This past weekend was a Cambodian national holiday - Pchum Ben. For starters, Cambodia has 44 national holidays throughout the year, the most in the world! But Pchum Ben is one of the more important ones, when people customarily go to their home towns for the weekend. So we packed up with half of Phnom Penh and headed - well, home was a little far for us - to Sihanoukville, Cambodia's beach 'paradise'.
Sihanoukville is a seedy town. Middle aged Australian men hang around with young Cambodian women, the beer is super cheap, and the whole place kinda smells. The tourist dollars are not going towards cleaning crews, that's for sure. Our room was the epitome of all that is Sihanoukville. We made the unfortunate decision of staying at the Sea Sun Guesthouse, which seemed fine in our Lonely Planet. Without going into too mcuh detail, it was humid, moldy, and the pillow gave me (Julia) a runny nose and swollen eyes in the morning.
You would think, based on our description of Sihanoukville, that we had a bad vacation, but we had a great time!! Ok, so a paradise it surely isn't, but the water was warm and the waves great and it was all around a good time. We sat, we ate, we swam, we read, we relaxed.
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