One of the rites of passage of any Cambodian trip, Sihanoukville is a beach town seeing more and more backpackers hit its shores. After dropping our bags off at Monkey Republic and drinking our complimentary free beer, we strolled down to the beach, all the while manoeuvring various mounds of rocks, bricks and other debris. You might think of happiness when you think of the word ’serendipity’. Well, the white sand was beautiful enough, as was the sea, but I’m not so sure if you can call it a relaxing experience to sunbathe on a lounger with children beggars prodding you and jabbering away!

I was really surprised how fluent the young children were in English; I guess being able to speak English to the tourists makes the difference between having a livelihood or not. One little boy called Pin/Piu kept hassling me as we walked, so I agreed to let him make me a bracelet with the Brazilian flag colours… I’d always regretted never buying one when I was there. While he was skilfully weaving the various thread together, we took to our sun loungers and prepared to chill. Or not. Children, who should really be at home playing with dolls, were hounding us, saying “lady you’re legs are hairy” to which they would, without our permission, scrape our legs with tightly pulled thread that acted as a makeshift razor. One girl actually opened a healing scab on my leg so I let her know what I thought of her work and thankfully she moved on!

Then the next batch arrived. “Lady, your nails are dirty” to which they would grab my friend’s hand and try and succumb her into a session. We were offered shrimps, bracelets, books and all sorts in just five minutes! And then, the real troublemaker arrived. He shimmied onto my seat and proceeded to question “lady, why you so white?” and “lady I want your belly ring”. Upon saying this he reached over and touched my bare stomach! I told him to move away but he then started tugging at my sarong, just to piss me off.

I don’t know how to word this the right way, but the thing with the beggars on this beach was that they were ruder than any others I’d ever encountered while backpacking. Normally if you politely say no to a seller anywhere else, they accept that and move on. But these kids seemed to treat it as a game. One girl of about ten rested her elbow on my knee (all this while all I’m trying to do is frigging sunbathe!) and said “girl you play tic tac toe?” I told her I just wanted to relax and be left alone to which she decided to keep repeating EVERYTHING me and my friends were saying to each other. Maybe that was the tactic that explains how they managed to speak English so well!

Thankfully the rest of the day got better. We visited a shack which had its own ‘happy’ menu, serving marijuana(or god knows what) laced spring rolls, milkshakes, curry and pizza… Oh, and they served joints too. That night we also went to ‘Happy Herb’ restaurant where we each dutifully asked for an ‘extra happy’ pizza… all it succeeded in doing was making us a little bit tired and one laughing fit because of my hiccups!

We booked an island boat trip with UTOPIA, a large backpackers that offers free info, free dorms and also has a bar. The weather wasn’t all that nice and the water was choppy as hell, but we got to trek from one side of the island to another and ‘sunbathe’ underneath an overcast sky. Funnily enough, just as we reached Sihanoukville again, the sun came out… I guess you can’t expect perfect weather every day of your round-the-world trip!