We left for Sihanoukville at 7 a.m. we had been looking forward to this trip for a while. After going Northwest for 6 hours to get to Siem Reap, we were now headed South to the coast on the Gulf of Thailand. we were told that due to the rainy season (rain every day, bot often is spurts as we have seen so far), the water is not turquoise or crystal clear, but that it would be warm and we were hoping for good weather.
well.......this is where the problem started. :)
We got into Sihanoukville around noon and walked up to Monkey Republic, a backpacker`s kind of restaurant and hangout with hammocks, a pool table and good cheap food which reminded me of my lifestyle during the year I traveled in Australia. They sold towers of beer which we had to try :)
It ended up turning a bit rainy and cloudy, so we skipped the beach for the afternoon and proceeded to the pool for a bit. we had supper on the strip again and finished off the night at a fun bar called Utopia. Draft has been very cheap....about $2 for a pitcher. We were now introduced to $7 buckets of drinks. They were literally buckets of whatever you chose with a bunch of straws and lots of ice cubes. Nancy and I split the daiquiri one, it was really good! Then peer pressure started somewhere in the group to try a drink called the Flaming Lamburghini...a variety of 4 shots, poured into....(for all my sambuca friends at home who will understand that I was kind of excited about this one as I that is the one kind of alcohol besides beer and win I actually like): Sambuca! It was the main shot which was lit on fire, the others poured into it. Wow, holy smokes!. It was a fun night with the group :)
Friday: we were going to head to the beach but woke up to pouring rain. Just our luck...well, we decided to make the best of it. We asked Mr. Ta,. our bus driver who was at our disposal for the 3 days. We stopped when we saw some monkeys hanging out on top of a fence on the way into town and then asked him to take us up into town to see a market but it ended up not being a really good one, so we had lunch and spent the afternoon getting massages, figuring out Visa`s for further travel, some people napped, some got manicures, and then a few of us went swimming, as well. The ocean was warm, waves were strong which allowed a bit of body surfing ....it was great to be on the water finally. It was a nice, relaxing day and we were getting ready for our last night out as a team at the coast and decided to eat at the Dolphin shack which was a pub/restaurant right on the beach. We had amazing seafood grilled: shrimp, squid, I tried barracuda for the first time and we had the crashing waves only a few feet away. nice night. Kate had an outstanding task: to eat the grilled tarantula she had kept in her fridge. well, at least the leg. it was brought to the dinner table and a few of us had fun with it. Michelle had already tried a leg, Chelsea wanted to have nothing to do with it, but I tried a leg and it was actually not bad at all. A bit like the grilled frog I ate. Done and done. Eeaten a cricket, frog and now tarantula. My own food related bucket list :)
We did lose 3 of our team members today: Nick and Paul were going to travel a bit more in Cambodia and had actually booked a night on an island nearby. So they left at lunchtime. Brian also had to leave around 7 pm for Phnom Penh as he had an early flight on Saturday. Great guys to have had on the trip! We will miss the Doc, the hollow leg guy who can finish all the meals and Mr Sociable :)
Saturday we made out way back to PP and had a really nice dinner with Eric and Rayman who came to join us. We also said Good Bye to them after exchanging some more notes on sayings in English for them (i.e. what`s shaking, `brother from another mother`, gimme a break etc.) and we video taped Eric singing a song which Chelsea and Michelle want to teach their elementary kids at some point. we played it at the work site.
It was a really nice evening topped off with us goofing around the lobby after with a flower which Rayman agreed to put into his hair for some pics.
No comments:
Post a Comment