We caught a cramped hot bus to Sihanoukville, accompanied by young hungover backpackers, who shared stories of their nocturnal exploits, the price of beer in each joint they frequented along with in-depth précis and merits of the dj and music in each. I always thought Monaghan CIE bus station was the worst, but there is a contender for this status in the place we stopped – somewhere between Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville (which is down on the Cambodian coast). The iconic (in Cambodia) Angkor beer comes from Sihanoukville. Angkor means “capital city”, and Sihanoukville sure ain’t that!
We were advised by an interesting Aussie ex-pat forester to go to Kep, which is less of an over-exploited resort coastal seaside town. However that advice was a day too late (after we had made bus and accommodation booking). Shame!
We were on our guard when we arrived, as we had also been warned that Sihanoukville is overrun by prominent Russians. A quick Google search reaffirmed some trouble, and also made us more alert to their presence. It is definitely a holiday destination for Russians, perhaps for their Winter holidays.
We arrived to our resort hotel, obligatory pool in front courtyard, and felt like consumers of mass tourism. Not my kind of a holiday, but after a couple of days I relaxed into it, and took an opportunity to swim a lot, read and do little else. Monitors poolside helped a lot! 
Tadhg came on in leaps and bounds with his swimming and confidence in the water, managing to swim a full length of the pool on his own! Life’s little accomplishments, and we are lucky to have all this time while travelling to observe them.
I visited the beach, and went for a brisk walk up and down it, in the vain hope of finding a nice spot to return later. Alas, it was filthy, rubbish strewn everywhere – plastic bottles, polystyrene, jandals, plastic bags and other flotsam. Overflow pipes stopped abruptly on the sand right on the beach, I had to avoid stepping in cow dung – some fresh some not, and pools of green stagnant smelly water lined the beach.
Most of the beach was covered with corrugated iron walled and coconut palm leaf roofed structures, containing tightly packed hammocks to sit in if you buy something from the bar. Women carrying the long stick over their shoulder – which balanced small burning charcoal pots on one side and their fresh clams or crabs legs on the other – they walked up and down and would bbq the seafood in front of you. Other ladies selling trinket laden baskets, balanced miraculously on their heads, passed up and down. People selling selling selling, vying desperately for your dollar. It’s really not my idea of a fun time at the beach. Give me a stretch of lonely Donegal beach anyday, or a slice of beautiful coastal New Zealand for spirituality and tranquility.
I have had the discussion many times as to whether a clean environment is a luxury good – but it shouldn’t be. If we build our populations and cities, based on industrial advance and inventions based on energy from oil, we should at least clean up after ourselves. The pervasive presence of plastic, so enduring and destructive (a bi-product of the oil industry) is really sickening. I know I carry cultural norms which make it normal to have clean environs, which makes me wonder how people can possibly live with bags of rubbish lying around in front of their houses; or how they are happy to inhale the smoke from the fires when they frequently burn the plastic laden rubbish. But equally I know I get looked at strangely for all the unusual things I do and people probably question me passing through these places too!
Once you looked past the dastardly effects of lack of environmental management, it was still possible to see beauty in places (cropping photos to hide unwanted extrusions!).
There was life on the beach, despite the hammering it gets from humans and their waste products. Tiny jelly like beads contained active squirming tadpole-like juveniles of some species, washed in on the tide. 
Crabs bravely surfaced from their sandy dwellings on the ebbing tide, burrowing and making magnificent, delicate but transient patterns in the wet sand.
Early morning fishermen walked their nets into the ocean, still at benthic levels, not far from shore and landed small but shimmering silver catches. The women I saw quickly un-netted the catch, weighing them on small well used kitchen scales, passing them on to the next in the chain……to be bought by those that cook and peddle produce up and down the beach. Every small margin on labour hard earned.
There is still a magical quality in some of the images I captured – a family eating breakfast and skirting on the margin of the waves.
That solitary beauty in an early morning beach walk, when evidence of the revellers of the night before cannot quite dispel nature’s soothing magic:
The appreciation of the industriousness and doggedness of those who continue day after day, making their living:
The less industriousness of abandoned projects, half constructed ground works leaving their aura of more desperate times behind:
So all in all, I feel we could have given Sihanoukville a miss. We did get to ride scooters for a couple of days, which was fun. We got out of the main touristy area, but still didn’t meaningfully engage with any Cambodians. We tried nice bbqed food off the street, but that was about it.
As it was my first time ever on a “Moto” it took a little getting used to cycling on it….albeit only going at 15km per hour. The mandatory tourist pull-over by the (s)Cambodian police proved a bit tricky, as I hadn’t quite mastered how to stop! They tried to find fault…..but I managed to produce my international driver’s licence (hat tip Daniel, as I wouldn’t have been bothered with such trivialities!) and all was well, sending me on my merry way, with Tadhg riding pillion, clinging to my waist.
We stopped to see a troop of monkeys, who brazenly were hanging around a fence. I managed to stop the bike, and was concentrating on what I needed to do to quell the machine, turning off ignition, playing around with balancing while trying to get stand up and not wobble Tadhg off. One of the monkeys were strutting over to our bike in a direct b-line, as Tadhg was holding a wafer bar in some shiny wrapper that the guy at the petrol station had given him, when we fuelled up. The monkey clearly knew what he was holding, and before I could even unclench my fingers from the handlebars, the monkey jumped up on Tadhg and sat on his lap. I was freaking out, but not as much as Tadhg! Cheeky monkey! Daniel quickly tossed some food to the monkey, and I went put-put-putting on he bike out of there as quick as I could!
So all in all, I feel we could have given Sihanoukville a miss. We did get to ride scooters for a couple of days, which was fun. We got out of the main touristy area, but still didn’t meaningfully engage with any Cambodians.
ooooh…..and while we were thre, we spied another amazing full moon. We travelled out of NZ on a full moon, left Thailand on a full moon, and fly to Ireland on a full moon. Not pre-planned, but still conscious of our lunar escapades. This is our last full moon while travelling, and it was spectacular. All in all that means we have less than 28 days in South east Asia (Ilona is revelling in that fact, and it’s what keeps her going……she is adamant she would prefer to be in Ireland now). 
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