Kampot, Sihanoukville, Koh Rong, & Koh Rong Sanloem, Cambodia

12/5/16 – Kampot, Cambodia

Wake. Go to find cafe. Find Girl's School of Rock. DIY painted signs boasting radical reading groups and meetings and such dressed in planters and French architecture. Beyonce playing inside. Grilled tomatoes and non-instant coffee. Cambodian and old English guy partner who surely fronts the money. Full band set up in cafe/car. Records and gear everywhere. Young girls rolling up on scooters after class. “Teaching girls who are discouraged from learning instruments to play music. When not playing music just hanging out” So Fucking, so, cool.

Rent scooter. Book it to “Arcadia Hostel” a few miles up a shitty road. Monster size hostel planted along side river. Rope swing, blog, floating deck, and a massive water slide with a lip that launches people way out into the water. Closest I've seen of Never Never Land. Check in. See Chris Pounce. Drink beers on the floating raft all day. Meet his Dutch friends Tessa and Karina. Tessa is super cute. I'm just so happy to be in an adult water play place with no law and am rambling about nothing all day. Continue drinking into the night. Drink a lot. Make lots of white people friends. So many English people. Wanted to get out on my scooter, but drunk. Pretty uneventful if I remember correct. Pass out.

12/6/16

Wake. Need to get out of mini-England. Go for joy ride in the morning. Find some dirt roads I think are going to a fishing village. End up in the middle of nowhere. Mud roads I'm sliding around and peeling out with the scooter - sick. Lots of square shallow pools with barn looking structures beside them. Total silence. No one around. I walk up to a bar. Stacks of bags with thick grainy shit inside. Stick my finger in and taste. Salt! Follow the road all the way back out through a neighborhood. Everyone smiles at the lost white guy. Hit the road and buy some fuel out of a coke bottle. Take off to a mountain state park that I can't remember the name of. Windy nice paved going up a mountain for miles and miles. Get to the top and giant Buddhist statue and crazy long view over Kampot. Cruise back down in fear I am going to run out of gas. Sick.

Back to hostel. Everyone is still hanging on rafts and drinking. I sort of hate these people. When someone says “I've been to Cambodia” just remember that could mean “I took a taxi to a hostel in the middle of nowhere and hung out with English people for a solid week.” But everyone is really hot and practically wearing nothing so, not the worst way to live. I get a drink. Swim and hang with Chris. Power goes out. No sign it's coming back on. Convince some people to finally leave the hostel and come eat at random restaurant. Super nice sweet family serving good food and cocktails for .50 cents. A fraction of the price of the hostel. What the fuck, kids. Hang there. Take over their full stack PA and play some jamz. Get my dice out and start gambling. More people come because the power's out. Have a party at these people's house. Meet some cool Nepalese guy who tells me if I ever come out we will sacrifice a goat to a Hindu god. Tight. Head back to hostel. Get shitty. Gamble more. Final pot is $30 and an entire bottle of tequila from the bar tender. Chris wins. Empties the whole bottle giving out shots at the bar. Everyone is literally screaming. Dangerous night. Pass out.

12/7/16 - Sihanokville 

Wake. Order taxi for Chris, The dutch girls, and I. Head to Sihanokville – a town on the coast that's a launch point for some islands. Find a beach at the end with a hostel. Swim at sunset while drinking beers. Talk about how hard our lives are. Drink most of the day. So exhausted from party. I turn down a party from a guy that works the hostel because I'm on Valium (which, by the way, you can buy anywhere for real cheap). Traveling with other people seems to lead to mostly uneventful, but good, days. Pass out.

12/8/16 - Koh Rong

Wake early with boat tickets to Koh Rong Island. Picked up by bus. Picked up by boat. Dumped at a dock. Colorful long wooden boats bob on turquoise water. Bars and restaurants crowed the beach. We get a “safety” talk that reminds me of summer camp. Everyone is fucking English, including all of the people working. This is not Cambodia. Walk to our hostel Police Beach. A handful of shitty bungalows on a shitty trashy beach. Chris and the girls go for a walk and I lay in a hammock and look over the ocean for a while. Walk around naked and alone for a while. Meet back up. Go to food at some Thai(?) guy's one man outdoor restaurant. He talks shit to kids while making bomb food. Very East Coast. Walk the beach a while. Go to “Pub Crawl.” One hundred party bros with “Pub Crawl” tank tops and their favorite sex position written on their arm. I'm officially one of the bros now (Mine is “spoon.” Everyone else's is “Doggy.”)

Walk down the beach in a mass going bar to bar. Chris finds Molly. Eat it. Dancing to shitty music all night. Playing snaps with people outside. Dancing with hot Dutch girl Tessa. Dancing close to hot Dutch girl Tessa. Making out on Molly with hot Dutch girl Tessa. After an hour her friend is staring at her and abruptly says, “Okay I need to go.” I say, “Cool I'm coming to.” Go back to the bungalow so sure I'm going to bang. She immediately get's in Pjs and passes out. I sit on the deck pathetically listening to music and waiting to see if she comes out. Drag my drunk high ass into bed. Pass out.

12/9/16

Wake. Go to beach. We hang on beach and float around forever. I'm incapable of relaxing so I go on quick hike to other side of island. Quick hike has a long cliff with bouldering elements and almost blow out my flip flops. Get to “Long Beach.” Super serene white sand beach for miles. No one is really there. I swim for ten minutes and leave. Meet back at beach. Float around. Some English guy is talking at me forever. Go to restaurant. Order a burrito knowing it's going to be God awful. Exceed my expectations with truly how absolutely awful it was (brown beans, pasta sauce, and a half folder open tortilla.) Two for one cocktails though and a free beer. Head to movie bar down the beach. Sit and talk for a while. All Cambodian dance party on the beach. Grab Tessa and run over to it. Everyone is dancing around in a circle with a chair covered in trash in the middle and a portable speaker blasting some weird Khmer Pop (so Cambodian). Guy's giving us free drinks and shrimp. Guy's teaching us Khmer dance moves, which are hilarious. I'm making out with Tessa on the side while Cambodians are now line dancing. Coolest Cambodian moment so far.

Head back to chairs. Tessa and I make out more. Everyone leaves us to make out. She is sitting on me and making out on me forcefully hard. Eventually I say “Okay, well, I mean, if you want, I can definitely buy us a room?” to which she says “No” and gets up and leaves. The Latina move. I'm a bit flabbergasted and simply don't get it. I try a few more blatantly pathetic lines like “Let's take a walk down the beach (you know, like into the dark.)” Doesn't work. Walk back toward hostel. She goes to bed. Chris is on the porch just laughing at me. Him and I hang for a while I'm bitter and talk shit about everything. Pass out.

12/10/16 - Koh Rong Sanloem

Wake up. All of us get breakfast. The girls have already bought a ticket to Koh Rong Sanloem (the other island). Chris then tells me the Karina said the girls want to be alone. Is she speaking for Tessa? Just wants Tessa for her? Tessa is sick of me? I'm already hella confused as to why people will make out for an hour and not bang so I guess anything is possible. We grab an earlier ticket with and earlier company. Last minute say “Bye!” Tessa to my shock looks as sad and confused as I am. A shitty goodbye for someone I really liked. So goes.

Boat to other island. Throwing anchor and dropping off backpackers waste deep in water in the middle of nowhere. So cool. We go to the main beach because that is all we know. Grab the first hostel. Rent a kyak. Get ready. Eat acid.

Paddle far off into distant cove. Paddle over coral. I've never seen coral before in my life. It's dotted with spiky balls and fish. Looks terrifying. Get to cove. Covered in trash, dammit. Walk around. Shallow turquoise water. Rocks with tide pools of red salt deposit. A pair of dead crabs holding hands and one of the pools. Take that, love. Float around with my head half way in the water. Ripples reflect the now pulsating clouds. Schools of small fish swim around my feet. A crab scares the shit out of me. I can't think straight. I walk back to the kayak for water. Look at the sand. Crabs are digging holes, turn the sand into balls, and then leave the sand in patterns around the whole. A mix between Fibanachi and crabs writing nonsense words to communicate with us. Beside the patterns is a huge pile of trash. These are our patterns. Fuck people.

Get back on the boat. Pass a boat that literally, before we ate acid, looked like a cartoon. Sit and smoke a cigarette and drink a beer while watch cambodians run back and forth starting the engine and cutting it over and over. With every diesel roar clouds of black smoke ran out from under big dark plastic barrels full of fuel. Every time the engine would start these dudes would run around the same paths and cross the same ropes to other ships. They are stuck in a children's story book page, repeating the same scene, over and over again, for all eternity. Pretty cool. They start play fighting and tearing off each other's clothes so we paddle away.

Paddle back toward home. Chris is wearing his life jacket inside out and I can't stop laughing. A speed boat pass and creates a massive wake. We ride up and down on the mega waves, the mother of waves that we can see everywhere in everything. We are part of it. Everyone and everything is part of it. Woah. Keep paddling. Actually I'm laying in the back drinking beer and yelling about shit while Chris is paddling. Get to the beach we are staying on. I dump myself over the side with my life jacket and shirt on. I'm rolling around watch the sea and sky battle around me at sunset. Everything is so beautiful. We eat some Pizza Pringles and fruit and sit on chairs at dark. I need to walk. Walk all the way down the beach. The whole cove is beach with many different bars and resorts. I'm only seeing brochure covers of everyone's different dream vacations – rustic, party, rock n' roll, fancy, mod. My favorite resort is a bunch of tubes people live in. I stand on the shore laughing for ages at everyone dressed in white BBQing with their tubes.

Walk back. Find Chris walking. We walk together. Stop at a resort that looks like if a circus tent was also a palace. Swinging egg chairs. We sit in the swinging egg chairs. No one comes to get us drinks. We have to walk inside. We are freaking out. We get inside. Everyone working is Cambodian and talking to us in Khmer. Aliens. We say “Two beers please” and throw a handful of money on the counter. We get beers. There is 70 year old lady made of cigarettes alone wearing the brightest most tacky clothes drinking at the bar. Like, as if alien were trying to be human. Holy shit. Get out.

Go back to egg swings. Launch into existential conversation about love and home and travel and life. We realize when in doubt and being consumed by a shitty thought you just need to swing harder in that egg swing, man. Walk to next bar. Rock bar called Octapussy. Super lame rock generic rock riffs. I swing on the swings for a while, and then run to try to climb a giant glowing tree. Unsuccessful. Lay in hammocks for a minute. Starts raining. We run to the bar next door that's a circle bar with a big thacker top (they are all like this). The rain gets worse. And the wind comes. And the lightning comes. Everyone has cleared the bar to go home. Chris and I sit there getting soaked and freezing. Order beers and a cup of noodles. Best meal I've had in my life.

Storm clears. Walk to our hostel to sleep. Someone is in my bed. There are no more beds. The piece of shit Russian hostel owner sold my bed. He is nowhere to be found. I sit in the lobby and wait. Some English girl comes out because her light socket is shooting fire. Chris comes out with the rest of the tequila he one. We get tanked. I steal the hostel owners hammock bed. We jack the rusty chain and get into the beer fridge. Are screaming about whatever because we are still sort of on acid. The English girl is clearly uncomfortable but has no choice but to hang. She goes to sleep in her fire room. Three hours later the hostel owner comes back, shit tanked, looks at the fridge, looks at us drinking the beer. I start yelling at him, he grabs a cigarette, and just straight up fucking leaves. Chris and I are in awe asking each other if that really just happened. Ten minutes later he comes back, grabs some pillows, and goes back to sleep on the beach. That's it, I guess. I turn the lights off, lay in his hammock, and pass out.

12/11/16

Wake to the English girl demanding her money back at 6am. The dude is doing circles around the room. His blanket smells like weird cheap cologne. I get up, pack, and demand my money back. The other Russian guy comes and calls me a little bitch. I tell him to give me my fucking money back. He asks me if I drank any beers, to which if the other Russian guy was any less drunk might have seen all the crushed cans laying around a few hours ago. I tell him absolutely not, we only took a water, and tell him everyone almost died in a fire he caused. He tries to give me five dollars back because I got a fucking hammock I slept in for a a few hours. I tell him to give me my fucking money. He gives me it all back minus a dollar for the water. I say fuck you fine and walk to the dock.

Breakfast to a boat. Go to eat. See cute Cambodian girl I lock eyes with for a second on street. Go to bus. She is on bus. I go to sit on the chairs across from her. Turns out we have assigned seats. I'm actually sitting in my assigned seat. Fate! Talk to girl for a while. Get her number. She takes mototaxi with me and drops me off at my place. I get her number. Get to hostel. Fucking exhausted. Pass out immediately.