On the 25th of November we shuffled on down the coast a little bit from Kampot to Sihanoukville.
Kampot isn’t quite on the coast, although it is pretty close to Kep beach, which we went to yesterday, but Sihanoukville is famous for being ‘the beach resort’ in Cambodia. I think it’s safe to say everyone was looking forward to hitting the beach. And no one had malaria or dengue fever! Yet.
There’s no public bus between Kampot and Sihanoukville; you can get there by hiring two vans, which means you can leave at 10.30am, which means you have plenty of time for breakfast for a change, and it means you can have a bit of a sleep in, and that was very much what the doctor ordered.
Kep used to be famous for being ‘the beach resort’ in Cambodia but the old majestic houses are now visible only in the front garden walls near the seafront. Sihanoukville is a different matter.
The bus trip was pretty nice, actually, flinging through the countryside in relative comfort, five people in a nine person van. I had my headphones in and was listening to music from my phone. Listening to music from your phone, especially when they gave you a free 1GB memory card when you got the phone. Listening to Led Zeppelin makes it even better. Just outside Sihanoukville we came across some sort of factory, either for shoes or clothes or both, at the precise moment that about 400 orange clad workers came out the front gates for a snack break, and the snack stall owners couldn’t have looked more enthusiastic.
Sihanoukville is named after the old King Sihanouk, who departed from the throne around 1970, and also after the many Kings Sihanouk before him. But before it was known as Sihanoukville, it was called Kampong Som, which is how some Cambodians still think of it. It’s a surprisingly large and spread out town, and you can feel the beach coming as you drive along. We drove down one of the leafy streets and the two vans pulled into an alley, where we found the Starfish restaurant. It’s run by the starfish foundation, which benefits disabled people. The restaurant and shop are also staffed by disabled people.
The starfish reference is from a Buddhist parable where a master is walking along the beach, covered in starfish washed up by the tide, and stops to pick one up and return it to the ocean. ‘But master,’ says the pupil – as all pupils says in Buddhist parables these days – ‘why do you bother when there are so many you cannot help?’ Or words to that effect. ‘It doesn’t make any differecnce,’ says the pupil. “it makes a different to this one’, says the master, as he puts the starfish back in the ocean. And so forth.
The tables outside are crowded over by durian trees, and the word is that durians fall from the tree when ripe, and that can be at any time. Nobody was all that eager to sit under the durians, seeing as they’re kind of spiky in addition to smelling like rotting corpses when cut open. We luxuriated in the sun and the comfy chairs and the appetising menu. We ended up getting the mediterranean sandwich, which is basically a salad sandwich, but with things like marinated eggplant and red capsicum, hummus, red cabbage, carrot and all that kind of stuff which goes well with a proper espresso, which I had finally managed to lay my olfactory nerves upon.
After lunch we had a good look around the shop, and I wanted to get a orange t-shirt which had a white band across the middle and ‘Cambodia’ stitched upon in the band in green. It was pretty funky. But they had large, which could be used as a parachute, and small, which could be used to increase blood pressure as desired, but no medium. So no t-shirt; but we did pick up a bunch of cool stuff as souvenirs and presents and whatnot.
From there it was a short ride down to our hotel, where we set about some old-fashioned sink washing and quickly turned our otherwise comfortable room into a chinese laundry, what with the wet clothes hanging from the window frames and that type of thing. Then we strolled on down to the beach, which is long and narrow, and fronted all along with various types and qualities of shacks and huts. Jetskiers and boats twiddled a little way out from the shallow water, which was warm with hardly a wave in sight. We swam back and forth in the sun, taking it very easy.
An hour or so later we walked the 500m back to the hotel, and decided that the hotel pool looked like a pretty good place to be. The usual quota of fat sunburnt Europeans, of course, but there’s nothing to be done about that. It wasn’t as warm as the ocean, but definitely warm for a swimming pool. Amanda, Jamie and Ella were splashing about too, and had been wondering whose room had all the laundry hanging up. Sherry and Lou came in from the beach, and we lazed around in the water.
Another group dinner was afoot, but being starving as we were we tried to fit in some garlic bread from the hotel restaurant, which of course took ages and they were just about to leave without us, but the kitchen wrapped it up for take away. That filled the little afternoon tea hole, but predictably we waited a while for dinner. Seems we just weren’t learning about the perils of going out in a large group. Along the road back into the main town of Sihanoukville there is a biggish roundabout, ornamented with two large golden statues of lions. Nothing remarkable about that, except that they seemed – how can I put this? – well-equipped… seems like in the west we make our statues so as not to be overly realistic, but in Cambodia they make their animal statues balls and all.
And I wasn’t the only one to notice, for the record.
The restaurant owners were friendly and knew that they were keeping us waiting, but there was nothing much that the three of them could do about it, except for deliver drinks quickly, which they did. But when dinner came – what a dinner! Anyone who ordered amok found themselves with an empty coconut full of creamy spicy loveliness. And they left the restaurant with 8-month food babies. A good time was had by all, you could say.
And it wasn’t far to walk home.
Greg
