Sihanoukville, Cambodia

Oct 16- Sihanoukville, Cambodia
So we thought it was a sleeper train, but the term is applied very loosely. In reality, it was like a refrigerator with slightly reclining seats (Stephs more than mine! grrrr broken chair!).  Today we arrived in Phnom Penh at about 5am, an hour before we were supposed to, and had to wait till 7:45 for the next bus to Sihanoukville.  Arriving on time, we boarded and awkwardly watched Khmer music videos and read for the ride.  We got to Sihanoukville around 1 and immediately negotiated a tuk tuk to the Vietnamese Consulate to procure our visas.  Sadly, Visas are only done till noon on Saturdays, so we are stuck waiting till Monday.  We then went to our hostel, Mick and Craigs, which was a fairly nice place (meaning a reasonably comfortable mattress, fan, and mosquito net).  After settling in for a bit, we walked down to the beach to check out the lay of the land.  The beach we came to was called Serendipity, which was not nearly as nice as that sounds.  There was trash and the water was just sort of brown, not to mention the 30 or so Khmer tourists there on a company retreat (beeline mobile, if you're interested).  We decided to walk along it anyways, eventually making our way back to a restaurant to eat some barracuda and sip on a shake.  Tonight we stopped back at the bar Cool Banana to watch a movie, which was the first time we'd seen a western movie in about a month.

Oct 17- A day at the Beach
Western breakfast!  It was awesome!  We shared some fried eggs, a hashbrown, a baguette, banana pancakes and BACON!!!  Oh wonderful, amazing, awesome BACON!!!!  In other news, today we went to the beach.  We rented a moto (aka scooter) (don't worry moms we had helmets) and headed out towards Otres beach, which had been highly recommended to us by our hostel in Siem Reap.  It was largely deserted; we only saw about 10 other people the entire time we were there. It was awesome.  Even still, the most interesting part of this beach was getting back to Sihanoukville.  A note on driving in Cambodia:  if you have a moto, just about anything is drivable.  The roads, or at least a lot of them, are dirt (and right now mud) and largely uneven, filled with wonderful potholes and obstacles for you to nearly crash on.  Seriously, it takes some amount of skill and a great backseat driver to navigate these roads.  And bridges are shanty (seriously, several 2x4s nailed together), enough said.  Anyways, we ended up on a backroad that took much longer than we thought, almost got us stuck or made us crash a couple times, but eventually led back to Sihanoukville.  Our original plan (we left at ~2:15) was to try and make a brewery tour at the Cambrew Brewery at 3pm (they brew Angkor, really popular/famous in Cambodia), but that failed.  We got the the brewery (lucky even to find it!) at around 3:15-3:30 but they told us that they only did tours on Wednesdays. Damn...  Instead we traveled over to Independence Beach and ended up on a stretch of private beach of a pretty nice looking hotel (we probably weren't supposed to be there, but being white in Asia has its privileges).  Wanting to check out another beach, we left and found Sohka beach, another private beach we definitely shouldn't have been at (they had a guard, we just walked right past).  At Sohka beach we had some papaya salad with some really fishy tasting crab mashed into it.  More on that later.  We arrived back at our hotel and found some food, then settled down for some Iron Man 2 and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.  We were really excited about Tomb Raider, as it was filmed at Ankor.  As Lara kicked butt and took names, I imagined how different Ankor in the movies is from real life.  "Hello Ladyyy. Hello Misterrr.  Bracelet?  One dollla.  One dolllllaaaa.  Ok, 20 for one dolllllaa."  More about fishy crab.  It gives you diarrhea.  Or really, it gave me diarrhea, Steph was fine (iron-gut prevails! for now at least).  But it wasn't that bad, mostly just a stomach ache and a couple more trips to the bathroom than I'd want.  A really light case at best, but still, it ruined our perfect record so far.

Oct 18- Massive day of Internet
Wake up, breakfast, and off to the Consulate for our visa.  Easiest visa ever.  I go in, barely put my name on the application and a bit more info and the guy walks up and asks when I want to enter Vietnam.  I tell him, then he says, "Forty- five dolla.  One picta." So I give him the stuff, and start filling out Steph's form, writing her name and filling out about 1/3 of the application, he again says $45, takes her passport and picture.  It was all done in about.... 7.5 minutes.  Literally.  I think I payed $45 for a guy to put a sticker on my passport.  Hopefully it works (we'll find out in a few days).  After passport, it started raining, so we decided to do some much needed internet catchup.  This is when we made our new picture website which you can visit at philstephasia.shutterfly.com.  It took a long time, so if you're interested I hope you can find time to browse through a few of our albums.  We later went to Sohka beach, again feeling slightly out of place (it was deserted except for the people working the resort bar on the beach- $3 for a can of Ankor beer- outrageous! No way we were going to pay that much.).  Pre-dinner cart food snack of dried frogs (which tasted like dried fish), escargo (with a black pepper and lime 'sauce'), and chicken wings. Dinner at Cool Banana and watching the Runaways and Robot Chicken.