Crabs, More Crabs and Tropical Disease Symptoms

There is no greater travel reality check than leaving paradise (link) and arriving in Sihanoukville. We had two hours in Sinville before our ferry to Koh Rong Samloem departed and that was two hours too many. Enter fat Poms strutting around with their shirts off, women offering us pamphlets to join their full moon party (definitely misjudged her audience there), Khmer youths that had been corrupted by attempting to imitate the knobbish Westerners that hang out there and puppies, that were too young to even know what they were doing, humping other puppies (we also blame the Westerners for this).

So after two hours that felt like ten we were on our way to Koh Rong Samloem, another picturesque island off the Cambodian coast.

Koh Rong Samloem

Apart from taking in a bit of island village life and soaking up some more sun, I was on KRS to complete my Advanced Open Water Dive ticket. I nailed it, naturally.

Highlights of the course were:

• underwater rodeo which involves taking off your tank and BCD and riding it like a bucking bull;
• seeing three seahorses and setting a new AOW record in the process;
• a night dive on Papa's Boat which was crawling with fish and a myriad of crabs; and
• playing ping pong with an egg yolk at 29 metres that doesn't break up due to the pressure that's exerted on it at that depth. Mind = blown

Highlights of Nix's time on KRS were:

• hanging out with SparkleD*ck and Bobo;

• reaffirming her title as Gecko Queen spending her days with a family of seven Giant Geckos (all at different stages of their development ranging from tiny to foot long); and

• getting some quiet time away from me.

But the most interesting observations from KRS were the things our gecko friends would get up to at night:

• we watched the big daddy shed his skin by peeling it off with his mouth and eating it;
• we witnessed gecko sex which was surprisingly consensual; and
• saw two geckos fall off the roof in an attempt to get an insect and live to tell the tale of their four metre plunge.

Kampot

We dropped in to Kampot to visit one of their famous pepper plantations and chow down on all things pepper. We spent four nights holed up in our room whilst Nix suffered through what appeared to be the onset of Dengue. We had one decent meal of pepper squid, saw the giant durian roundabout and I had some Cambodia-wide famous but ultimately disappointing ribs. Nix's symptoms cleared up after a few days (clearly only the best of us get the real dengue) and it was time to move on.

Looks like someone made a full recovery.

Kep

Pretty little seaside Kep. It has a white sandy beach, is small and peaceful and is a popular hangout for Cambodians. Oh, and it had crabs. F*CKLOADS of crabs. More crabs than you can poke a claw at. Crab shells litter every corner of the beaches, streets and parks.

There are two main ways for you to acquire your crabs.

The first is at the Crab Market where the ladies down by the water's edge haul their crab pots out of the ocean and you barter your way to what seems like a reasonable price for a kilo. We read a "guide" before we went on how to barter for you crabs. Don't bother reading that guide. People throw numbers and laughs and quizzical looks at you in rapid succession and anything you've read that says "make sure you select your own crabs", "you a should never pay more than X amount", "the optimal size for a crab is three and a quarter inches". Forget it.

Get in there, don't get ripped off, get stuck into your bag of steaming hot crabs.

As long as you keep a smile on your face the Khmer people will pretty much take them from the pot and put them in your mouth. For less than a tenner you'll get a kilo of crabs, half a kilo of prawns, lime and pepper dipping sauce, and two sugar cane juices. You can't beat that for a feed.

The other option is one of the crab shacks complete with menu and a tenth of the crab for the same price. Nahhhh...

Rabbit Island

Before leaving Cambodia we slummed it for a couple of nights on Koh Tonsai in a $6 a night bungalow.

The wind blew its arse off, the sun never really appeared and on both boat crossings everyone got drenched but hanging out in a hammock and being adopted by the local dog pack (to the point that we'd get de-flead like the puppies by mama pooch) made leaving the little island paradise very, very tough.

But now it's time for Viet Nom!!

Here's our Cambodian journey in map form.