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.