Kampong Cham

The name means "port of the Cham", a reminder that Cham traders and refugees from the kingdom of Champa, in what is now central Vietnam, settled along this stretch of the Mekong from the 15th century onwards, and their descendants still live in villages on both banks. Long before that, the area lay within the Khmer world: Wat Nokor on the edge of town was built in the last years of Jayavarman VII's reign, and the brick sanctuary at Wat Hanchey upstream dates from the Chenla period, centuries earlier still.

The modern town is largely a French creation. Under the protectorate, Kampong Cham became a provincial seat and the centre of Cambodia's rubber industry, with large plantations laid out to the east of the river from the 1920s, worked by labourers recruited from Vietnam and the Cambodian countryside. Shophouses, offices and a market went up behind the riverfront, and the Mekong carried rubber, tobacco and rice down to Phnom Penh and Saigon.

The province suffered heavily in the 1970s: American bombing of the countryside, early Khmer Rouge control, and the forced labour and killings of the regime's years in power, followed by fighting as Vietnamese forces advanced in 1979. Rubber estates fell into neglect and were only gradually replanted. Since the 1990s the town has been quiet and slow-growing. The Kizuna Bridge, opened in 2001, gave it the first permanent road crossing of the Mekong in Cambodia, and Tboung Khmum province was split off from Kampong Cham in 2013.

Kampong Cham is one of the most mixed provinces in the country. Khmer Buddhist villages, with their pagodas and annual merit-making, stand alongside Cham Muslim communities whose mosques, prayer calls and headscarves are a normal part of the riverside landscape; fishing, boat building and cattle trading are traditional Cham occupations here. Chinese-Cambodian families run much of the town's commerce, and Vietnamese families have long lived along the river.

The Buddhist calendar shapes the year for the majority: Khmer New Year in April, when the hills at Phnom Pros and Phnom Srei fill with picnics and games; Pchum Ben in the autumn, when families bring rice to the pagodas before dawn for their ancestors; and the Water Festival, when boats race on the Mekong in front of the town. The Cham communities keep the Islamic calendar, with Ramadan and its feasts observed in the villages.

The province has a reputation in Cambodia for education and for producing public figures, and its schools are well regarded. Manners are those of the countryside: quiet, formal and hospitable. Visitors are greeted with the sampeah, invited to sit and given a drink, and expected to dress modestly away from the river, to remove their shoes at doorways and to be careful with photographs at pagodas and mosques.

Kampong Cham is a small provincial capital of about 62,000 people, well down the list of Cambodian cities by size, and it feels smaller still: a few streets of commerce around the market, a riverfront that comes alive at dusk, and countryside beginning within minutes of the centre. Mornings start before six, with the market at its busiest and monks on their alms rounds; the middle of the day is spent out of the sun; and the evening belongs to the promenade.

The province lives from farming. Rubber remains important on the plantations east of the river, alongside rice, cassava, maize, tobacco and soya, and the Mekong supplies fish, sand and vegetable gardens on the islands and banks that are planted as the water falls. The town provides the schools, hospital, offices and market that the countryside depends on, and the bridge and highway make it a stop on the route between the capital and the north-east.

Many young people leave for factory work in Phnom Penh or for jobs in Thailand, and remittances support households across the province. Falling fish catches, debt from microloans and the erosion of riverbanks are common local worries. Tourism is small-scale: a handful of guesthouses, cyclists heading for the island, and travellers pausing for a night on the way north.

The river sets the table. Fish from the Mekong is grilled whole over charcoal, fried with garlic, dried in the sun or fermented into prahok in the dry season, and eaten with rice at almost every meal. Samlor korko, the thick soup of fish and mixed vegetables, is a village staple, and fish amok, steamed in banana leaf with coconut and the lemongrass paste called kroeung, appears on restaurant menus along the riverfront.

Breakfast is kuy teav, the pork-broth rice-noodle soup, or bai sach chrouk, grilled marinated pork with broken rice and pickles, both sold at the market and from carts near the river. Nom banh chok, rice noodles with a green fish gravy, is carried round the streets in the morning. Beef lok lak with a lime and black-pepper dip is the standard restaurant dish, and num pang, the baguette filled with pâté and pickles, is eaten at any hour.

The province is known for two other things. Rubber-country roadsides sell tropical fruit in season, and Skuon, on the road towards Phnom Penh, is famous across Cambodia for deep-fried tarantulas, eaten as a snack with lime and pepper. The Cham villages cook halal beef and chicken curries with their own spicing, and sugar-palm juice, palm-sugar cakes and iced coffee with condensed milk are drunk everywhere.