Sihanoukville, Cambodia

  Sihanoukville, Cambodia
Saturday, June 28, 2008

We arrived in Sihanoukville (also known as Snookyville!) on Cambodia's southern coast at 4pm last Tuesday. For the whole 5 hour bus journey it bucketed down. Now, apart from lying on the lovely beaches all day and the excellent night-life, restaurants, bars and clubs there is to offer in Sihanoukville, there really is nothing else to do. We had planned on staying for 5 days, lying by the beach by day and partying at night, but that depended on the weather.
We checked into the same hotel as the Irish girls we've been tagging along with since Vietnam. A nice hotel in the middle of all the action and just a 5 minute walk to the Serendipity Beach. We had drinks that evening in a bar called Monkey Republic and I won $10 in a pool tournament. $10 goes a long way in Cambodia, 2 nights accommodation, 10 pints of beer (20 at happy hour!) so I was delighted with that! We got talking to a few people during the tournament and everyone was telling us about a bar on the beach called the Dolphin Bar. So we hit there around midnight and stayed til I don't know what hour.

The Gang

Grace, Lydia & Ciara getting Messy

Next morning, everytime I opened my eyes, all I could see was rain pelting off the window so kept turning over and going back to sleep. It was still raining when we got up around 2pm and we just got something to eat then went online for a while. Really nothing to do when it rains, we were cursing the bloody typhoon that brought all this rain. We met 2 lads from Cork and myself, Lydia, the 4 Irish girls and the 2 lads had a poker tournament and then had a few more games of cards. One thing led to another and it turned out to be a 12 hour session! Had a really mad night, don't remember much of it but there was a lot of messy photos the next morning!
Thursday morning was the same, rain, rain and more rain. When we finally dragged ourselves out of bed we booked a bus for the following day to Siem Reap. There was no point staying in Sihanoukville in the rain drinking ourselves into oblivion every night!!! We went for a walk round the beach front and actually got in for a dip even though it was raining on and off. Had a quiet one that night, went out for a nice traditional Khmer dinner and home to bed early - a 9 hour bus journey to Siem Reap awaited us at 7am the next morning.

Lorraine, Ciara, Grace, Edel & Lydia

Lydia & Grace

If the weather was better I'd say Sihanoukville would have been really good and we'd have spent the best part of a week there but we didn't want to keep saying "maybe it'll be sunny tomorrow" and then wasting more days away in the bars and nightclubs!