A lull in the exciting holiday

Well this entry is not going to be quite as exciting as the last couple, as we haven't really seen/done much due to us both, at different times, being sick. We went to Sihanoukville the day after our visit to the Tuol Sleng museum - it's a really nice beach only 4 hous away by bus, and it was great to be by the sea again. The beach is absolutely jam packed with umbrellas, loungers and a seemingly endless stream of hawkers (lady you want massage? lady you have hairy legs, you want shave? lady you want lobster? no? Why not?) and it is unfortunately not the cleanest beach in the world (apparently Cambodia has no rubbish bins and no organised rubbish collection or landfills, so most rubbish is either burned or dumped, which obviously creates a bit of an environmental nightmare), but if you walk 20 minutes down the beach it is deserted and you have whole stretches of white sand and blue ocean to yourself. We spent a few days there, including my birthday, which was a really nice day. Daryn arranged breakfast in bed and a really nice hotel room right on the sea and we spent the day eating seafood, lying on a stretch of deserted beach, swimming, eating more seafood and drinking. We had big plans for the birthday night which involved a large number of Mekong whiskey buckets, but Daryn was very sick that night so we had a rather dull birthday night watching TV! It was still a lovely day though. The next couple of days were also quite uneventful as I have developed some sort of problem which makes swallowing, eating and drinking very painful and put me in a bit of a bad mood so we spent most of our time in our guesthouse bar (a really cool place, thankfully) playing cards and attempting to eat (not always successful). We planned to stay in Sihanoukville a bit longer but after a visit to a doctor there which seemed to involve using some sort of pop up book as a diagnostic tool (the end diagnosis ending up as "oesophogus" - very helpful), we decided to come back to Phnom Penh to visit another doctor and try and get it all sorted out.
So we are now back in Phnom Penh, and after traipsing aroudn for a good hour or so this morning trying to find the traveller's medical clinic, only to find out it is shut for a vacation, we have put our plans on hold for a bit (we were planning to go to Ho Chi Minh tomorrow) until we can get to a doctor - preferably one whose office is not decorated by Hello Kitty. Hopefully we will be able to go to Vietnam on the 5th (we need somwhere to watch the US election!), but in the meantime we are trying to make the most of our time here and are off to the killing fields this afternoon (which many travel agents try to combine with a trip to the shooting range, which just seems wrong). I did buy some codeine (or what the 'pharmacist' claimed to be codeine) this morning and am feeling a bit drugged up so how this will affect this visit is anyone's guess.
Sorry this is all a bit boring but hopefully we will be on the road soon with far more exciting tales!
Love Hayley

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