Buy your lunch here and it is still moving. Kep's crab market keeps its stock alive in cages floating in the sea a few metres out from the stalls; a vendor hauls one up, you point, you haggle, and the crabs go straight into one of the big pots boiling in the open behind the counter. A kilo costs somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 riel, depending on the size of the animals and how well you argue. The claim locally - repeated often enough that it has hardened into fact - is that these are the best crabs in Cambodia. Very few visitors leave arguing the point.
The dish to order is crab with fresh Kampot peppercorns, still green and on the stem, grown on plantations a short drive inland. The pepper is bright rather than hot, and it does something to sweet crab meat that dried black pepper cannot. A row of seafood restaurants runs along the shore near the market, most with terraces built out over the water, and their whole reason for existing is the view west at the end of the day: the Bokor ranges behind Kampot going purple, the long low shape of Vietnam's Phú Quốc sitting out on the horizon. Come mid-afternoon instead and you get the working version of the same scene, boats coming in, the day's catch going up onto the concrete in plastic crates while the restaurant staff watch to see what they will be selling.
Kep was the seaside address in Cambodia until the 1960s, when Sihanoukville took the title and, soon after, war took everything else. The shells of the old villas are still standing in the scrub above the shore, roofless and stripped, and they are the reason a lot of people come. What has grown back around them is not a foreign resort strip but a Khmer holiday town, busy with Cambodian beachgoers and slowly being rediscovered by foreign travellers alongside them. One practical consequence: Kep is not cheap by Cambodian standards. A basic room that costs five dollars elsewhere in the country will cost ten here, and prices quoted to outsiders start high across the board. Bargaining is not rudeness in Kep. It is the expected opening move, and locals do it too.
People who tire of seafood and sunsets go uphill. Dense forest covers the slope directly behind town, and a trail loops through it with views down over the bay and out to the islands - the single best antidote to the flatness of the Mekong Delta, which starts just over the Vietnamese border twenty kilometres east. The other standard day out heads inland toward Kampot, where the limestone caves between the two towns include one at Kampong Trach you can swim in. Package tours from Kampot usually bundle the caves with a pepper plantation and a boat to Rabbit Island, which is a reasonable way to see the whole province in a day if you have only one.
Kampot is twenty-five kilometres away on good paved road, thirty to forty-five minutes, and a bus between the two costs about three dollars. From Phnom Penh it is roughly four hours by bus, five or six dollars, with departures spread through the morning and early afternoon. The railway is the more interesting option: the southern line from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville runs through Kep, putting the capital about three and a quarter hours away and Kampot half an hour up the track. Coming from Vietnam, a motorbike taxi from Hà Tiên takes about forty-five minutes, much of it on dirt. Once you are here, tuk-tuks handle everything - a dollar or two across town, twelve to twenty-five for a full day - and self-drive motorcycles rent for around seven dollars a day for a 125cc, double that for a 250. Money changers at the crab market take dollars, euros, dong and riel. The riel holds steady near 4,000 to the dollar; anyone offering markedly better is not doing you a favour.
It is a border town in temperament as much as geography. Hà Tiên, just across in Vietnam, is a fishing hub with boats out to Phú Quốc and buses into the Mekong Delta, and the road there is still rough enough to feel like a genuine crossing. Kampot in the other direction is the gateway to the Bokor plateau. Sihanoukville, the town that ended Kep's first golden age, is two hours west. Kep sits in the middle of all of it, small, slightly faded, extremely well fed.
Kep town sits at 10.483°N, 104.317°E on Cambodia's southern coast, on a small peninsula pushing southwest into Kep Bay. From 2,000-4,000 ft the layout is obvious: forested hills behind the town, the beach and seafront road along the southern edge, the crab market and its over-water restaurant terraces at the western end of the strip, and the Kep Archipelago scattered offshore with Koh Tonsay about 4.5 km southwest. The Kep White Horse Monument on National Road 33 and the rail line running inland are good ground references. Bokor plateau in Kampot province rises to the northwest; Phú Quốc is visible to the south in clear air. Nearest airports: Sihanouk International (VDSV) about 41 nm west, Phnom Penh International (VDPP) about 70 nm north, Phú Quốc International (VVPQ) about 28 nm south-southwest, plus a 579 m grass strip at Kampot (KMT). Southwest monsoon, May to October, brings haze and heavy afternoon build-ups; the dry season gives the clear evening light the seafront restaurants are built for.