This is where we stayed for eight nights on Coconut Beach on Koh Rong. It was more luxurious than it looks, it had electricity and a fan, and a mattress almost a foot thick, and lovely squishy pillows. The beach was beautiful with soft white sand and the sea was calm and deep blue in the day and opaque green later on. I walked to the local village to buy fruit and crackers each morning, and every day in the late afternoon when the sea was at its most beautiful my husband and I went in together and swam, floated, and discussed the meaning of life. Cambodia is very hot, and each day I spent a good couple of hours indoors writing, working on my book.
I said the sea was calm, it was, until the day we were due to leave, when it was too rough for boats to moor up at the pier, so we stayed an extra day. I was relieved as it meant I could spend the day sleeping on the lovely mattress, having caught my husband’s chest infection. Yesterday we left, the sea was still a bit rough so the journey to the main pier (same island) in a small-medium open wooden boat was exciting/scary in places. Then we got a biggish speedboat to the mainland- Sihanoukville- and from there a tuk tuk to Otres village where we are staying. Otres beach is a twenty minute walk away and isn’t as nice as Coconut Beach and without much in the way of facilities.
That doesn’t really matter though, what’s noticeable is the building work going on all over Sihanoukville- loads and loads of huge high rise blocks, huts close together, and loads of land cleared for building work. Where we are actually staying is nice, but step onto the main road around the corner and it’s dusty with building work all around. Many of the businesses are for sale or rent and maybe it won’t be long before this area is redeveloped too. Sihanoukville used to be popular with backpackers and hippies (we have seen a few drug addled Westerners stumbling around), but apparently it has changed beyond recognition in the last eighteen months.
We’ve found a couple of cheaper places to eat in the vicinity but apart from that we will probably not be venturing far. The road to Sihanoukville was painfully bumpy and really dusty in the tuk tuk yesterday. That is all fine though, our place is really nice, a wooden hut with a good mosquito net and plenty of shared bathrooms with free body wash/shampoo, an on site restaurant and, best of all super friendly cats and cute playful kittens!
Thank you very much for reading
All the best
Rachel
Rachel 