By the seaside

Now we are beside the seaside and life is good! It took the best part of another day's worth of bus journey to get us here, but get here we did. (and treated ourselves to a wee impromtu night out to celebrate - think my t-total days are truly behind me now!) There's not too much to be said about our past 2 days of bus rides, it's a lovely way to travel in Cambodia - the scenery is beautiful and rural, the ticket cheap and the onboard entertainment (all in Cambodian) pretty dam funny. There's absolutely no chance of going to sleep and missing any scenery because the drivers are well trained in excessive use of the horn. They hare along the country roads, horn blaring, people and traffic scattering to make way. The only living thing that is going to slow that bus down is cows, we passed a fair few herds and then the bus stops entirely and patiently waits while a whole herd of cows make their leisurely way across the road.

We arrived in Sihanoukville which is supposed to be the tourist mecca of Cambodia. We were actually pleasantly surprised how undeveloped it is. The beach is lined with plenty of bars and guesthouses but there's still a fair few that are nice ramshackle huts - it hasn't been developed to within an inch of it's life (yet!). Last night we stumbled across a cool, grungy style bar with dangerously cheap drinks and chatty people so we sort of never left. Well, that's a lie - we eventually left when my stomach commanded and I dragged us off in search of food. The food we found was from this awesome BBQ shack, I ordered chips and the lady actually got a potato, chopped it up and fried it up - right then and there. I have never in all my nights out ever found a place that serves up freshly cut potato chips to the drunken masses, I'm pretty sure I went on about this fact a lot! I was also kind of ashamed at the amount of tourists from all over the world who came up and were just plain rude to the nice people cooking the chips. Drunk people really don't make the nicest people but still there's no excuse to speak rudely to the people who are up at 3 in the bloody morning, cooking chips, earning pittance and putting up with drunken imbeciles!

Today we have eaten and played on the beach and just thinking about eating again. We were planning on travelling on to one of the islands here but right now that seems like unnecessary effort and our budget's really tight so we may just stay put and enjoy for a day or so.