Before I share our experiences from today I will touch on our very uneventful, lazy sea day yesterday. Having decided to a skip our customary room service breakfast we went to the restaurant (aka invitation to gluttonville) as my cravings for an eggs Benedict was getting the better of me. I have to say that it wasn’t as nice as my brain had hyped it up to be (perhaps pancakes would have been better) and I have returned to the guaranteed portion control safety of delivered fruit and cereal. The additional downside to the restaurant visit was it also impacted on my, until now, structured daily sea day schedule. Throwing my plans into disarray I had to make the decision to drop something from my plans and unfortunately (yes you are feeling the sarcasm) the morning exercise session had to go. It was unrealistic to think dropping eating or lazing on the deck was going to be an option. Given that I am now unable to fasten the top button of my shorts, it was probably not the smartest idea I’ve had. Let’s just hope if there is failure of the second button my zipper has the strength to stay zipped.
So rather than my 6km morning walk I opted to lather up in sunscreen, position myself near granny soup and nuke my skin. Yes I know those of you who would be giving me a lecture on skin cancer and the stupidity of allocating 5 hours of my day to laying under the sun, but in my defense cellulite looks far less obvious (who am I kidding with my increasing capacity to hold the stuff) with a brown tinge. I did break up my lounge lizard behaviour with a few visits to granny soup. Granny soup was going off yesterday, it was definitely the place to be. Some patrons were spending so much time in there they were forming water logged wrinkles on their existing wrinkles. I only just escaped before I started to resemble a granny soup resident myself.
What sea day wouldn’t be complete without a mention of food (oops I already did that)? Last night’s dinner was French themed. The conundrum of the evening was which meal to pick as all of the entrees and mains were sounding delicious. For a split second I did consider the option of skipping the soup in favour of having all three entrees and two of the mains but thought my fellow dinners might have thought they were dinning at a pig trough. I did however have the most delicious garlicky snails!
That brings me to our day in Sihanoukville today. Rather than booking a tour, we caught the shuttle from the dock into the downtown markets. There’s nothing like seeing the wonders of how others live, especially in their food markets. Coles and Woolworths don’t quite give the same authentic experience.
The food is obviously really fresh as the fish were still wriggling and some of the animals were being slaughtered and cut up in front of us. For the sake of the locals I really hope there is a run on sales as I’m not sure the heat and flies will add extra taste.
Wanting to see a bit more than just the markets, we hired a Tuk Tuk to head out to the beaches. The desperation for our business was evident as we were driven from the port on shuttles with Tuk Tuks dodging traffic and men running along the side of the bus pleading for our business. We chose Mr Phorn (great name) and he led us to his quality transport (debatable but we made it back alive).
The very persistent Mr Phorn puttered (very slowly at times) us down to the beaches, past a few monuments and back to the markets. Similar to Lombok, the experience was on par to the white knuckle express minus the safety of doors for impact protection. What was a particularly wonderful experience was the way in which it was quite cooling as the breeze blew through. That was until the non deodorised Mr Phorn’s body odour blew into our faces.
Once back in the city it was mission ‘find wifi’ to attempt to fix the screw ups of my password memory failure and broken phone blog failure (if you read my last blog rant you will know what I am on about). Looking around at what appeared third world surroundings it looked like we were going to be suffering an epic connectivity failure. That was until Mr Phorn pointed us in the direction of a dodgy looking open air restaurant. Low and behold the place had really fast internet and sold beers for the bargain price of US$1. I am now going to claim my technological tiara back as I was able to fix all of my stuff ups via my iPad and upload my rants. Phone is still stuffed but two out of three ain’t bad. Another couple from the ship joined us which only encouraged repeated consumption of the local beer ‘Angkor’. All in all an enjoyable and cheap day!
Nearly forgot this little gem. As we were heading into the restaurant we walked past a mini van with live chickens hanging on the back. I’m glad our ride in the shuttle was a little more comfortable than theirs.
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