Sihanoukville

We have just arrived back in Phnom Phen after having spent a very lazy week in sunny Sihanoukville! The bus journey back was....uneventful, for a change and we are now back at the 'Okay' guest house where we were last time. Sihanoukville is kind of the 'Costa del Sol' of Cambodia, but without the Costa, ie, no frills, no fancy hotels, no lads (yet), but plenty of sun, nice beaches and the odd cow or two roaming the roads. We felt we deserved a beach holiday after all the hard travelling we've been doing (snigger) and we are now thoroughly relaxed and ready for more hard graft :)
As always the bus to Sihanoulville dropped us at a hotel of the bus companys choice and we ended up staying there for 3 nights at $5 a night. After this short time we realised we were in the boring bit of town, so we packed up our stuff and headed over to stay at 'the Green Gecko guest house'. This was a nice family run hotel with much nicer rooms, still at $5, about 3 quid for the both of us!
We've spent our days lounging about on the 5 beaches, our favourite being Sokha beach. Why? Well, its a private beach belonging to a 4-5 star hotel and for a measley $1 each (60p) it was literally all ours all day, as apart from 1-2 other people it was empty. Travellers being the miserly people they are (myself included on occasion) will refuse to pay this extortionate price and would rather go to one of the many free beaches. On the private beach however, the sand was swept lovingly by a couple of ladies every day so that it was just the right sandy featheriness for our delicate feet and a security guard ensured that there were was no-one to hassle us with their constant mosquito like offers to sell us beads, fruit or prawns.
In the evenings we spent our time frequenting the local bars and restaurents and I'm afraid to say that I am back on the pork again. Although the horror of the pig execution is still on my mind, I am being brave and trying to eat pork whenever I can in tribute to the poor piggys suffering! One such evening took us to 'the Snake House'. An establishment known for its massive collection of snakes! It was wicked walking around looking at all the different types of snakes in their glass cages, they even had a snake cage built into the table that we sat at, so that you could stare down at the snake whilst you were eating :) Which was good, because the food was so awful that you were praying for a distraction to come along and then that distraction to get even with the 'chef'!
In the two streets around abouts our hotel were plenty of bars with and some of these bars had names like 'the Crazy Rabbit bar' and it was definately crazy. From the bar over the street where we would play cards, I would take an occasional glance to confirm my suspisions and indeed, there seemed to be alot of young Cambodian ladies who had discovered the joys of dancing around a pole! Said pole was virtually on the street and there were some fairly horrible looking 50 year old westerners around it to. As we would walk back to the hotel of an evening I was often flattered to receive an invite to join the ladies, but Sam always turned them down on my behalf. Still across the road in the other bar, I made friends with an English Bulldog called Elvis and let Sam beat me at the odd game of cards.

Over the course of our week in Sihanoukville, we would chat in passing to another couple who were called Stephane and Katherine and no, they weren't English! On our last night we went out for drinks in the spirit of strengthening E.U relations, for respectively they were French and German. Anyway they are a very nice couple of people and we hope to bump into them for a beer, maybe in Laos. Over the evening I investigated their views of us Brits and I can now report back, that the French really do call us 'Roast Beefs'! :) As you can see there was alot of geo-political discussion that night and brilliantly at one point a real frog jumped out of a tree onto Sams lap :)

Tomorrow, we are on the bus once again, to go to Siam Rep, a city every single tourist who visits Cambodia comes to see. The reason to visit is Angkor Wat, the biggest religious building in the world!
Wat blog to coming soon...