Return to Sihanoukville-Land!

Checked out, paid the bill and had breakfast before our 10am boat back to Sihanoukville. Chatted to some of the Danish girls who worked at Coco’s then boarded our boat. Basically just slept/sunbathed for the next 2hrs. Then we reached Serendipity Beach where all the nightlife and backpackers go, so as we’d had a chilled few days decided to stay in this area, rather than the more laid back Otres Beach area.

Went to Utopia where we’d heard there were beds for $3 – now we know why! Yes, there is a pool, bar and club there, but the dorms are skanky as hell! There’s no electricity during the day, the dorm we were in was full of empty bottles of beer, water, toilet tissue, god knows what else, it stank, was sweltering hot, dark, damp and the dorm beds were basically just one big bed with individual mattresses, so you were basically sleeping on-top of each other. What’s more there was a super arrogant girl in our dorm who kept saying ‘Cambodia is a 3rd world country, just deal.’ I felt like saying, ‘I know love, electricity, water, heat, we can deal but that’s no excuse for leaving the room like a **it-hole and not cleaning up your skanky mess!’ Plus the reception staff was an old American ex-pat hitting on a load of young Cambodian girls, too stoned to pay any attention to anyone else.

So I decided to head down to another place we’d heard of, Monkey Republic, and found us a super cute bungalow with our own bathroom for $11, plus they had an awesome menu and happy hour – sold! So we checked straight back out of Uptopi-skank and headed down to Monkey, where we were greeted by friendly staff, friendly backpackers and just a general friendly atmosphere. We had lunch there – the portions are HUGE and so cheap then went to do a spot of shopping/browsing at the beach stalls, as by this point it was late afternoon and we couldn’t be bothered to go to the beach. We then decided to hit happy hour up and see what the nightlife was like in Sihanoukville, we’d heard it was good, it definitely wasn’t Thai-Islands style, but we had a great time and it was actually nice that it’s not too over-commercialised!

We went back to Utopia as an awesome ‘Dave from Miami’ had flyered us in with some drinks promos. Hit up the BOGOFF on White Russians, and got on the Laughing Gas balloons (we had 3 and were pretty light-headed after!). But other than that, the place had no atmosphere, the old ex-pats were all over Cambodian young girls and the DJ was awful! Switching off songs halfway through, mixing songs that didn’t go together – I could do a better job with my ITunes Mix! So once we’d made use of all their drinks promos, we headed outta there and took the advice of a drunk ex-pat we’d met earlier in Monkey. We’d heard about Dolphin Bar back when we went out for Maura’s birthday and so we’d asked drunken ex-pat where it was, turns out it was down on le beach! Let the madness begin!

It was full moon tonight, and so what did they have? Glow-in-the-dark paint, so we got hold of some and decorated ourselves. Then we made use of some drinks promo’s here, danced on the podiums, met an awesome Filipino dude who totally knew how to camp-it-up, met Amy who worked behind the bar and became a dance buddy the times we went, and also met Mike from the UK and his Swedish friend. Maura instantly hit it off with Swedish boy and they disappeared for a while.

Meanwhile me and Mike were left dancing with Amy and a Cambodian prostitute we’d befriended (who the bar staff I later found out called the ‘Black Widow’ as she had aids – she was kicked out by security later on), til the wee hours of the morning and then chatting on the beach until 5am. Decided it was probably then time to search for Mike’s friend and Maura, turns out they were back at ours as Mike had the key to his room so they wouldn’t be back at his! Then we said our goodbyes and all headed to our respective rooms.