phom pen to sihanoukville

victory hill
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after 2 nights in the comfortable narin guesthouse we left early for sihanoukville. the journey was really smooth with lots of camboidan kare-oke.

sihanoukville is a sea side resort town, the town itself was built in the 50's around a large port. the community is poor and the town is pretty grotty with the 2 main backpacker and tourist areas on the beach just out of town.

we stayed in the weird backpacker area in victory hill which is essentially a few dirt streets lined with guesthouses, girly bars and other effemeral establishments. sihanoukville showed us again the huge void between the wealth of western tourists and the locals. lots of hawkers, lots of beggars and lots of moto drivers who are really enthusiastic about driving you anywhere.

couple of beers after a hard day
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all this sounds pretty negative! however all the people we met local or otherwise were very hospitable and the beaches are almost untouched in some places.

on our second day we hired a bike and as with phon pen we experience the very specific fear or kyner raods! seemingly there are no raod laws. people move for push bikes, puch bikes get out the way of motobikes, motor bikes move for cars etc etc and thats it. but with all this aparent lawlessness we saw no trouble on the roads. no road rage, not even close. at best everybody just takes it slow and is very easy.

alex and the bike after a cabodian down poor
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the bike enabled us to find some beautiful spots on the beach and other than some kids who were quite interested in our stuff we were able to get throughly sunburnt!

sihanoukville is definately worth a look but as with alot of what we have seen its being deveoped at a very fast rate. in other words, get there soon.