Siem Reap to Sihanoukville

Donovan Writes:

We enjoyed Siem Reap so much we decided to stay an extra day. We visited a few more temples, one still overgrown with trees and another on top of a mountain (maybe more comparable to Cat Mountain). We spent the afternoon at the pool. The heat is pretty intense, it's obvious why it is the low tourist season. Just means we have to take everything a little slower, which is easy to do here.

Monday morning we left for a 10 hour bus ride to Sihanoukville. Overall, the trip went fine, but I definitely would avoid sitting in the front of the bus again. Seeing how close the bus driver comes to everything on the road was a little stressful. Also, it was a rare occasion that 20 seconds would pass by without him honking the horn. When we finally arrived, I was honestly surprised we hadn't killed anyone the entire trip. We did come within about 2 inches of hitting a cow though. We're now looking for a boat to take us to Vietnam.

I can't totally complain about the driving here in Cambodia. I think in some aspects, they have better system than we do. For instance, although there is traffic in Cambodia it is never stop-and-go. The reason being: there are no stoplights or even stop signs, never a reason to stop. We did see a couple stoplights on our way through Phnom Penh, but no one (including the bus driver) paid any attention to them. By avoiding ever having to stop, it really helps with the pace of traffic. Even making a left turn is easy, you just start driving down the left side of the road until you see a break in traffic big enough to get over to the right side.

When we arrived in Sihanoukville it was dark, so we just let the tuktuk driver take us to the hotel that he recommended (or got a kickback from). It wasn't the nicest place we'd seen but it had cold A/C and hot water, and being on the beach for $10 a night was hard to refuse. We had a pretty good meal at the hotel restaurant, although the 1996 bottle of Bordeaux we found collecting dust on their shelf for $17 was the highlight.

There is an obvious excess supply of restaurants and eateries here. With the exception of dinners on Pub street, we usually end up being the only customers in many of the places we eat. Works out great for us, we've always had fantastic food and great service. Hey Bill - The $1 draft beers are usually Angkor Beer and sometimes Tiger. Not the best beer in the world, but sure is worth the $1 (or $0.50 - $0.75 at happy hour). Johnny Walker is usually $2, so I haven't splurged for that yet. I did try some Mekong Whisky. It wasn't bad, but a little too sweet for me.

Internet here in Cambodia is super slow, more pictures to come when we get to Vietnam.