and take it easy here… Indefinitely!
And the jokingly dishonest honesty from earlier in the day is particularly in contrast to how kind and honest we find the Cambodian people to be: The sugar cane lady who gave us back half our money when we misunderstood the cost…the man we gave all our laundry to this morning (we think he said to come pick it up clean tomorrow…),and the tuk tuk drivers who don’t argue any further when we say someone else offered a better price (now that we know its not the bargaining racket we experienced in bangkok, we need to change our tactics!)
Indeed, we are enjoying Cambodia and wishing we had more time in this warm, kind, and honest place. I just hope that I can get away with one more teeny tiny white lie…
My poolside cabana was like this when I got here:
It wasn’t anything I did that made it different from the rest that looked like this…
Off to try and repair the damage our day has caused to a mug, a poolside cabana and a couple small half-truths …
All in time to watch the sun set from our balcony. Indeed, it’s been a full day in paradise.
