You can learn what a town values by looking at what it puts in the middle of its roundabouts. Kampot has a giant concrete durian, spikes and all, at the junction where the buses drop their passengers. A little further on stands a monument to salt workers. Between them, in four lanes of scooter traffic, is a fair summary of a small Cambodian city of roughly 42,000 people that has made its name on three things you can taste — salt, pepper, and the most divisive fruit in Asia — and which was, for twenty years in the nineteenth century, the only place this entire kingdom could touch the sea.
When Ang Duong took the Khmer throne in 1840, Cambodia had lost the Mekong Delta and was squeezed between Siam and Vietnam, both of which treated it as a client. His answer was a road: he cut a route from his capital at Oudong down to Kampot and declared the little river port the kingdom's sole international harbour. From 1841 to 1860 everything came and went through here. Anglo-Chinese merchants out of Singapore worked the trade, and one quarter of town filled up with their households — the French census of 1889 still recorded a "Chinese Kampot" on one bank and a "Cambodian Kampot" on the other, with Vietnamese villages and a Malay settlement on Traeuy Koh island nearby. The naturalist Henri Mouhot passed through before heading north to the ruins at Angkor. Then Saigon's port opened, the French took over the Mekong's navigation, and Kampot's moment closed as abruptly as it had begun.
What the boom left behind is the reason people come now. Unlike almost every other Cambodian provincial capital, Kampot's centre is a run of nineteenth-century French colonial buildings — ochre shophouses with shuttered upper floors, a covered market of hard geometric lines, two art deco cinemas that stopped screening films decades ago and still look like somebody's idea of the future. The old bridge across the Praek Tuek Chhu is a stranger thing: breached during the Khmer Rouge years and patched afterwards with whatever spans could be found, it is now a mismatched assembly closed to heavy traffic, crossed on foot and by motorbike, strung with bulbs at dusk. The war reached the town itself. From 26 February to 2 April 1974, government troops and Khmer Rouge guerrillas fought for control of the city; the Khmer Rouge took it on 2 April. Both sides suffered heavily, and many residents were left homeless. Since 2017 the government has been assembling a case for the Old Town's inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Southeast of town the land flattens into a chessboard of shallow pans, bunded and levelled, filling and drying with the tides. Salt farms cover about 4,748 hectares across Kampot and neighbouring Kep, worked by some 200 families. The finest grade is fleur de sel, skimmed from the surface of the ponds in April and May, the hottest and stillest months, when there is barely enough wind to ripple the water. It is precarious work. Shifting rainfall and rising seas have made harvests wildly unpredictable — 170,000 tonnes came off the pans in 2015, and just 18,430 tonnes in 2019, a record low. Families have sold their pans; the children of salt workers have left school to help make up the shortfall. Whether the fields survive at all is now a matter of government strategy documents rather than weather alone.
The other two crops are easier on their growers. Kampot pepper, trained up wooden poles on smallholdings inland, has been protected as a geographical indication since 2010 and recognised by the European Union since 2016 — the reason a district this small turns up on menus a continent away. Durian ripens in April and May — buy it in Kampot in winter and it has been imported, whatever the seller says. The local kitchen is unashamedly hybrid: crab from Kep cracked and tossed with fresh green peppercorns still on the stem, and a breakfast stew called koh kor num pain, a thick beef broth eaten with a French baguette, which tells you the history of the place more economically than any museum could. In the evenings vendors line the boulevards selling teuk rleuek, fruit shakes built to order from whatever came in that morning.
Kampot spent decades as the place travellers went to do nothing in particular, and that is changing quickly. An eight-million-dollar port has been developed under the provincial tourism master plan, with ferries planned to the Cambodian islands, Thailand and Vietnam. A forty-two-storey twin tower has been proposed, which would be the tallest building in Cambodia outside Phnom Penh. In May 2022, Chinese state construction firms broke ground on a port complex and special economic zone under the Belt and Road Initiative. Not everyone is pleased: a residents' petition gathered 1,239 signatures asking the prime minister and the king to keep the high-rises away from the Old Town and to spare the colonial buildings slated for demolition. The town that once existed to move cargo is being asked, once again, to move cargo.
Kampot sits at 10.60°N, 104.17°E on the Praek Tuek Chhu River, about 5 km inland from the Gulf of Thailand and immediately southeast of the Dâmrei (Elephant) Mountains. The approach from any direction is unmistakable: the Bokor plateau rises to 1,081 m directly northwest of town, dropping in a sheer escarpment to a coastal plain that is almost at sea level, with the salt pans reading as a bright geometric grid toward Kep. Best viewing altitude is 3,000-6,000 ft for the town and river mouth, higher if you want the plateau and coast in one frame. Kampot has its own small airstrip on the edge of town (no ICAO code assigned); the nearest international fields are Sihanouk International at Sihanoukville (VDSV), about 100 km west, and Techo International (VDTI) south of Phnom Penh, about 140 km north. Expect low cloud clinging to the Bokor escarpment during the May-October southwest monsoon, and haze over the plain in the dry season.