Kampot sää — joulukuu

December is the dry season here, and the thing the board explains that no column can is wind direction. The northeast wind of the dry months, roughly November to May, leaves the west coast of the island calm and clear - which is where the sunsets are, and where they tell you to stay in December. Our wind column reads 25.8 kph, so it is a real wind, simply blowing off the land on that side. The rain has largely gone, 59.1mm across 10 days and mostly at night. On temperature our row runs warmer than their recollection: they say 25 to 27C, we read 30.8C reading as 34C at 71.8 percent humidity, over 23.6C nights, with a 29.4C sea. The record: 9.4 hours of sun and AQI 48.

Kampot's forum, including a poster with multiple years of July/August visits, describes a consistent pattern: rain on roughly three of every four days, but concentrated as an intense downpour for an hour or two in the late afternoon or overnight, leaving mornings and early afternoons generally clear for getting out and about. One visitor did hit a genuinely wetter-than-usual stretch in late July, but the forum consensus was that these short, sharp squalls are normal for the season and not a reason to skip Kampot or nearby Kep.

Forum posters name December-January as the best weather stretch of the year here - dry, cool mornings, blue skies and a light breeze, with humidity noticeably lower than the rest of the year. The clear trade-off: this is also peak tourist season, so posters note higher prices and more crowds than the shoulder months. For Kampot specifically, posters describe November-December as particularly gorgeous - dry and comfortably low-humidity, though occasionally dusty given the dry conditions. Posters do flag that 'cool' is relative here - what feels cool to a Cambodian local wearing a light jacket may still feel warm to a visitor from a genuinely cold climate, so temperature expectations should be calibrated accordingly.