Kampot and Kep, four days

Phnom Penh to Kampot, and the salt fields at dusk

Leave Phnom Penh at 08:30 and drive three and a half hours south on National Road 3, through rice country and small market towns. Lunch in Kampot.

The afternoon is deliberately loose: the town is thirty streets of French shophouses and you can walk all of it in an hour. Late afternoon we drive out to the salt fields between Kampot and Kep, worked from December to April, which at five in the evening are one of the strangest and best landscapes in the country.

Sunset on the river, from a boat or a riverside bar, with Bokor black behind it.

Pepper, a cave temple, and Bokor mountain

Out at 08:00 to the pepper farms on red soil at the foot of the hills, 15 km inland. An hour with a grower who sells direct: the poles, the vines, the drying yard and the sorting tables. Harvest runs February to May. We take nothing from what you buy and we will tell you the going rate before you go in.

Then Phnom Chhngok, a seventh-century brick shrine inside a limestone cave, reached across a paddy field and down a set of steps. It is small, pre-Angkorian, and usually empty.

After lunch and a break, up Bokor: a thousand metres in 32 km of switchbacks through forest, the temperature dropping as you climb, to the abandoned French hill station, the old church and the casino ruin. There is also a large modern casino development on the plateau, which we tell people about in advance because it is jarring if you arrive expecting only ruins.

Kampot to Kep, the crab market, and Rabbit Island

A short 35-minute drive to Kep after a slow breakfast. Kep is a 1960s modernist seaside resort that the war ended: roofless villas being taken back by vegetation, a national park on the hill, and a crab market at the water's edge.

Boat to Koh Tonsay, Rabbit Island, 25 minutes offshore: one beach, a dozen bungalows, no cars, no road. Three or four hours there, which is exactly right.

Back for the crab market in the late afternoon, when the women lift the woven baskets of live blue swimmers out of the sea and cook them a few metres away. Crab with fresh green Kampot pepper is the single best thing to eat in Cambodia and it costs a few dollars.

Kep national park, then back to Phnom Penh

The 8 km forest circuit around Kep hill at 07:00, before it warms up, with views down over the gulf and Rabbit Island. It is flat enough to be a walk rather than a hike, and you will see almost nobody.

Late breakfast, then the three and a half hour drive back to Phnom Penh, arriving mid-afternoon. Airport drop or hotel as you need. If you are continuing to Vietnam, the Ha Tien border is 40 minutes from Kep instead.