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Sihanoukville, Cambodia
10° 37' N 103° 30' E
Oct 08, 2007 16:18
Distance 186km

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Other entries in Sihanoukville

The new Phucket!

Text written in: English

Sikanouk Ville. The new Phucket.

This is one of the southern most points of Camodia by the sea, in a few years it will be the Cambodian Phucket. Hotels are being erected everywhere and the budget traveller options as well. The beaches that I have seen so far aren't as nice and according to the bible the careful and delicate prescision art of dinamite fishing, may have scared off Nemo and his friends, lets see when I go diving.

Well the universal text book on

'The Delicate are of Dinamite Fishing!' by Terry Nevil Terrance,

never made it this far, or we were just diving in a part of the sea, devoid of any life forms what so ever. Ok, thats abit harsh, I did see some huge Angle Fish, some Box and Puffer Fish, a Blue Spotted Sting Ray and some very ill looking Sea Horses. But the rest of it was non-exsistent, there were hardly any Christmas Tree Worms, which I could spend hours looking at, so simple but amazingly beautiful. The Typhoon thats hitting northern Vietnam and southern China at the moment is causing it to rain lots and thats probably contributing to the lack of visibility, only 3-5m. My guide would have been suited more to olympic swimming than a diver, as he was always swimming as fast as he could, and when ever I found anything intresting to look at, he had almost disappered off into the murky water before I had to start swimming after him to try and catch up. Luckily he had yellow fins on so I could catch flashes of yellow in the distance and hope that was him and not some big fish coming to eat me.

I had booked a bus back to Phnom Penh the next afternoon and spent the next morning on the beach watching the sea, there were no waves as there had been the day before and it was as flat as glass. The return bus trip was full of Cambodians going back to the capital from a weekend by the sea, with very few tourists on the bus. The bus struggled through the Monday rush hour traffic, grid locked, some of the worst driving I have seen so far this year, and eventually made it to the guest house, where I booked a ticket for Kratie (pronounced khreach ee ) and headed to bed.