Snoozing in Snooky

Surprisingly (to me anyway) the internet speed is much much better in Laos, however it's more expensive even than Cambodia. $6 an hour is not uncommon here, but I've found a place for less than $1 and the better speed makes it much better value than Cambodia. However, I'm now so far behind the blog, I'm going to have to spend hours and hours catching up... so here goes!

The arrival in Phnom Penh was quite a let -down. The city didn't seem nice, the wealth gap was evident, and the menus were much dearer. Soon we discovered that Cambodian food is nothing like as nice as Vietnamese food and the coffee is similarly poor by comparison. To be fair, neither are that bad, it's just that Vietnam is excellent for food and coffee. The street food is less available and not so good, and there's no bia hoi (how were we to survive such a country?)! We decided to get out of Phnom Penh quickly and go to the "chill-out" town of Sihanoukville, where the last battle of the Vietnam war was fought, and where we planned to plan the rest of our time in Cambodia; we'd been spending too much time on novels and not enough time on guide books.

Phnom Penh was hot. Vietnam had been increasingly hot as we headed south, and certainly by Saigon we noticed the increasingly greasy and sweaty appearance we have in all the photos. You'll be glad to hear that this all gets worse in Cambodia. The temperature was over 35C every day for the first part. The humidity was high; 60+ the only time I checked, but it felt like a Turkish bath the whole time. I think part of the problem is that, although Vietnam is hot, you usually have a sea breeze, whereas Cambodia is mostly not on the sea and always feels still. Another thing we noticed quite quickly about Cambodia is that there are even more francophones than Vietnam; as you pass people (tourists only) on the street they say "bonjour" rather than hello. The Cambodians say "hello".

We had also discovered (observe our fantastic organisation and foresight) that it's not possible to get a visa for Laos on the border coming from Cambodia, although every other border allows you to. So the plan we came up with was arrange a visa in Phnom Penh, which takes several days, go to Sihanoukville to get some relaxing beach time for several days, while the visa is being processed, then return and continue with whatever plan we came up with while chilling.

Our first bucket

Of course before we headed off to "Snooky" we met Marty and Jochem who were (of course) staying in the same hotel as we were. Where we were seemed very expensive so, before we left, we had a look at the Lakeside area, which the guide book had scared Joanne and Hollie away from. The Lakeside seemed OK, if a bit "ultra-backpacker", and the hostels were all built around slums; the atmosphere in the hostels was very nice and relaxed, the prices were a bit lower, and there was a suspiciously relaxing aroma in the air. While we were there I sampled the national specialities of Luc Lac and Mekong "Whisky". And Joanne and I encountered our first ever "bucket".

Snooky sunset

We organised our Laos visa swith the hotel and were off. Snooky is a beach resort. Actually there is a town, but we were on the the Serendipity Beach stretch. It is very nice and relaxing, but there is no "unesco tourism", only backpacker tourism, so nothing much to do but lie around on sun lounger and get wasted, which is more-or-less what we did.

Gecko-zilla

We also went diving one day, which was a bit disappointing, but prepares us for Thailand where we'll hopefully dive again. There's not really much to say about Sihanoukville except it's easy to relax there, they have the cheapest beer in Cambodia (it's made there), and it's easy to get wasted there (which we did). Oh - and they have the biggest geckos I'd ever seen.

Snoozing in Snooky

Sihanokville, Cambodia