Kampot and Sihanoukville - Beach resort overkill - Jan 31 - Feb 7

2006-02-09T01:36:00.000-08:00

I walk through the streets of Kampot in the evening dark looking for a guesthouse and stumble (literally – all the roads in the whole town are dug up, just like everywhere else in Cambodia) across a sign saying Kampot Guesthouse. Soon after checking in I meet Tony, from UK who has lived in Hong Kong, South America and throughout Asia, variously working in publishing or teaching English. We go to a Sri Lankan restaurant and have a pleasant meal, drink and chat. He goes off to keep drinking, I head back to the room to sleep. On the way back I bump into Tatianna and Joppe coming out of the guesthouse across the road where they were having dinner. We exchange a few awkward sentences are move off.

The next day I plan to do a day trip to an abandoned hill station. There are organized tours but you can also hire a dirt bike (the normal mopeds just wont make the road there), which I go to check out. As I’m kick starting the thing, may sandal breaks and I flop back to the guesthouse, get my thongs and walk to the market to see if there’s someone there who can repair my sandal. There is, but each attempt is unsuccessful and I need to get back to get the truck fot the tour to the hill station. When it arrives I make a decision not to go and to spend the day checking out the town. I go back to the market and get my sandal fixed properly and walk around the town – takes about an hour. I spend the afternoon reading in a hammock in the garden of the guesthouse. An Italian woman, Lori, has lunch in the garden restaurant and we chat and organize to go to the markets together at 2. She goes to her room and I read and nap. At 2.30 Lori hasn’t shown up so I go to the markets alone. I buy 6 of the hackydart things that I was playing at the orphanage in Phnom Penh, take them back to the guesthouse and play for a few hours with the sons of the owner. Still think this thing is going to be a huge craze.

Meet up with Lori for a great fish curry dinner at the guesthouse restaurant, chat til about 11. She is also going to Sihanoukville, where she has already been for a week and just came to Kampot for a few days and I invite her to join Tatianna (T), Joppe (J) and I. The next morning, meet T and J as arranged, have breakfast at markets and go to get taxi which we booked both the day before and confirmed that morning. No taxi. I rush around trying to get a ride to Sihanoukville, best I can do is the back seat of a minivan for the 4 of us, but at a much better price. 2.5hrs later we arrive at the Sihanoukville bus station and get 4 mototaxis to take us to the guesthouse Lori was staying at before, which turns out to be full. We try a few more which are all either full or expensive as it is still the Chinese New Year holiday. I go off with a mototaxi on my own to find us 4 rooms. The best I can do is 2 doubles which we take for 1 night until we can find another room.

Lori and I hire a moped and go off to check out the beaches(there are 7 of them). A couple of km from the guesthouse we get a flat tire and have to ride slowly back to the main roundabout where a kid of about 12 has a queue of mopeds getting repairs by the side of the road. This kind of service ingenuity is everywhere. Anything that can be done or offered to make some money is done so, by anyone who gets the chance to do it, even if they don’t know what they’re doing. Its just part of what has to be done to get by in Asia. We wait at a café for an hour til our bike is done. We check out the market, go back to the guesthouse, get changed and go for a sunset swim in the body temperature water. Each beach has perfect sunset views, each with its own unique flavour. The one we are staying at is about 2 km long with beach hut restaurants lined along about 1km of it offering every kind of food, each with its own music, pool table and lighting. Very similar to Goa in India but much bigger and more variety. All 4 of us meet up for dinner, great curries sitting on raised wood beach chairs with food served on a platform on the sand, the water lapping at the table. Rooms are about $5 a night, dinner about $3 – beach, music, pool and moonlight free.

We walk down the beach to a reggae bar and have fruit shakes but theres not much going on. The others want to go back to their rooms, I want to keep going. I see a bonfire further down the beach and head off on my own. The Utopia Bar throws one hell of a party. Sand pits are dub between the bar and the water with big tables in the middle, carpets on the pit sandhill and cushions scattered around. Wooden platforms surround the pits where rubber mats make them very comfy. On the sand at the end of the seating area, there is a platform with a tall white screen with a bright light behind it. All night, young women dance and act out strange scenes behind the screen, letting their shadows play on it. After shadowdancing for an hour or so, they start acting out scenes behind the screen like one of them having something up her top, being pregnant, another woman helping her give birth – to a hat – which she then puts on and starts to dance with. Later they get out some kind of rubber tube and act out various sex scenes. Later they all lie on the platform and let the shadows of their legs entwine like snakes and roll around. Suffice to say this is mesmerizing entertainment. When you add the fire dancers at the bonfire on the beach, the American owner of the place handing out drinks and other substances for free, and then calling out that all ladies who dance on the bar get free drinks (and not minding when some guys, including me get up and start boogeying), you know it was a great night. Got back to the room some time in the morning and still managed, thanks to Lori’s alarm, to get up at 7 for yoga and meditation.

Lori and I go back to the market before we checkout of the guesthouse and move to the one she was originally in which now has a room much nicer than the last one for the same price and is right across the road from the beach. I grab a nap to catch up from the previous night, return the moped and get online to chat with Beck and Jett. I go for another sunset swim, something I don’t think I would tire of. Have a chat to T, but its not the same. The connection we had whilst traveling in Laos and Combodia feels pretty much gone. So be it. The next day, do yoga and med on beach, almost have it to myself that early. Hire a bicycle and spend the day exploring the town – the other beaches, the hill behind the town with views of all the beaches and out to the islands that stretch down the coats 800m offshore, the other backpacker areas on the other beaches, and the fishing port, which ends up being 8km away, much further than I anticipated. I ride back to the closest beach and have fantastic prawn noodles. Whilst I eat, women and children walk the beach offering everything from BBQ lobster and crayfish, squid on sticks to massages and manicures. I try the squid. Yum!

I get to a webcafe for my scheduled chat to Beck and Jett but the lines are terrible. I give Beck the number and she calls me. It is the first time we have spoken normally since we parted on Jan 2, over a month ago. It is magical to hear her voice so clearly, as if I could hang up, get on my bicycle, ride over to where she is and have her in my arms in a few minutes instead of the 5 weeks we still have to wait. In Cambodia, there are stores called The Boom Boom Room with a catalogue of 1000s of albums that you can buy for $1AU. I choose 50 and have them transferred to my MP3 player. I have dinner at Bayon, a restaurant that Tony who I met in Kampot recommended. From the beachchairs you can see all the way down the beach, all the lights from the various beach shack restaurants, which you cant see from where we are staying as its about 2/3 of the way down. Nice view. There is a traditional dish in Cambodia called Amok which is a creamy, not too spicy curry which is generally delicious. I order it and it isa unique and still yummy version, made with a paste rather than a sauce. I ask the owner about his unique Amok and he says Amoks are like martinis, everyone has their own version.

The next day we have all organized to do a day trip to the Reap National Park which is meant to have lots of wildlife. We drive for an hour, then ride in a cramped, hard seated boat for 1.5 hours, seeing lots of mangroves and not much else. We get to a beach where we are left to swim for a few hours, then repeat the boat and bus ride in reverse back to town – no animals, a few birds, lots of mangroves. Really just a long, uncomfortable boat trip to an island beach, but they probably don’t get many tourists on that tour. I play volleyball and soccer on the beach until sunset, have dinner at the place that has become our regular hangout, across the road from the guesthouse on the sand. That night I am asleep by 9, catching up from the Utopia party, the 20km bicycle ride the previous day and the long boat trip.

I take Sunday off from yoga and meditation. Have been doing it every day except for travel days for 3 weeks now. It feels great. Hire a moped for 1.5 days so I can ride to Utopia again that night and have it for the next day. Go shopping and have breakfast at the markets, ride around redoing the trip I did on the bicycle – boy is it more enjoyable not having to pedal. Call Beck and Jett in the afternoon and have dinner with T and J. Have a nap to prepare for another big night at Utopia – and wake at 6am instead. So be it. Go to the beach for yoga and med. This is last day in Sihanoukville, and last chance to spend time with T. We go to the market for breakfast and have 2 deserts rather than our usual 1. Deserts in Cambodia are wonderful and available all day. There are several stainless steel bowls each with their own concoction – sago pudding with banana or taro or rice balls filled with crushed nuts and sugar syrup, or sweet wild rice with coconut milk and roasted sesame seeds, or baby pumpkin stuffed with sweetened red bean paste and many more. MMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMM!!!

Spend the rest of the day lying on the beach chairs reading, eating, swimming, talking. T and J go to yoga at 5 and I take a last drive around. All 4 of us meet for dinner and T and I go to Utopia for lime juice sodas, and meet one of the Swedish girls from Don Det. We chat, she leaves and T and I say our goodbyes and head back to the guesthouse. Sihanoukville is a wondeful beach resort. Apart from Angkor, Cambodia doesnt shout out much to offer. They havent been marketing Sihanoukville properly. Its awesome. Though they do knwo it. Most of the beachfront property is in the process of being carved up to be sold for expensive resort developments or private waterfront homes. Shame, but there it is.The next morning, it is pissing down, in the middle of dry season, as I am getting ready to catch a mototaxi to the bus to Phnom Penh. I get to say goodbye to T, J and Lori. It feels like I’m starting my journey home today – home to Beck. There are more days to go til seeing her than there are passed since seeing her. It is the downhill ride. And just as good, the start of my journey to see Jett in 3 days in Vietnam. Whilst I will miss the great, fun people I have been traveling with, I am more excited about seeing my son and wife soon.

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