Boating and Beaches

I spent this past weekend I went to Sihanoukville on the South Coast of Cambodia. It was beautiful: blue sky, clear water, white sand, fluffy clouds and bright sunlight made for a basically perfect weekend.

The first day I was there, I went with five other volunteers (Erin Michigan, Evan from Australia, Stuart from Scotland, and Sarah and Arielle, both from New Jersey) on a boat tour of some of the closer islands.

At the first island we were able to do a little bit of snorkeling, and it was nice. We saw some small fish with stripes, some bigger fish with stripes, and a but of coral. The water wasn’t exceptionally clear, and there wasn’t a huge variety of fish to see, so we moved on to Bamboo Island and lunch after just a short time.

On Bamboo Island, I went off by myself for a bit, and explored a little bit of the way around the island. I saw colorful butterflies, huge dragonflies, little scuttling crabs while I was picking my way over piles of driftwood and under trees that were growing over the water.

After Bamboo Island, we went to a third island where we could snorkel again, but it was all the same fish and coral as the first place, so Erin and Evan just had a really good time jumping of the boat while the rest of us tried to stay out of the sun and in shade to save our sunburns. (I had such a bad sunburn, the next day one of the child vendors on the beach was calling me “Lobster Girl”).

Even though my sunburn hurt, the sunset that ended this day more than made up for it.