The drive from the homestay at Chambok was pretty grueling, we were stuck on a cramped mini bus, all of us were tiered, a little hungover, dehydrated and generally a little grumpy. So when we arrived at our hotel, we weren’t that bothered that it was a little basic, it had a hot shower, air conditioning and most importantly a bed! I have never had a shower as good as that!

A quick power nap and we met up with Long for lunch at a local restaurant, I had Chicken Amok, a coconut curry served in the coconut, it was pretty damn amazing. The restaurant owner was a friend of Longs and had invited us to his house warming party the following night. After lunch we headed for a private beach, Long knew a guy that worked at local five star hotel and could get us our own section of private beach! I’m beginning to think that Long isn’t so far removed from all the corruption that he has been telling me about! So we spent the afternoon on the beach, swam, played volley ball with the local mafia, the usual!

The following day we had a private boat that took us out some of the smaller islands up the coast, we snorkeled, swam and fished all morning, in the afternoon we stopped at another deserted private beach the crew of the boat knocked up a bbq, while they cooked our lunch we played some more volley ball and generally chilled out. The Captain come Chef had done us proud, bbq’d prawns, chicken kebabs and of course the fish we had caught earlier, washed down with an ice cold beer, probably one of the best lunches I’ve ever had! - LG!

That night we walked out of town to the house warming party. I had spoken to the restaurant owner earlier in the day and he proudly told me that he had just finished building his new house and was excited to show it off to us. I’m not too sure what I was expecting, but I wasn’t really expecting a building site with a bbq in the front garden! The house had no doors, windows, electric, water or staircase! And the toilet was a thousand star toilet, which the girls weren’t so happy about!

As the Cambodians say ‘go with the flow’, so I cracked open a cold beer a took in the view. A storm crashing its way around us 360 degrees of sheet lightning, it was spectacular.
Rather amusingly for the oldies, the youngsters had been out earlier and scored some ‘happy pizza’! A dark building site in the middle of nowhere, sheet lighting illuminating the sky, distant raw of thunder, strange Cambodians milling around not really the ideal setting for them all to get a case of paranoia! As they imagined groups of people coming over the hill ‘to get them’ I tucked in to my bbq prawns, shark and sticky rice and cracked open another cold beer!

After a heavy night I was looking forward to my lie in, if you believe in Karma I obviously was a very bad man in a former life, at 5:30am a funeral began in the hotel next door. In the UK you wouldn’t know or if I’m honest care, but in Cambodia it seems that they play very bad musical instruments, very very loudly for a week! A sodding week, which means I won’t be able to sleep in tomorrow either! I would have got up and killed those playing the instruments, but this would have meant more funerals and more loud music!

I didn’t really do much today milled around, had another amok for lunch, wrote some emails, had dinner on the beach and back to bed ready for my funeral alarm clock!
The next leg of our trip was a public bus back to Phnom Pehn, where will see S1 and the killing fields.