Blog : Koh Kong

We awoke early in Sihanoukville and packed up all out stuff to catch the bus we'd booked further west to Koh Kong, an Eco tourism town up in the Cardamon mountains, that was apparently yet to be discovered by the masses an where treks and overnight stay in the jungle were the activities of choice. We were all staying around in the front bar area of the Led Zephyr hostel in Sihanoukville, which over looked our pick up location, where we'd been told be at 7:45am. Whilst Al was trying to find an ATM that worked (we'd heard rumours that Koh Kong didn't have one) I went to speak to the bloke at the desk where we'd booked our tickets, only to be told really aggressively that we'd already missed the pick up bus because we were soooo late and if we didn't hurry up then we'd miss the coach too! Great! We were bang on time too and the only minibus any of the girls remember seeing was one which looked full and left the pick up point at 7:30, a whole 15 minute earlier than what we'd been told... Gggrrrr. I got pretty shirty with them, telling the woman that if shed sold five tickets to a certain bus it would be the sensible thing to do to tell us a) the correct pick up time and b) maybe ask the bus to wait a few minutes seeing as none of us had boarded. We had to massively hurry to flag down a tuktuk, why are there never any when you need one(?!) and get him to take us to the bus station, which he did, only to the wrong one with ten minutes to spare. After some frantic Cambodian chat our bags were thrown onto another minibus and we ushered on and taken to a layby where we were quickly shoved onto the bus. Phew big sigh of relief that we'd made it but none of the massive panic was needed as about three minutes later the bus pulled into a big bus station and sat there for twenty minutes whilst a few people got on and off. Good start eh! The journey was quite hot and the aircon was more like having warm air blown in your face than anything cooling! It was only five hours though which made it bearable. I think Alice and Lora found it worse though as they didn't have the terrible bus journeys that we've done to compare it to. The road was pretty bumpy and twisted and at the next stop more people got on than off and so about five people had to sit on crappy mini plastic chairs in the aisle. It was hilarious after one particularly big bump when the bloke nearest us landed back down onto his chair, only to crack all of the plastic and end up on his back. I did have to stifle a little laugh as I certainly didn't want to swap places with him!!

When we finally pulled into the Koh Kong bus station we'd been told that there would be a tuktuk driver waiting for us for a free ride to our hostel... We couldn't see him so we decided to jump into one and began to negotiate the price. We had no idea the distance we'd be going to get to our guesthouse that I'd booked for us via phone the evening before and so started at $5 for all five of us... The driver was having none of it and it took us a few seconds to realise he wasn't actually trying to rip us off and that he was saying too much and only asking for $3 between us! What lovely people the Cambodian's or the Khmer -as they're traditionally known - are. We got to our guest house, the Blue Moon, just after lunch and we had a look at the tour and trek options they had for the following day, but decided to go for a walk down the road and into town to get an idea of what other companies where offering and to find out the time of the night bus to Siam Reap. To our upset, we found that there was no night bus between Koh Kong and Siam Reap and what was more, we would have to spend a whole day on the bus between Koh Kong and Phnom Penh before changing and catching a night bus from Phnom Penh to Siam Reap which would arrive at 6am - Yuck! We had no choice though, as Cambodia has only one main road through the country connecting Siam Reap and Koh Kong and the coast, all via Phnom Penh which seems like the most illogical route, drive east to get west, but it was what it was... We would have to pass through Phnom Penh and find something to do to kill the four hour wait time in the city. Knowing the bus times meant our ideas for Koh Kong had to be readjusted to compensate for the fact we'd loose at least half a day on the bus. We decided we'd like to do a two day trek with an overnight stay on the jungle, and arrive back at midday on the second day, rather than after sunset, which was the original plan. We were limited to only a fe companies that were offering the tour we wanted and in the end we decided to book with Eco Tours as Mr Rittney could also book our busses to Siam Reap and guaranteed we wouldn't miss the bus for any reason! We paid $35 each for an hour transfer to the Koh Kong conservation corridor, a UNESCO protected site next to the Cardamon mountains, a three hour trek through the jungle , with knowledgeable guide Mr Map, a visit and swim at a waterfall and an overnight camp in the jungle in army hammocks, basically under the stars and a second trek in the morning of day two, back to transportation to famous Tatachi waterfall and then home. Unfortunately what we actually did wasn't quite the same full itinerary, but we had a great time all the same. We settled down for lunch before we committed to Mr Rittenys tour and trek at a restaurant close by, where all of the girls ordered big plates of noodles and Pad Thai (we were less than 5km to the Thai boarder crossing) and as I was t that hungry I just thought I'd have a tuna baguette, thinking it would be something little. It came out the side of a hole French stick and had at least two tins of tuna in it. It was absolutely delish though and as much as I tried not to, I polished off the whole thing!! I certainly wasn't hungry that night when all the other girls were ordering breakfast pancakes or omlets for their dinner, as it was all the kitchen served. We did also managed to find an ATM whist we were exploring the Koh Kong town. Lora's card didn't work as she had forgotten to tell the bank she was going away, so I withdrew $100 for her to borrow - M: she is going to transfer her total back into your account when home :) We were the only ones staying in the basic guesthouse, which was $6 per room, per night and we played cards and tunes out in the courtyard for a few hours whilst we dipped in and out of showering and packing our smaller backpacks for the trek.

The following morning on our tour we were picked up and all sat int he open boot of a pick up truck and driven through the beautiful, green, rolling countryside to the start of our walk. We did the morning trek, which was through really dense trees and jungle which we all had to hack down as we walked with our little sticks Mr Map had fashioned for us. It was seriously sweaty and after seconds I had my headband tied to my backpack strap to use as a sweat wiper... Gross! I trekked in my s***ty little trainers again but we had had to go round the market the previous evening to buy both Al and KV trainers that they could walk in, as Kate lost both her and Als Toms on Koh Rong - oops! It took ages to find a pair that both girls liked at an affordable price. Mr Map and his son in law's brother Lea-ha (or something) covered our trainers and socks with this white stuff from a water bottle which they called 'leach medicine' to keep the leaches away. As it had been raining the previous day there were a lot of leach I the ground which wriggle up onto your shoes and to your feet where they literally latch themselves on to you and suck your blood - only a little bit though, but the girls were terrified! I remember having pretty bad leaches in Sri Lanka and probably me telling everyone bout having to flick them off our feet with pen knives didn't help! Neither did the leach medicine to be honest and before long everyone was screaming or sweating as they had dark coloured maggot like leaches on their feet. We flicked them off with our little sticks and had to stop every few minutes for someone else to clean their feet. For some reason on day one they weren't really interested in me, I find a few on my trousers, but I'd tucked the bottoms into my socks (sexy!) so I wasn't worried about them going up my legs. The jungle had some cool sounds echoing around and smelt of that wonderful fresh and earthy smell. I did however have to be quite careful to not look at anything to closely as I was obviously s***ting it that there were giant spiders all around. It only took about an hour before the first tarantula was spotted... I'd accidentally seen a couple of spiders webs but up ahead of me Al had shrieked after seeing a massive multicoloured one apparently really close to the makeshift path, moving towards her. She must have ran about 50m forwards before breathing again. As calmly as I could I had to walk past the same spot so in my head I was concentrating on singing some song and staring only at my shoes. I didn't quite see where the spider was meant to be and I managed to avoid seeing it when I passed so I felt very proud of myself. If I had seen it however a panic attack in a jungle full of them, with nowhere to go would not have been a particularly fun experience for anyone! I felt pretty proud of myself for the way I coped with all the leaches, pulling them off bare handed from others feet and the knowledge that there were some pretty big creepy crawlies in the jungle with us! As we plodded further and further into the rainforest we saw more and more interesting mushrooms groaning on the ground, a scattering of monkey fruits, which I tried - it was like an unripe and sour plum, giant ants and even poisonous trees. With my leach stick I felt like I was Harry Potter in the Forbidden Forest, on one of his 'detentions' with Hagrid and I half kept expecting to see a baby Voldemort sucking Unicorn blood at every turn! Mr Map was full of knowledge about the jungle so it was interesting to learn from him and also to chat to Lea-ha about his schooling in Phnom Penh and general life as a teenager in Cambodia. I got on particularly well with him on day one as we bonded over our mutual love of west life and sung songs together, badly and out of tune as we were walking. After about three hours we came to the waterfall where we'd be setting up our camp for later that night. It was a bit unimpressive with not very much water trickling down into the pond and the water was quite murky orange coloured but both Mr Map and Lea-ha were stripped off and had jumped in before we could even query it. Al and I were next in, launching ourselves off the rocks and into the refreshingly cold waters. The other girls followed and we enjoyed swimming around cooling down and washing off the river of sweat from our faces and boobs!! We laid all of our damp sweaty clothes out to dry on the hot rocks and after a lunch of sticky rice and veggies and three hours or so of napping we all woke up, having not even realised we'd fallen asleep in the middle of the jungle on some hot flat-ish rocks!!

Whilst we'd been asleep, Mr Map and Lea-ha had set up our camp, with five camo print hammocks hung next to each other in a line under a tarpaulin sheet, it was very basic but it looked like it would do the job. They had also set up a fire and were playing around in the stream trying to catch some little fish. We sat on a ledge of rock throwing rice into the water which the fish kept swimming for. Apparently they saw a baby turtle in the water as well but I missed it whilst I was putting my clothes back on. The sky over head was really pretty grey and only moments really after waking up and watching the men fish, big fat raindrops started to fall so in a mad rush we all gathered up our clothes and dashed to the undercover of the camp and chucked our stuff onto a hammock each. We all sat in our little beds until the tarpaulin sheet started leaking so much the hammocks began to get really wet and at which point Lea-ha came over and helped us to take them all down and roll them all into one hammock in the middle which wasn't really getting dropped on by the torrential rain. We all stood under the sheet in the pissing rain playing silly counting games and taught Lea-ha how to play gives which he liked and then we played 20 questions and would you rather, silly pub games which were pretty innocent without the introduction of alcohol! It took quite a while for the bulk of the massive thunder and lighting storm to pass and we were counting the time between the flashes of lightening, lighting up the sky and the big grumbles of thunder and it felt like it was directly above us for ages! Alice ordered us all to wear our flip flops because "at least then if anyone got struck by lightening the rubber soles would earth us". After a while we all took our tops and trousers off again as we wanted to watch the storm in the then drizzling rain. I felt like I was in my absolute element in the middle of the jungle watching such a big storm. The forks of lightning were really regular, streaking across the sky and casting earie lights across the jungle tree tops. I loved it! I felt like I was sort of orchestrating it or conducting it or something standing on some rocks high up in the middle of the forest as the earlier non existent river flowed strongly down to the waterfall around me! I was at one with nature! Yes me, I was!!

Once the storm had fully passes we sat down to our dinner on the floor, vegetable and chicken kebabs cooked on the fire, which had been sheltered from the rain with another plastic sheet. Toasted baguettes, sticky rice and the kebabs were served on banana leaf plates and we all happily munched away in the half darkness, Al and I being careful not to eat the veggies that had come off the meat kebabs. Once we'd finished dinner the darkness had completely swallowed the whole jungle and we couldn't see a thing all around us. I was quite dehydrated but as we had to carry all of our own water we only had six little bottles each and I had rationed them so that I would have one for through the night and had to be careful not to drink the whole lot with dinner! After the food we tried to play a few games of cards as we didn't think we would sleep at only 7pm or so! At about nine we called it a night and Mr Map and Lea-ha helped up to out our damp hammocks back up and showed us how to get into them. I was a bit scared about having any creepy crawlies join me in the hammock but it was quite clever as it had an in built mossy net which you got inside of and zipped yourself in. It went over the front of us and because of the way it had been designed and our weight in the hammocks the net sat a couple of inches higher than our bodies. I still slept with the makeshift mozzie headnet that Mummatron had sewn for me and sent to Australia! All the girls laughed at me but apart from being chilly for a few hours in the early morning I had a pretty good nights sleep. I was on the inside of the line, with Al on one side and Lora on the other so I wasn't scared about any of the bigger animals like tigers or wild cats or monkeys which we'd been told live in the jungle and although I knew there would probably be spiders quite close by with all my nets I knew they couldn't get to me and I had to train myself not to even think about them. I managed to drop off to sleep pretty quickly and didnt even wake really until eight the following morning. The other girls complained of s*** nights sleep, being scared or uncomfortable in the hammock but I had been pretty alright! I had woken up needing a poo quite badly and so once I'd gotten up there was nothing for it but to do my third poo of the whole trip outside in broad daylight! I'd almost gotten used to it as my bowels weren't even shy pushing it out whilst hovering over leaves, insects, sticks and whatever else was there!!

For breakfast we had a couple of toasted, no smoked baguettes from the last dwindling bit of the fire, before having to pack up the camp pretty quickly and trek back to the pick up truck as we had to be back in Koh Kong town for 12pm ish in order to catch our strong of buses. Unfortunately this meant missing the second waterfall that we'd been excited to visit, the famous one mentioned in all of the Cambodia and Koh Kong guide books. We did walk through a bar cave though, which none of us liked really. You couldn't see them hanging on the ceiling of the rocks until Mr Map shone his torch and then we saw hundreds of them - bleurghh! The girls saw a second tarantula, crossing the path in front of them but once again I trained myself not to look for anything and with out seeing it I felt fine. It was really really humid trekking on the second morning and before long not only was my face and boobs sweating like anything but my trousers were drenched and I even had sweat patches on my knees!! I kept tripping and falling and catching myself on sticky out tree stumps and branches and I managed to rip the lace holes of my little trainers... Ggrrr! We walked a similar route back to the road but managed to do it in a much quicker time the second time round as we had stressed to Mr Map that we really couldn't miss the Siam Reap bus that Mr Rittney had booked us onto. He walked at double speed for us and literally I was jogging to catch up. At the back I walked with Lea-ha who was really annoying me with his constant s***ty-f***-b****es sweating and squeeling about having leeches on his feet. And he would ask me the same question five times over and then repeat the answer whilst telling me to "keep going and catch up with everyone else slow coach" but also "wait for me and go slow as I can't hear you" ggrrr he just really frustrated me with his high pitched 17 year old voice! The girls thought it was hilarious and I had to get Kate to walk between us so I didn't stress myself out to new levels!!

Once we'd made of back to the pick up trick we were all literally drenched in sweat and I could have wrung out the headband attached to my backpack which id used to mop up my sweat! The breeze from sitting in the boot though was delightful :) We all kicked off our shoes to help cool down quickly and I saw I had a massive blood stain in the sole of mine so whipped off my sock to find a big leach had gone to town on the bottom of my foot before obviously getting squashed... Lora and I took our friendship to a new level when she had to wet wipe my sweat foot and pull the leech off! (Thanks Lor!) We drove the hour or so back to Koh Kong town and to the Eco tours office to pick up our backpacks and Mr Map offered to drop us back at the Blue Moon guesthouse we'd stayed at the night before so that we could shower and pack our bags for the bus. The staff at Blue Moon were a bit stuffy and certainly weren't going to let us use one of their all completely empty rooms to shower in, until Lora mentioned ordering some food and paying a dollar each... I popped to the supermarket at the front of the guesthouse and picked up loads of water, bus snacks, cold cokes and some Heinz baked beans and I got the kitchen staff to cook me a fried egg and warm my beans as I wasn't really that hungry, everyone else had pancakes with chocolate and fruit or big veggie omelettes. It was so refreshing to have a shower but literally five minutes after getting out and dressed I could have done with another it was that hot and I was that sweaty!! Mr Rittney arranged a tuktuk to collect us from the guesthouse and take us over the to the bus station which all worked like clock work (you don't take stuff like being on time or someone doing what they say for granted in Asia, so it is pleasantly surprising when everything happens as is). We loaded our bags onto the bus and settled down for a long journey ahead of us... I was pretty content though as although the bus we'd boarded looked nothing like the one we'd booked nor did it have a toilet it did have aircon thank god, as my face pouring with sweat and my T-shirt was clinging to me like something from a wet tee competition minus the sexy bit!! Phewwww, next stop Siam Reap and the temples, via Phnom Penh!