The Razzel Berry: A Week in Sihanoukville

As soon as we gathered our friends together, we headed straight for the beach.

Sihanoukville is about 3 hours drive (on completely paved roads!) from Phnom Penh. Even though you can take a bus there for about $5, we splurged on our own private minivan for the 6 of us at $9 per person.

Originally, Nick and I were planning on skipping Sihanoukville, which is Cambodia's only real beach area, because we had heard that it wasn't anything to write home about,. But after a couple months on the road, we figured a week on the beach with our friends is just what the doctor ordered.

Thanks to a suggestion from a friend Nick and I met in Laos, we headed strait to Otres Beach and parked ourselves at the Queen Hill Resort for most of our stay. It was a nice place with a group of bungalows on a hill overlooking the beach. It's also the only place on the whole beach with 24 hour electricity and the options for A/C.

Most of the beaches we saw in Sihanoukville are completely overpopulated with lounge chairs and restaurants leaving no room at all for having your own little spot on the sand. Just the kind of beach I despise!

This being the case, we completely avoided these beaches all together (except for the occasional meal or beer) and stayed at our little sanctuary on a secluded corner of Otres Beach.

The water was beautiful, warm, and where we spent the majority of our time.

But while I was bobbing about lazily in the ocean, Claire was spending most of her time hunting through the sea to see what she could find. She was a super sleuth and found all kinds of awesome things on the bottom of the ocean, from hermit crabs to baby squids and octopuses!!

Some of the hermit crabs she found were pretty big

and we noticed that there was something soft and slimy on the back of their shells, so we put them in a cup of sea water to get a closer look.

It turned out that they had little sea anemones growing on their shells that opened up once we put them back into the water.

Clair was finding things all over the place and when we walked down the beach in the evening to catch the sunset, she found something that I'd never seen before. It was a little disk about an inch and a half in diameter and 1/4 inch thick with bristly hairs covering its body. On the top it had a brown and white pattern and with what looked like a thick wiry coat

but the bristles on the bottom were used like little cilia to move the thing forward along the sand

here's a video Claire took of the thing:

It was the weirdest little thing I've ever seen and none of us had any idea what it is! (anyone know?)

While we were in Sihanoukville, we broke our streak of having horrible food in Cambodia and had some awesome stuff. Our first day we stumbled upon a restaurant called LaPona that had kick-ass BBQ and we went back almost every night for their red snapper and amazing spare ribs.