Sihanoukville and Otres Beach

After visiting Siem Reap, we bused south to the beach town of Sihanoukville. It took us all day on the bus, with a transfer at Phnom Penh. Sihanoukville is a city with a very different feeling to it - it is built more for motorbikes and vehicle traffic, with wide paved streets. It was a strange thing to be in such an open city, as Siem Reap has much narrower streets and lower buildings. And no dust! Everywhere in Siem Reap are patches of the red soil, so my memories of the town are washed in a rusty color.

We arrived around 8pm and caught a tuk-tuk, for a reasonable hard-negotiated price, down to Otres Beach. Otres is at the southernmost end of Sihanoukville, and the quietest, most relaxed, beach in town (currently). The most famous beach is Serendipity - but it is a wild scene at night from what we heard - lots of drunken tourists and trash.

Otres was everything we wanted. There are two sections to the beach - Otres 1 and Otres 2, and between them a long empty stretch of public beach. We learned on our first night, when we stayed on Otres 2, that it is dangerous to walk at night between the two inhabited sections. There are problems with drugs, and muggings at night are not uncommon.

But, that aside, Otres was incredibly lovely and laid-back. We moved our second night to Otres 1, which is closer to town and has a little bit more going on. Our place was at the Otres Orchid Guesthouse - a sweet place with bungalows, hammocks, and a momma chicken with babies (who Devlin quickly adopted and tried to train to eat from his hand).

A random cow who wandered down the street

We quickly found our local hangouts. The food options are limited on the beach, and a tuk-tuk ride to town was a spendy $9 one-way ($3 per person), so we pretty much kept to Otres 1 for the week we were there. Our favorite places to eat were:

• Bamboo Shack: great cheap breakfasts and fried rice
• Chez Paou: a great restaurant run by French ex-pat William and his Cambodian family, and the best place in town for pool. There are often nightly tournaments for a $2 entry fee - but watch out, William and Cham (one of the bartenders) are extremely good! Try the beef lok-lak, or the tom yam soup - they are par excellence. 
• The Indian place: both great for its all-you-can-eat sets, and also because it sells happy stuff (ahem - "happy" pizzas, joints, and wild mushroom shakes
• The red place: I don't know the name, but all their decor is red - they have great little round concrete platforms on the beach which have hammocks (although the cocktails are pretty pricey)
• Mushroom Point: a cool funky place with a fantastic central domed bar, and neat lights (but again, a bit pricey)

We spent our days lounging on beach chairs watching the waves, going for swims, and then watching the sunset with a cold beer. Our  nights were most often spent at Chez Paou playing pool. I spent one fabulous morning watching fish at the most northern point of Otres, where it meets with a rocky cliff edge, separating it from the adjacent beach. Although I got a sunburn for my trouble, I had a fantastic time watching little schools of fish float past me. 

To town we ventured just a couple times - once for money and little things like flip-flops and bugspray, and the next to get our tourist visas for Vietnam. They are a hefty $60 (it just increased from $45 to $60 in December 2012). 

The roof going up at the new restaurant

All in all, it was a fabulous and relaxing time, filled with beautiful sunsets, tons of stars at night, fruit smoothies spiked with cheap coconut rum from the corner store, sand, and aqua ocean. Otres is a place in a state of rapid flux - in the week we were there, a new bar/restaurant went from a rough concrete pad and a shell of a structure, to fully-finished. In the next five years, I imagine, the place will be completely different. We were lucky to catch it before the impending trendiness, and overbuilding, occurs at this lovely place.

It was the longest time I'd ever spent on a tropical beach, and the time seemed to expand  and lengthen with each passing day. But, such times don't last forever, and we left for Phnom Penh, and then Vietnam on February 10th and 11th - the first days of the Chinese New Year celebrations.

We're coming home!

It's decided, and booked! We are currently in Chiang Mai, Thailand for one week - and on March 5th we will fly to Fukuoka, Japan to spend two weeks on the southern big island of Kyushu. And, on March 21st, we will fly home! We're heading first to Bend to see my mom and get our stuff in ship-shape, and then we will be back in Eugene (living out of Devlin's big diesel camper van until we figure other stuff out.) So, mark your calendars! We will be looking forward to seeing all our dear friends very soon. :)

Angkor & its Children

People selling items outside the temple of Ta Prohm

The temples of Angkor Archaeological Park are not an easy place to write about. And it's not for the reasons you might think of. True, the place is one of the Wonders of the World, steeped in mystery and ancient history - the Khmer empire rose and fell here, and the jungle looms like a gigantic frozen green wave, ready to engulf the ruins once more. But the reason I found it hard to write about this place was not because of its past, or its setting, but because of its present – the people, and the children, who live on the fringes of the temple sites.

A little girl selling bracelets

Contrary to just about any other tourist site in the world, the Angkor Park is inhabited by local people, who are the direct descendants of the Khmer empire. The villages were there long before the archaeological park was formed, and the ruins are their cultural heritage. Unbeknownst to us at the time of our visit, I've now learned that these people have many restrictions on how they can live in the park - how they hang their laundry, build their houses, keep their chickens, etc. As a result, one of the only ways they can make a living is by selling things to the tourists who visit.


When you leave the most-beaten trails, and temples, this is when you notice the people, and the children, the most. You can never enter or leave a temple unattended. Cries of "Buy something, lady?" followed us everywhere, especially in the quietest hours. And it is heartrending to say no, over and over again.

The children are the hardest. Many start selling things for their families' small shops as soon as they can talk - we were approached by tiny kids, repetitively repeating their one question, while holding out little baskets that hung around their necks, filled with postcards, bracelets, and other trinkets.

Children playing at the edge of Sra Srang, at sunrise

We spent one very early morning at the un-touristed temple of Sra Srang, to see the sunrise. In the predawn light, children and teenagers appeared from the gloom to solicit us, giving free bracelets with the promise of "You see my shop later?" After four bracelets, we realized we were being branded... and my heart felt heavy and alarmed with the weight of all those promises. We saw the peoples' campfires in the dark, heard the roosters crowing, and listened to a young girl singing a pop song to herself as she walked at the edge of the ancient ruin.

As the sky lightened, the children talked to us, and I fed them dried mango, until after sunrise most left for a nearby school. We took a roundabout way back to our tuk-tuk, avoiding the promises and the stores. Our bodies and wallets escaped unscathed, but not our souls.

Bayon temple at sunset

The temples were still amazing and beautiful, intense in their majesty, and echoing with the power of a past empire. We looked in awe and wonder, and heard the jungle birds singing in the gigantic trees.

A traveler to Cambodia cannot forget that it is a country and a people still recovering from genocide. Visiting the Angkor Park, is not like visiting the Eiffel Tower. As a tourist, you can enter and leave Europe with your self-identity intact - but not in Cambodia and Angkor Park.

Siem Reap, Gateway to Angkor Wat

Siem Reap, in Pub Street on a busy night

In all of Cambodia, Siem Reap is truly the "it" place. Only three kilometers north of it lies the UNESCO site of Angkor Archaeological Park, an enormous complex 400 square kilometers wide (154 sq. miles!). Inside are the remnants of the ancient Khmer empire - Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world, and Angkor Thom, the ancient capital of the empire.

Siem Reap, as the only nearby place to sleep, has become the tourist base and gateway for the whole complex. People come from all over the globe - on a busy night in Pub Street, you can alternate between Aussie accents, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and a number of un-identifiables. Often, in the tourist areas, you see more white/Asian foreigners than you do local folk.

A typical house by the road, in Cambodia

For Devlin and I, who had just left first-world Europe and modern Istanbul, the transition was profound. The city, and the lives of the people, were just as fascinating as the ancient ruins. Even the journey to the city in the taxi was enlightening. Cows wandered freely in fields next to the road, unhindered by fences. Occasionally we saw water buffalo, their snouts loosely run through with a thin string - used for leading them. There were frequent small roadside shacks, pieced together with corrugated metal and wood, which sold everything from water, fruit, and coconuts, to motorbike fuel in recycled glass coke bottles.

A tire repair? and refilling station by the roadside

Children splashed next to a cement water tank, or more often, down by small ponds near the road. The houses were elevated on poles or columns, leaving the bottom area free for chores during the day, or sleeping animals at night. Chickens roamed everywhere, and ducks. Palm trees abounded.

And that was just the countryside. Inside Siem Reap, we gaped at the tangles of electrical wires on every telephone pole, and the dizzying zig-zag of travel - motorbikes zipping between tuk-tuks, while narrowly being missed by bigger buses and crazily loaded trucks. Just about anything qualifies as a vehicle - even a tractor, jerry-rigged to pull long loads.

Hectic traffic and tangled wires

We quickly mastered how to say "no thank you" in Khmer - "te o kun" (tay oh coon) - to the innumerable tuk-tuk drivers hankering for our patronage on every corner. Just as important was the art of bartering - except for restaurants and stores, everything is negotiable. Everything from a ride in a tuk-tuk, to a dress in the market, and even our hotel price, could be bartered down. Devlin spent a blissful afternoon at the covered market, finding the best deals on dried taro chips, sugared ginger and coconut (my favorites!), and dried mango.

After three days, we began to feel at home in Siem Reap. We had earmarked our initial favorite eateries - in particular, a small Khmer restaurant on the edge of the daymarket, which had the best mango shakes and coffee shakes. They also had a dizzying variety of traditional food, all illustrated with photos in a menu 5" thick. We quickly learned the cheapest, and often best, restaurants always had a tome of a menu - we avoided the thin menu places.

Our familiar street, walking home - always lined with
tuk-tuks ready to take us somewhere. "Tuk tuk, lady?"

We spent three days adjusting to jetlag and to the town. And then, on to the temples!