Kampot:

The best pepper of the world

Kampot 2

27.02.2017 - Jordan

 

 

Second day: 

 

The guest-house being far from the downtown, we rent three scooters. Hop, everyone by relationship! Alex with Sarah, Sixtine with me and Kevin with Clément <3. We're biking, without knowing if it's really legal: I do have an international driving license, but without the bike one written in it... 

 

Everywhere, next to the main roads, there is an amazing thing happening in Cambodia: weddings. It's a real institution here! We easily see 4 or 5 of them per day, and they like to make it known: with loud music that we could listen to, from more than a kilo-meter (Ok I'm a bit exaggerating...). 

 

About twenty kilo-meters from the city, we head over a little dirty road, to join plantations of the famous Kampot pepper. BUT, the police is here, blocking our way. They ask us to stop our scooters! PRESSURE, but they just want to take a picture of us on the bikes. They are just funny and Clément and Kevin are happy to do the models! 

 

To give a first 'terroir' taste, the red road dust kills our eyes. However, Sixtine can approve that it is nothing compared to a white pepper grain well bitten!

 

One of the guides of this plantation, which is fully organic, speaks french perfectly. So, we follow him while he explains all the pepper variations. How it goes from green to black or from red to white, everything from the same plant. He also tells us how the peppers cultures were destroyed during the Khmer Rouge period, and the difficulties they have had to re-grow everything. It's a bit like wine: plants should get old in order to give the best of their potential. We learn how this pepper is the result of a long process: each grain is selected and sorted with tweezers. All the 'bad' grains are thrown to keep a high quality. What a colossal job! 

 

The pepper having dry our mouthes, we head to Kep and its beach! For the guys, it's been few months that they had not seen the sea, they are crazy! We want to run and play in the water, but knowing that we are mainly surrounded by locals, we control every move we do. And above all, the girls are not completely at their ease: men eyes are attracted! In fact, unlike Cambodian girls who bathe completely dressed, Sixtine and Sarah are the only ones who don't have an outfit that covers the entire body.

 

However, we have a lot of fun!