Sihanoukville is the main beach city  in Cambodia, so I spent most of the time relaxing on the various beaches. Unfortunately, as it turned out, I stayed at the wrong site of the city. While the beach next door itself wasn’t too bad, it was pretty lonely. The main beach, were most of the people and all the backpackers went, was on the other side of city, about a 1h walk away. Cheap as I am, I walked most of the time, also sometimes I took the motorbike back for 1$…

The first time I arrived at the main beach, it was packed with people, mainly locals. It was the kings birthday and it was a national holiday…

While on the beach, there are tons of people that approach you, trying to sell you stuff, like fresh fruits (can you ever get enough of fresh pineapples?), massages (I couldn’t say no to a 1h massage for 5$; not in the daily budget, but for one time…very niiice), sun glasses and various other stuff. And of course you have all the kids that try to sell you bracelets (by now I had about 10!). Surprisingly most people spoke a very good English, especially the kids. We met a girl that was maybe 8 or 9 years old that spoke a perfect oxford English! Incredible! Why aren’t the Thai’s like that?!? Once the kids realized that you’re not buying (anymore) bracelets, they asked you if they could play billiard against you for money. Some of them were really, really good. I met an English guy, that lost 80$ on one day, all against kids under 14 years old…

At one day I booked a boat tour to some island. It was pretty expensive with 25$, but some people recommended it to me and the flyer sounded good (and I was bored). The captain was a cool german guy with a beer belly.

First we stopped on the shore of a small island where we could go snorkeling. The view wasn’t really good at this time of the year, but I was still able to see some nice soft and hard corals in various colors; not too many fish so…

After that we went to this amazing island, with an postcard picture beach and some mangroves inside of the island.

Robert, the captain, gave us a really interesting tour through the mangroves and explained us the different things we were able to see, like tons of wild orchids etc.

Afterwards we had time to relax at the beach. It was waaay to hot to lay on the beach, so we moved into the shallow water, which wasn’t really that much cooler. I am not kidding, when I say the water had bathtub temperatures!!! It felt more like a wellness bath than a bath in the open ocean. 

Back on board we had some time to jump of the boat and enjoy some cold beers. On the way back, Robert claimed to have EVERY song on his laptop, so we made it a game to request songs and see if he had them. He really had A LOT of songs, even some very rare stuff. As I met some really great guys on the boat, it was an awesome trip. Highly recommended!

On the next few days I explored some more beaches (I think Sihanoukville has at least 5 different beaches) and spent most evenings playing billiard in some bars.

Somewhere in between I got my visa for Vietnam in Sihanoukville. Vietnam is very strict, so when I applied for the visa, I had to give them a fixed date on when I will enter Vietnam. The original plan was to visit Kep and Kampot (two other towns on coast) in Cambodia, before I went to Vietnam, so I gave them a date 1 week ahead. But when I talked to Tina and Bram on Facebook, they told me that both towns were boring and they didn’t recommend going there. So I ended up spending 11 days in Sihanoukville, before I was able to book a bus to Vietnam.

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