Caves and Crab in Kep

Kep is a small seaside town on the south coast of Cambodia with an imported beach. I stay in a charming place called the boathouse, next to the forested hills of the national park and with lovely wooden houses, pretty gardens and tons of character.
I've decided to give the fake beach a miss for my only day in Kep and instead hire a tuk tuk to visit some caves. There are several cave sites along the road to Kampot and we are visiting two of them. At the first we find a small closed temple outside and a man and a young boy guide us into the 'white elephant cave'. The rock formation which he points out to us as an elephant head, however, looks absolutely nothing like an elephant, however hard you squint! He shows us the bats in the darkest reaches of the cavern before leading us to an impossible climb out route where we cling to the rock face; don't look down! We make a circuit through some forest to the 'bat cave' where some more nocturnal critters hang out, before completing the route back to the temple where we find some monkeys larking about in the branches.
It's back in the tuk tuk and on to the second cave where after paying an entrance fee we're followed by about 5 young lads who want to be our guides. One of them has particularly good English and does a great job of guiding us. They point out huge boulders crashed into crevasses above our heads and interesting rock formations. Of course there's some more unlikely elephants but also a monkey looking down which is strikingly more resemblant of the real thing. The lad tells us how some people, including his grandparents, used to hide out in the caves during the time of the Khmer Rouge regime. The boys are a good laugh and one of them even sneaks up on us in the darkness and pokes his head out of a hole in the rock face 'boo' making us jump out of our skins.

We climb up out of the cave system to be rewarded with a dramatic vista of the landscape; hills surrounded a perfectly flat plain which stretches all the way to the sea, peppered with palm trees and carpeted with farmland.
Another highlight of Kep is the crab market, not actually a market but a string of restaurants overlooking the sea serving up the most delicious array of the freshest fish, seafood and of course tasty crab. A must if you're stopping by.