Return of the Bed Bugs

Lizette and I decided to travel together for a while as we were both heading for Sihanoukville, a seaside town in South Cambodia with a thriving backpacker community. We booked a ticket for a 'bus' that turned out to be an ancient tin can of a car and we were unable to sit up straight because it was so cramped. My weekly budget has gone down significantly over the past few months as overspending has been inevitable so we booked ourselves into the cheapest hostel we could find costing just $3 a night; Cambodia uses US dollars as well as Cambodian riel and both are widely accepted - usually you pay in dollars and get your change in riel which can get confusing! The hostel, called Utopia, was a hippy haven with thin mats in rows on the floor (no beds), only a tiny percentage of the lights and power sockets worked, we had to walk through a dorm of twenty people to get to our dingy, windowless room, the staff were rude, we weren't given any sheets, the air con was only on for a few hours at night (Sihanoukville is BOILING), the music from the hostel bar blasted all night and our door was broken. Buuut what can you expect for $3 a night? I'd be able to easily deal with all that if it wasn't for what happened during the night; I spent seven hours in bed having hallucinations that little critters were crawling all over me and I was driven insane by itchy mosquito bites. Except they weren't mosquito bites and I wasn't having hallucinations... when Lizette and I got out of bed it took us just seconds to realise that we had been savagely attacked by bed bugs! The place was absolutely infested with them and we later found out that the hostel was also home to lice and rats. Suffice it to say we RAN out, changed hostels and put all of our clothes in to a laundry shop whilst the little red bumps all over our bodies became increasingly red and itchy. The bed bugs I caught in Thailand last November made me want to rip my own leg off and hit myself over the head with it but these were another level all together...

I counted the marks on one part of my leg, lost count at 200 and realised that I easily had several thousand bites on each limb. 

Tuktuk drivers are getting younger and younger these days...

I don't think I'll ever get bored of beaches!

Lizette had a friend working at a hostel on a nearby beach and on our way to meet her our tuk tuk broke down and we were stranded in the middle of a road for a while. We passed the time incessantly scratching our bites. Despite feeling a little sorry for ourselves we made the most of our time in Sihanoukville by trying the local food such as amok curry (a coconut based fish dish) and lok lak (a beef salad) at the evening food market and we also went for a night out on the beach front which is lined with loud bars 'Thailand style'. Our final night in Sihanoukville at the next cheapest, infestation-free (fingers crossed), twenty four person dorm, called Easy Go, was another sleepless one due to loud music, banging doors and also the man in the bed next to me decided to bring a random, drunken girl in at 10pm that he'd just met and proceeded to have extremely loud sex with her for hours. Yes, there was a curtain round each bed but last time I checked curtains are NOT soundproof. Now I know why it was called 'Easy Go' hostel.

I ate pineapple and sweet rice cakes from the ladies selling food from baskets on the beach. 

We were followed by one of the beach dogs.

Why the long face?