My First Beach!

---

This post isn't that educational and doesn't deal with any site seeing. It is all about kicking back and having a little fun.

Ever since I had stepped off the plane from a dreary British summer to the humid heat of China, I had been looking forward to a swim in the sea. I didn’t spend more than five minutes in the hotel when we arrived. All I did was drop my bag and change into my swimming costume. The beach had a large impact on my life or should I say the women and girls who worked on the beach did.

On the beach you could have massages, threading, nail painting and buy fruit and bracelets every minute of the day. The kids are the unfortunate side effect of tourism, they spend time they should be in school out making money. There are exceptions, I met one girl who was sixteen, could recite the alphabet backwards in English and wanted to become tour leader. What struck me the most though was how little they had tried. You would never hear of a kid back home who had not tried pizza. We did buy one to share with them and they were a bit over awed but it was amusing to see the faces that they pulled. Not many of them liked the taste of it, I think that was probably due to the cheese. They don’t really do dairy products in Cambodia. In between swims and a banana boat rides I did get my nails painted and bought a couple of bracelets. A couple of the kids also gave me ‘friendship bracelets’ I suspect they were trying to tempt or tug at my heart strings to get me to buy more.

I had been doing very well at avoiding sunburn so far. Even on the beach I was good. My undoing was a little boat on a rough sea. We all sat in our swim wear with our clothes thrown over our bags to protect the contents. It was a big mistake, red didn’t begin to describe us. However since one person’s phone that wasn’t in a bag did get walk and didn’t work afterwards, it was slightly justified. I used a lot of a bottle of after sun that night and the next day.

Snorkelling was done from the sun burnt boat. The coral was impressive, it hadn’t died and it was teaming with fish life. I loved every second of it and tried my hand at fishing with a plastic bottle, string and a piece of squid. Needless to say I have no fishing skills and if it hadn’t been for the boat crew and our guide, we would never have had fish for lunch on an island. And nope the island doesn’t have any history.

The only thing left to add is that I got my ipod uploaded with fifteen new albums at a dirt cheap price. I’ll be humming the songs all the way to Phnom Penh

---

Photos

Beach Night Out
Like I said,I am having a break from site seeing

The Kids
He liked my sunglasses

The Island
ah a break from people trying to sell us things

A future tour guide
and so did she but I did get the sunglasses back

Comments

[Gill Campbell]

Hi
Hi Mary and Lauren, Hope you are both having a fantastic time - thinking about you. Going to Academy Restaurant today for Christmas lunch so should be fun. I'm sure your weather is lovely - actually nice today here. Keep us posted on your travels. Love Gill xx