Rainy beaches are not so exciting

Trip Start May 06, 2007
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Trip End Jul 24, 2008


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Where I stayed
Beach Road Guest House
(Sihanoukville hotels)

Flag of Cambodia  ,
Saturday, May 10, 2008

The Saturday afternoon when I arrived in Sihanoukville was sunny and beautiful.  Little did I know that the weather was all downhill from there.  This being the rainy season, a daily rainstorm is not a surprise.  Typically there will be a downpour lasting anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour which will gradually let up until it is once again, sunny, hot, and muggy.  You can tell it's coming when the wind picks up, so you make sure you're inside somewhere to wait it out.  No big deal.  Unfortunately this wasn't the case with the rains in Sihanoukville.  Once they started coming, they didn't stop, only slowed down for the entire rest of my time there.  The beach itself also wasn't so exciting.  It was more of a dull, grey color, rather than the bright blue of many of the other beaches in the area.  Dynamite fishing has ruined most of the coral in the area, so it's not a very good place to go snorkeling or diving.

Normally the weather would have caused me to cut my stay short and move on, but I needed to get my visa for Vietnam before I could continue.  Unfortunately when I went to the visa office Monday morning, I found out that literally that day a 1-day wait for the visa had gone into affect.  If I had been there on Friday before their new policy started, I could have gotten my visa within an hour and been on my way, but since I showed up Monday morning, I had to wait until 3pm on Tuesday, meaning the earliest I could leave Sihanoukville was Wednesday morning.  In what was probably good timing, I also managed to start a cold/flu thing on Monday afternoon, leaving me laying in bed blowing my nose for a couple of days.  Thankfully there wasn't much else to do and I did have cable tv in my room, so if I had to spend a couple of days being sick this was a good time for it.

On Thursday morning I was feeling well enough for 11 hours of travel time and boarded a bus to Phnom Penh, where I had an hour and a half lunch break before my bus to Ho Chi Min City, aka Saigon, left.  The border crossing was done almost entirely by the bus attendant, requiring us only to get off the bus to pick up our passports to prove that no one was sneaking through without handing one over.  I was happy and ready to move on from Cambodia.  The moto/tuk-tuk drivers in Sihanoukville were just as aggressive as those in Phnom Penh and I was very much ready to be done with them.

Because Cambodia is so poor and has so many landmine victims, there are also many more beggars here than in the other Asian countries I've visited.  It can be a bit depressing at times, but there are a number of organizations doing a lot of good work.  Each town had a few cafes that are run by NGOs that give all their proceeds back to one organization or another.  Although I didn't take the time to stay and volunteer anywhere (most places had a 1-2 week minimum) I know that a lot of these groups really are trying to do a lot of good for the Cambodian people.  Their history, particularly their recent history, has been very depressing, but hopefully all of the good work people are doing here will make sure that their future is much more uplifting.
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