A Tour on ‘Marigold’

We don’t wake to a sunrise today but instead have a beautiful view at the foot of our bed, straight out to an azure blue sea beyond the white sand beach.

After a leisurely breakfast we head down to the activity centre to see if we can rent a bike for the day.  This is going to be a day of exploring the island.

Bike hire sorted, we head back to villa for the rest of the morning as we have opted to have the bike for afternoon and evening, so that we can use it to go back out to dinner later.  The morning is spent catching up on my blogging and a little email from home.

At 1pm we head down to where we are to pick the bike up and have the usual struggle here of finding the right change to pay for it.  Cash machines in Cambodia only dish out $100 bills but when everything is in single figure amounts, nobody has enough change if you try to pay with them!  All of the hotels quickly run out of change because the guests are trying to change their money for smaller denominations.  On top of that, if the Cambodians pay cash into a bank, the bank will take the smaller denominations out of service.  I presume it is all part of the drive to take the dollar out of the system here but I’m not sure how well it’s working; everything is still priced in dollars!

With change sorted from the activity centre manager’s own pocket, we head off to find our bike – a bright yellow Honda that Corinne has decided suits the name Marigold!  She’s only with us for a day but already she has a personality!  We have been given some pointers as to where to go and handed a map but when we get going, we find out that the few yellow lines on the map that are supposed to be the roads on the island bear very little resemblance to what we come across!  For the most part, the roads are concrete paved but every now and again they degenerate into dirt tracks.  It is what we have come to expect of travelling around Cambodia but for some reason I was not expecting it here. 

The island is slightly bigger than I expected but it still only takes us an hour or so to get from one end to the other on Marigold.  Along the way we find a backpackers’ idyll in Coconut Beach, at the south of the island and at the north, after a couple of attempts at trying to find one recommended destination, we find a pretty village called Sok San. We decide this is the venue for dinner tonight but head back to the villa for a change beforehand.

It’s late afternoon and a swim is in order before anything else as we have done nothing to work off our food today.  The sea is like a bath it is so warm.  There’s not much life close into shore and it’s easy to get 500 meters off shore and still be able to stand in the shallow waters.  If we want fish and coral life, it’s a boat ride out to the reef and some snorkelling.

Swim done, a freshen up before dinner and then we head back down to Marigold so she can take us to dinner!  Corinne has found a restaurant that is recommended in her book so we head for that.  We park up in the sandy ‘main road’ and manage to grab a table right at the front of the restaurant, at the edge of the sea, so that we can watch the sun setting.  As we sip cocktails and wait for dinner to arrive, the lights start twinkling into life in this pretty little village and the place seems to come alive a little more.  Dinner tonight is fish in a ginger and oyster sauce for me and a local chicken and pepper dish for Corinne, all with the obligatory rice, of course.

After dinner we had a wander through the village and realise that it is probably 50:50 between locals and western tourists but none the worse for it.  We hop back on to Marigold where the adventure to find our way home begins with rather inadequate lights, for a relatively new bike!  Despite this we manage to find our way back to the villa and have a coffee sitting on our deck.

We retire inside to cool down – it does not seem to drop much below about 28c here, even at night – and play some Backgammon before retiring for the night.