Recovering on the beach

A Sihanoukville sunset
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The next day, we hit the road for Sinoukville - me slightly sore! A lovely ride with relatively good roads for Cambodia. The next 3 days would be spent deservedly relaxing on the beach. I needed to recover from the ride of my life and Al needed to get some rest before heading back to London and work (what’s that again?!). Sihanoukville is actually very quiet apart from beachvending activity on the main beach, and nightlife is mainly dinner and a beer on the beach which is lovely. So imagine our surprise when there turned out to be a party the night before we were due to leave…would have been rude not to see out the end of our travels together with a celebration - so we somehow ended up drinking and dancing till 4am, which considering we had a 6am morning departure might not have been the most sensible…

Having had my legs 'threaded', I challenge Al to feel pain, woman-style
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Hung-over and tired we biked back to Kampot to give back the bikes with only a minor incident of running out of petrol on the way, and me only having to pay $10 for trashing the bike. Then 5 hours getting back to Phom Penh. A quick walk round town, a bite and a shower and then it was time to say a sad goodbye. We’d had some amazingly memorable adventures and some really good chats, almost figuring out the meaning of life, the universe and everything, almost. It had been great to travel together but Al’s path now takes him home and mine is takes me onto the next adventure and the beginning of solo travel proper… So finding myself in Phnom Penh that night, I think to take a stroll for some food…the night market near my hotel was alive with stalls – mainly offering up beetles, grubs, deep fried spiders, grasshoppers, cockroaches etc. I was tempted – but there was no-one around who could explain how to eat them – well thats my story and Im sticking to it - so I played it safe and chowed down on a whole deepfried frog and some Khmer spicy sausages on a stick before beautiful night's sleep in a lovely hotel.