Visit to Kampot and Kep

We uploaded the pictures of our visit to Kampot and Kep a few weeks ago, but didn't get to the part of telling what we did. 

We had a wonderful long weekend and started visiting Bokor National park by moped. A lot of Cambodians use mopeds, so we thought it would be nice to follow the local custom and explore the park on our own. We did not have enough time to walk a lot in the park, but the long ride to the top of the mountain was beautiful. Unfortunately, Chinese developers build a big hotel and casino on the top of the hill, in the middle of the park. The pictures of the remains of the concrete building was the old casino. Apparently it has been popular for a long time to build casino's in protected nature areas. Kampot is a lovely small city with a lot of old French colonial houses. The atmosphere was much more relaxed compared to the buzz in Sihanoukville.

Next day we drove with the mopeds to Kep. A second project site of Marine Conservation Cambodia will start here in March. The owner of the project has build an aquarium and wants to see if he can increase the seahorse population by breeding them. It gave us a nice opportunity to take some good pictures of the different seahorses living in the aquarium. On a small island 1 hour from the mainland, the new project site is build. The water is more shallow here, which prevents trawlers to come in and the municipality wants to be a green and sustainable municipality which makes protecting the reef much easier than on our island. There is even a marine police who patrols the area for illegal fishing. The aquarium offers a nice opportunity for environmental education, although it is yet the early stage of the project.

Both Dolf and me are training at the moment to become an assistant instructor and we are one of the few people who are experienced enough to take other volunteers out for diving. This results in 3-4 dives each day and a nice mix in doing a survey, learn volunteers about the seahorses and the substrates they live on, learning them the different fish species and invertebrates (like sea stars, sea cucumbers and sea urchins), helping the dive instructor with training volunteers in their open water dive certification and doing course dives. This means we only focus on diving and reading the course books for becoming assistant instructor at the moment. Dolf has also taken an interest in repairing dive equipment and by now he has learned himself to repair regulators and dive tanks. We are enjoying ourselves, but still miss the conservation part of the project a bit.

By now we have seen a lot of seahorses. Annelies had her lucky day last week and spotted 10 seahorses in 3 dives on one day. Apparently we are in the right season at the moment, because we see more seahorses than 2 months ago, including a lot of juveniles (or just have been better in spotting them).