What could Koh Rong?

So we made it to Cambodia on February 1^st. We crossed over from Vietnam, which meant we needed to cross the border by foot, with our bus waiting for us on the other side. The border was a bit of a free for all. You need to have a passport photo and proof of your vaccinations before you can enter Cambodia, but if you don't have this (as was the case for the proof of vaccines for us) you need to pay 1$ to the border guard and all is good. As well, when it comes time to return the passports, they just hand a stack of passports to someone in line and let them sort it out for the entire bus load of people. Not very professional, but hey, it worked!

    

With three weeks to visit Cambodia, we were looking forward to making the best of it! We started by spending a couple of days in Kampot. Kampot’s claim to fame is its pepper; apparently the best pepper in the world comes from Kampot. Let’s hope we can get the pound of pepper we are carrying around with us over the border to Canada!

    

John didn’t get to see too much of Kampot as he was out with a bit of food poisoning, but AJ made the best of her time by biking around the village and checking out the local sites.

When John felt a little better, we took a quick tour of the area where we saw the local salt fields where they dry out sea water to make sea salt. It’s so hot that the water just evaporates and they are left with tons of salt. We also visited the famous pepper plantations.

From there we caught a bus to Sihanoukville. Famous for its gorgeous beach and amazing nightlife, we only got to live half the experience. When we arrived in Cambodia, the King of Cambodia had been dead for almost 100 days. By the time we made it to Sihanoukville it had been 100 days, which meant that they would be having his cremation ceremony in the capital city, Phnom Penh. During this time, there was a ban on all celebration and music throughout the country. All this to say, when we made it to the amazing party town of Sihanoukville, none of the bars were allowed to play music. Lets just say, no music in a bar makes for a pretty boring bar.

Never the less, we made the best out of our time there. We enjoyed the beaches and chill atmosphere. We biked around the area and found some nice beaches a little way out, and we enjoyed the cheap 1$ beers everywhere we went.

    

On our last day in Sihanoukville we decided to check out the party boat that brings tourists to Koh Rong Samloem Island. Its basically a day trip to an island that is about 2 hours off shore. 

We got a small break on the way to the island for a quick swim. 

Little did we know that this island would be the most beautiful place we had ever seen. When we arrived we couldn’t believe it. Perfect, flour like, white sand. Beach that goes on forever and crystal clear warm water. We immediately fell in love with the place, figured out how we could stay on the island and told them we would be back the next day as soon as we checked out of our hotel in Sihanoukville.

   

We had to shuffle our schedule around a little, but boy was it worth it! We slept in an open air dorm that was basically a really comfortable mattress covered with a bug net, that’s it. Our view was the perfect sand beach and beautiful ocean. And all this for $7.50 per night for the both of us. Amazing!

    

Oh, did we mention that this perfect island, that was the nicest place we had ever seen, was also covered with adorable puppies!

On our second night on Koh Rong (as in what could Koh Rong?) we met a nice couple from Quebec. She was French Canadian and he was Cambodian, but had been living in Montreal for over 15 years. Well, it turned out the girl was an OT just like AJ, and the guy asked John if he had studied engineering at Concordia in 2004, because he thought John looked familiar (must have been the white eyebrow). Small world, isn’t it!

We also saw this boat on our way to the island. Turns out there is a sail boat inside this boat. It belongs to some Russian Billionaire... tough life! 

We enjoyed out time on the island by relaxing and reading by day, and partying by night. Lion was our host :)

     

When our time in paradise was over, we made our way to Battambang, in the north west part of the country. We would only spend two days here as we only wanted to stop briefly before we made our way to Siem Reap to see the amazing Angkor Temples.

Battambang was great to us. We visited the temples in the surrounding areas, took a Khmer cooking class, supported the local circus run by former street kids and tried out the amazing bamboo train.

The temples were a great taste of what we would eventually see in Siem Reap, while the cooking class wasn’t as good as our other ones, but never the less nice to learn some of the local dishes. The circus was a class act! We were proud to here two kids had been accepted to train with the Cirque du Soleil in Montreal! 

   

The bamboo train was a fun discovery for us. We didn’t know what it was. It turns out its an old train line that the locals have found a way to use in order to transport things from one village to the next. The basically build a simple bamboo platform, attach a motor, and there you have it, a bamboo train. Now they use this to give tourists a good ride.

Finally, we have to mention our hotel room in Battambang. We got very lucky. The hotel  we asked our tuk-tuk driver to bring us to was closed for construction. He mentioned that the owner was building a new hotel down the street so we asked if we could check it out. Well, it turns out the rooms weren't all finished yet, but two were. There was no internet, phone or tv, but we really didnt care. He asked us for 30$ a night, AJ counter offered 20$ and he said ok, since we would be his first ever customers. Wow, were we lucky. We've never stayed in a place as nice as this... ever! 

   

That's it for now. Next we are off to Siem Reap to see the Angkor Temples!