Sihanoukville and Lazy Beach

Golden Lions at Sihanoukville

Ochheuteal beach Sihanoukville

On from Kampot to Sihanoukville, Cambodia's main beach resort town.  It's still very much early days, but the signs of development are here, and the town seems to be going somewhere in between a Pattaya and Nha Trang style of development.  For the time being it's all pretty low key, with beach shacks serving seafood and drinks with plenty of beach loungers and vendors hanging about.  Some of the beaches have already been bought up, and Cambodia seems to be going down the route of private beaches and expensive resorts.

The view from our bungalow... morning swims, ahhh

But we're not here for Sihanoukville this time... just a night in town then we're off to the Islands, Lazy Beach Bungalows on one of the islands as yet untouched by development.

Two and a half hours by boat from town (passing the USS Essex - a medium Aircraft Carrier doing excercises with the Cambodian Navy and sending a Super Sea Stallion to check us out), Lazy beach is the perfect get away from Phnom Penh.  Simplicity into perfection.  One relatively small beach with 14 simple wooden bungalows and no other resorts, karaoke, vendors, villages etc.  Just natural beach, excellent for swimming, surrounded by rocky hills still covered with primary forest cover. 

Simple but very effective

Three days of beaching, good food, and not so much else... looking forward to the next visit!  More pics, click here!

 

Kampot and Bokor National Park

Sunset over Bokor Mountain from our Guest House

Colonial buildings in Kampot

Back to Kampot for a week's holidays in coastal Cambodia.  This time we stayed in Kampot for two nights, planning on visiting Bokor National Park, famous for its ruined hill station at the top, as well as relatively intact forest and remaining biodiversity. 


Kampot's a lovely sleepy riverside town, again as in Cambodia's provincial towns, filled with decaying French colonial buildings and Chinese style shop fronts.

Guesthouse Kampot

The benevolent looking CCP leaders

We took an organised day trip into Bokor National Park, unfortunately these days it's not possible to visit independently, as the park (as with so much of Cambodia) has been leased to a Chinese company who are redeveloping the old French hill station into a modern Casino, hotel and resort complex... all with rather dubious funding and business planning.  Time will tell whether this will be profitable and what impact it will have on the park's biodiversity, as always the idea being income generated by the concession will pay for conservation activities.

Note the guard's AK is complete with
folding bayonet

The ruined casino

So the merry group of day trippers met at the park's entrance and transferred to the back of a pick-up and on into the park for a hour or so trek, then back on the pick-up for the last leg of the journey to the old hill station.  Our guide was an interesting chap, a supporter of the Khmer Rouge (the park was a Khmer Rouge stronghold until quite recently).  It's easy for us Phnom Penhers to overlook so much of these issues facing the country, but truth is many Cambodians fought with the Khmer Rouge, and many supported their ideas... the rural poor overthrowing the wealthy urbanites, something the current generation of Lexus driving city dwellers should not forget. 

The Ballroom

We didn't see any wildlife, but heard Gibbons calling, and it was good to be in the countryside again and to stretch our legs. 

Reaching the hill station wasn't quite as eerie as it might have been, passing the large casino construction site, but eerie none the less, faded charms of past riches...  According to accounts, during the Vietnamese invasion, Vietnamese troops were held up in the Catholic Church with Khmer Rouge in the old casino... saying that, there's no bullet scars on either building, so could be one for the tourists...

For more pictures, click here.

Road Trip! Kampong Cham and baboon-butts

People hanging out the back of a minibus

Back to blogging... it's been a while since I've wrote on the blog, and keeping in the theme of travelling, here's a bit about our road trip on my magnificant(ish) new (29 year old) motorbike, and an introduction about rural roads in Cambodia.

Well, Cambodia as I've said before, is very different to Vietnam and perhaps most noticeably, when it comes to economic development.  Leaving the city and the scenery very quickly becomes very rural and subsistence based farming communities, and the roads (including the main highways) deteriorate.

Rural villages outside Phnom Penh

Pretty much only the main national routes (of which they're 7) are surfaced, the remainder either graded gravel or not much more than cart track... one does begin to wonder what exactly the tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure aid money has been spent on. 

Beers by the Mekong in Kampong Cham

Slow progress up the 70 miles following the river up to Kampong Cham... bumpy roads taking over four hours to reach the town.  The bike, though super-cool, probably isn't the best for these roads, even the surfaced roads are very bumpy and potholed, so an off-road machine would be best for this country (have a look at our Lao road trip way back and see my comments there).

The highway to Kratie

Kampong Cham is apparently the third largest city in Cambodia after PP and Battammbang, but feels very small, and not much going on, other than a quiet few beers by the river and a dodgy dinner in the market.  The town used to be much busier as it was a major ferry crossing over the Mekong before the bridge was built, now traffic up to Kratie and beyond just passes through the town.  As with many provincial towns in Cambodia, the central market area has a few decaying colonial era shop houses, various signs of NGO activities and are generally quiet places with not too much going on.



Our original plan was to head up to Kratie and Stung Treng, following the Mekong Discovery trail, but numerous factors, including sharing the only road with the ubiquitous speeding Lexus 4x4s, aching bottoms, a dodgy stomach (me) and a desire for the beach, we headed back to Phnom Penh... the north will have to wait until next time.  For more pictures, click here!