CAMBODIA III: ON THE BEACH AGAIN

I absolutely don´t regret that in Sihanoukville we got to spend only 20 hours or so including the bus ride. People may see it differently, but I find nothing super amazing on this place. At least mum says so. There were restaurants next to each other, plastic chairs standing almost in the water and mountains of garbage.

What was all right was the old market, where mum bought me a t-shirt for two dollars. It looks more like a dress, but smaller they didn´t have and there is an awesome elephant on it. Then we sat up at a tiny table on tiny chairs and had a huge bowl of noodle soup for one more dollar.

And here the list of positive things comes to its end. As soon as I closed my eyes in the evening the rock concert started in the club adjacent to our guesthouse. At 11 it finished and half an hour later the disco began. It ended when mum and I were getting up to catch the bus to Phnom Penh in the morning. When mum was writing maybe the most negative review of her life, she remembered how the manager led us to our room at the very end of the corridor in the afternoon – to enjoy the quiet apparently.

But back to positives now. To Sihanoukville we came because we had spent the previous days on the most beautiful island I have ever seen (not that I saw plenty of them, but still). Koh Rong Sanloem lies allegedly 45, in reality 90 minutes (at least if you get out – like us – at the Paradise jetty) of a speedboat ride from Sihanoukville.

If our bungalow in Malaysia was great, that one in the Sweet Dreams resort was just fantastic. Again we had a mosquito net, which I could climb on, but the best were the mirror windows – from inside we could see everything trough them, but no one could see us from outside, which means we could run around completely naked, woohoo! Mum says her favorite thing was the big two-course breakfast, included in the price. And a glass of red wine for dinner – shame it was only a small one. Little things in life make her happy, aye?

I was spending my days on the cleanest beach and in the sea which 200 meters from the shore it was still not more than 20 centimeters deep. The second day we met a New Zealand family with two kids and I had someone to play with. The last day Czech woman, her husband from Argentina and their 1,5-year-old son moved to the bungalow next to us. It was not bad at all, at least I could watch him and learn how to walk. In the beginning mum was glad that she could talk in Czech with someone, but I think she got annoyed with the woman pretty soon.

On the island it was not so hot like it was on the mainland and the second day even the rain worthy the rainy season came. Yes, it was the rainy season in which we actually happened to visit Cambodia. But until the island rain we encountered it only in the form of lower prices and minimum of tourists – even some of the temples in Siem Reap mum and I had only for ourselves.

Koh Rong Sanloem is not a big island and if it was not covered in a thick jungle, mum would probably take a walk around it (phew, I was lucky the jungle was there). Apart from walking along our long beach you can basically only take a stroll to the other side of the island, where the Lazy Beach is. That beach is completely different from our beach: the water is deep and the sea is rough. But sand at least as white as “our” sand and only a few people around.

When we were leaving the fourth day I was almost sad and I think that if mum had known how cool it was going to be there, she would have changed our plans and we would have stayed a bit longer. It is too late now: in two days we are flying to Australia and somehow we have to get back to Kuala Lumpur.

Your Annie

Some facts

When: 6. - 11. 7. 2017 Where: Siem Reap - Sihanoukville - Phnom Penh (Cambodia) - Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) How: plane, shuttle bus, bus, speed boat, tuk tuk

How long: 1 hr. 5 min. + 30 min. + 1 hr. 30 min. + 4 hr. 30 min. + 1 hr. 50 min. How far: 310 + 10 (*2) + 25 (*2) + 221 + 1 040 = 1 641 km