29th March 2009

With our bags packed, we asked at the reception of the Small Green Bungalows to call us a tuk tuk. They were asking for a rediculous $8 to take us back to Sihanoukville! So we decided to call Li, our previous driver, who sent his brother to pick us up, for a much more reasonable $5. You really have to keep an eye on the pennies in this travelling game!

We arrived back at the Beach Road Hotel only to be given the surprising news that they had no rooms available. After quickly explaining that we had telephoned the previous day, they acknowledged their error and gave us a deluxe room at a standard price, result! We were given a massive room, complete with a fridge, cable TV and even a comfy chair. This was luxury, especially compared to the Small Green Bungalows at Otres! They even had a brand new swimming pool, which was very big and a real added bonus.

We were glad to be back in Sihanoukville, so that evening we returned to our favourite restaurant, The Bayon, where we were welcomed back like old friends. We dropped into the Cool Banana bar for a drink after our dinner and bumped into Dave Pinto again. We thought he'd left as we hadn't seen him since our very first visit, but it turned out he'd been busy getting ready to open a shop called 'Uber', very exciting! After catching up over a few beers we headed back to our lovely deluxe room.

We spent the following day walking on the beach and enjoying the lovely new swimming pool at our hotel. We decided that the time was right for a night in, as we were getting very bored with going out for dinner every night. So, we stocked our fridge up with several Angkor beers and called the Happy Herb Pizza company to order our pizza. In no time at all, we were settled down with our 'Everything' pizza (nicer than any pizzas at home) and were watching some trashy TV - Bliss!

We spent the next few days either in the swimming pool or down at the beach and our evenings were spent sipping G&Ts at The Seahorse, dining at The Bayon and making new friends at The Cool Banana. We had the most spectacular thunderstorms here, regular as clockwork. As soon as the sun had set, the most amazing electrical storms rattled across the sky. We spent a lot of time watching the lightning from the steps of our room and also enjoyed watching the heavy tropical rain pouring from the sky. It was a much needed chance to cool down.

After a couple of days we decided to go for a round of crazy golf on the local course. It was advertised with a picture of Tiger Woods, so our expectations were high, it was howevere somewhat different to what we had imagined, a little... um, smaller! For $2 a round it was a bargain and we did have fun, even though the temperature was nudging 40 degrees and obviously we had gone at the hottest time of day! They also had the best running pool table in town, so we had a good few games, obviously with a beer or 2 to help us cool down!

Our original plan was to visit Kep for Clares upcoming birthday, but after booking a rather expensive, $35 a night bungalow, we discovered that it was fan only and not air con! The owner explained to us that it does get down to a cool 29 degrees inside the rooms, so we quickly cancelled. We changed our plans and decided to head to the temples at Angkor for Clares birthday, as we had enjoyed it there so much before.

After nine relaxing days, during which we made so many new friends, tuk tuk drivers, our waiter from The Bayon, the Khmer girls at Cool Banana and many others, we had a bus booked ready to take us back to Phnom Penh.