Kampongsom

I'm afraid the blog is jumping back and forward in time. For a year I was able to keep it in mostly chronological order. So much for that. For the past month I've been in Saigon but before that I spent a few weeks in Cambodia and made an ill-advised detour to Indonesia.

Cambodia was wonderful. I spent my time there shuttling back and forth between Phnom Penh, the capital, and Sihanoukville, the beach town.

The traditional Khmer name for Sihanoukville is Kampongsom, which is actually easier to say! It's touristy, but not overwhelmingly so like the beaches of Thailand. I'm a pretty uptight person and it's tough for me to relax. Sihanoukville is one of the few places I've ever been where I can truly take it easy.

I've been there several times, but I haven't seen all that much of the area. I'm perfectly content to go to the same beach every day and sit on a sunbed at the same restaurant. I'll sit there all day long reading and goofing around with the kids who work on the beach.

I found a great little guest house literally a two-minute walk from the beach.


Thida is a Khmer woman with a British husband, hence the flags over the entrance. At the end of the dirt road Serendipity Beach is visible. (Her pizzas are fantastic, by the way.)

My routine is to wake up whenever I damn well feel like it, walk down to the beach, find a sunbed and sit there until I feel like going home. At night I'll go down back down to the beach to have dinner at the best deal in Southeast Asia, the Sihanoukville beach barbeque. Virtually every beach restaurant has one every night, so the competition for customers is fierce. It's definitely a buyer's market.

In this shot you can see that the beach is lined with nearly identical restaurants. What you can't see is their menus are virtually identical, too.


With the BBQ you get your choice of fresh seafood. I usually go with the combination of prawn (two big ones), squid (two small ones, 3-4 inches long) and a barracuda filet. It comes with potato and salad.

Cost: $3. Wash it down with a couple draft beers and the cost goes all the way up to $4.

Here is my friend Hieng enjoying just such a feast.


Nightlife on the beach is geared towards the young backpacker crowd -- some bars offer free drinks to patrons who are still there at sunrise -- so I'll head back to the guest house, talk to Thida and the other guests, then turn in early.