I’ts a holiday in Cambodia!

22-30.12.11

Ha Tien-Kep-Sihanoukville

After taking the bus from Chau Doc to Ha Tien, we hired two guys with motorbikes to take us all the way to Kep, Cambodia (even though they tried to get out of it by putting us on a tourist bus, which we kindly declined). The change from Vietnam to Cambodia is remarkably distinct! Red dirt roads, awesome landscapes and people. I instantly took my liking to this country.

Funny thing with the money. The local official currency is Riel, which translates to 4000R/1$. Anyhow, US dollar is accepted as local currency everywhere. Even the ATM only gives out USD! So when you pay with a dollar, usually you get riels back for any amount less than a dollar. Confusing in the beginning but I got hang of it quite fast.

Feeling comfortable enough on a motorbike to shoot some views 🙂 This might just be my new favourite means of travel, for short distances anyhow. Nothing quite like hanging in the back of a bike, riding less than decent dirtroads and soaking in the scenery, wind in your hair…

We were covered all over with this red dust after only 30 minutes ride.

Nothing quite like a cold Angkor to wash the dust out of our throats 😛 My country, my beer!

Decided to chill out in Kep for a few days before we would rent motorbikes to go to Sihanoukville. Kep is nothing special actually. It is however a very peaceful and quiet place to relax on a very small beach with a nice bottle of Barroso banana whishy or superwhisky (featured on the picture). With 2$ a bottle, it will not put a dent in your wallet. (Unless the aftermath involves losing 40$ mysteriously. Just saying.) I wouldn’t recommend them for taste though.

Kep is also known for it’s exquisit seafood. Even though I never was a big fan of seafood, I wanted to give the seafood platter a try, and it was actually very good!

To this day I don’t understand why we rented the motorbikes from Kep, as we would have to return them to the same place. Also, they would have been cheaper in Sihanoukville. End result? 2 days of riding, 11 days idling. Very expensive indeed 😀 Not going to repeat that mistake.

So we got to Sihanoukville on Christmas eve! Checked in and head to the beach to enjoy our Christmas meal. This year it was shark.

From Antti’s face you can tell it was very satisfactory 🙂

Made phone calls to home and kept on enjoying the sunset on Serendipidy beach along with some refreshments. BTW Serendipidy beach is full of tourists. But it didn’t really matter because we had enough entertainment watching people and talking bullshit. That’s what we do best.

The ingeniuty of Asian people never ceases to amaze me ^^

During the week we kind of became regulars on this one beach bar. More often than not we had company from this cute puppy (and sometimes his friends). Antti dug this trap hole in the hopes we could stew some local delicacy “pit-dog” and what do you know? He actually got in voluntarily!

On a sidenote: as soon as we left Vietnam, we started seeing adult dogs on the streets again. It can’t be a coincidence that in Vietnam you only see puppies on the streets…

The plan was to leave Sihanouk for Koh Rong island 3 hours south-west of the coast, but as always, our timetables flex a lot. It took us almost a week to haul our asses to a tour organiser and book the boat. We were headed to Broken Heart Guesthouse (have to love the name!) on the non-touristic side of Koh Rong. And that’s where we found ourselves In the end of the year.

Departure!