Rain, clouds and jellyfish

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Named for the most loved and loathed king in Cambodian history, Sihanouk, emptied by the Khmer Rouge and now overrun with a more or less agreeable crowd of tourists and Cambodian entrepreneurs. Sihanoukville is the most important port in modern Cambodia. Before 200 years ago, when the lower Mekong delta belong to Cambodia, trade moved up and down the "mother of all rivers". The region was always hard for the kingdom to maintain control over and as a result of 400 000 migrating Vietnamese the area was permanently lost and remains Vietnam today. Port towns always have a peculiarity to them as a result of the inevitable smuggling and drug trafficking that comes with a port. Hamiltonians experience this phenomenon on a daily basis, often loudly and late at night. When reading about this place one of the comments was "this is the place where you will see an obese geriatric german man with a young hooker on each arm; this has proved to be an uncommon sight but there are a few bars that you only go to if you wanna "boom boom" as local touts have coined it. For the most part this is a tourist and wealthy local geared place much like dozens of other beach towns that still have a more or less natural coastline.

The beach is reminiscent of Goa for us with the massive number of people kindly offering services you do not want. Jenna gets bothered more because a lot of women walk around with manicure kits and will exfoliate or massage you at your beach chair. There are hoards of young kids with bracelets and shoddy fireworks for sale but they are fun to joke with. They get you to play tic tac toe or rock paper scissors with them and if you loose you have to buy something. I thought i could beat little ali at tic tac toe but we tied one and i lost one... how arrogant of me. In Goa these folks would be much less funny to talk to and much more aggressive and distasteful so it is not problematic for us so much. I would prefer not to be bothered but must accept that they have had a very different life me and act according to their needs, whether or not i agree. One the whole this is the first place since Lao that we have been able to really happily relax. The theme here is all day happy hour and cheap barbecue and we are acting pretty indulgently to prepare for the next leg of the trip where we stay away from civilization for a couple weeks.

There is a community a few hours from here that used to be focused on poaching and illegal logging but recently has stopped those activities and converted to ecotourism and conservation. There are trips ranging from 1 - 6 days cycling, hiking or kayaking (or any combination you want of those 3) and they even run camping trips! The community is only accessible by boat which is fun and apparently the food is ultra-fresh and mostly locally produced. Almost sounds a little too cheery but we are going anyways and hope to see lots of animals and go fishing and camp!!! Oh camping in Canada... where there aren't dozens of poisonous snakes, toxic centipedes and fire ants everywhere. Oh camping how we miss thee!

We don't really have a plan for how to get to northeast Cambodia but it is generally accessible and filled with lots of bad roads and small mountain towns. Our goal is to go to Banlung, near Lao, to visit a crater lake in a 700 000 year old extinct volcano called Yeak Laom. Our general goals for the rest of our time here is to stay away from cities except for when we head to Angkor Wat. So one more day of being a beach bum then its off into the jungle. I miss the ocean already but the plentiful jellyfish and rain today were nice reminders that it's not always a beach at the beach. The jellyfish move according to the phases of the moon and currents according to locals. I don't know whether that is true or not but i do know that they make swimming unpleasant and they aren't nice to eats, so that's 2 big strikes against them . We couldn't see them as they stung us because they were too small but lots of others beach-goers were complaining of stings also. (none of which were serious, just painful)

That's all for now. There are lots of new photos but no computers have been functional enough to upload them yet.
We miss you all
Brian and Jenna

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Comments

[Dean]

Jellyfish . . .
Looking forward to posts from less populated places. Just thinking about being on a beach full of people gives me the shakes. Good luck, have fun.