Surving Snooki (aka Sihanoukville) Part 1

A lot of my time in Sihanoukville was actually not spent at the beach. Sure it was a five minute walk away, but other than it’s white sand and waves, it was pretty obnoxious as a beach. Relaxing unbothered was nearly impossible as there was a steady barrage of women trying to sell massages, “massages”, or tiny lobsters, children try to sell bracelets or steal your sandals, and the occasional outgoing foreigner passing out drink coupons and advertisements for that night’s parties. The beach area was completely monopolized by all the bars and restaurants and their seating furniture. It was worth it, though, to find a place during happy hour ($.50 beers!) with comfortable chairs on the beach and relax with a book. I always felt pressured to be at the beach, though, since I was staying at a beach town after all.

One day I went down to the beach with a Danish friend, Tea. That was an interesting day as we seemed to make a lot of enemies. She was interested in these women that sold these baby lobsters. You could usually buy about five for two dollars, maybe ten for three dollars. They had about as much meat on them as a big shrimp, and they would dress them up with pepper and lime juice. Whenever the women would come around, Tea would barter with them for a while, hoping to get a steal of a deal. They would let her try one, and she would eventually turn them away, saying the price was too high. Later in the day, one of the women that had been with us before saw her sampling another women’s lobsters. Angry words were exchanged between the two lobster vendors, and then a few angry words were directed at Tea, since she had promised to buy from the first woman. One of the women started selling really hard, wanting to give her the whole lot of about 40 lobsters for about $15. It wasn’t a great deal, and neither of us wanted 40 lobsters. They went round and round, Tea eventually offering $5 for all the big ones (they were separated into two piles). Meanwhile, the other vendor would pass by and taunt the woman, and tell us that her lobsters were old and would make us sick. I didn’t care; they weren’t my lobsters, and I don’t think Tea took the threat very seriously either. She ended up buying half the platter (the women was trying to sneak some of the small ones into the pile of big ones) and as soon as the woman got her money, she was nowhere to be seen. Tea ate the first one, and made a face that told me all I needed to know. She offered me one to “see if they were bad”. Don’t mind if I do. Yes, it was a bit sour, like it was fermenting. A few of them weren’t too bad, but she was very generous with them. I ate quite a few, but most of them were a little bit off. We both figured we would get sick. I’m not sure if she ever did. But I actually didn’t, which was great, especially since even the bad ones were still pretty good.

In the midst of this whole lobster debacle, a couple of the kids that run around selling bracelets had latched onto Tea. I had learned that anything but being rude to the kids was an invitation for them to cling to you until they had made a sale. This girl, who was around twelve, started out being sweet with Tea. Tea was sweet back, but made it clear from the beginning that she wasn’t going to buy anything. The girl started making a bracelet with Tea’s name on it anyway. Tea said she wouldn’t buy it, and the girl said it was a gift. So Tea let her make it and put it on her, reminding her she wasn’t going to pay for it. Eventually girl started realizing she was not going to make any money, and she cut the bracelet off Tea’s wrist, then cut it into a bunch of pieces. Later she started cutting up other bracelets and materials out of anger. I wasn’t sure if this was honest emotion or a show to make us feel bad. Things got worse and worse, and eventually she and her friend “Beyonce”, a very young lady boy, were taunting us and calling us awful names. It started out with their wishes that we “get sick from the lobster and s*** and die”. They started to make a scene, so we decided it was time to get off the beach. They followed us and yelled the most awful, offensive things I’ve ever heard out of the mouth of someone that young. They called us names and told us they hope we get AIDS from prostitutes and die. There were a lot more obscenities laced into their words than I have let on. The most interesting thing, though, was that as soon as we got to where the beach met the road, where all the tuk-tuk drivers would hang out, they wouldn’t follow anymore. It was out of their territory. I turned around, and asked them why they weren’t following us anymore. The just gave us dirty looks and wouldn’t move past the last step onto the road.

One day a woman on the beach was very persistently trying to sell me some sort of service. First it was a massage, then she pulled out a spool of thread and asked if I wanted hair removed. I had never heard of the ancient hair-removal method of threading, but either way I said no. She sat down next to me and started poking at the scraggly hairs on my upper arm and shoulder. “Oh this no good, this so ugly. Women no like this hair,” she said matter-of-factly. I wanted to laugh, but it was still offensive. I felt the insult route wasn’t a very good way to get business. Then again, making people feel bad about themselves seems to sell a lot of beauty products in the west, so it shouldn’t have been that surprising.

A lot of my time in Sihanoukville was spent sitting at “The Charity Café”, writing these blogs, editing photos and kicking it with the other travelers passing through. The two guys who “worked” at the bar-style coffee shop in the hostel were Danny, a wild-eyed Dutchman, and Jimmy, a Singaporean of Indian and Ecuadorian descent. Danny was just a ridiculous human being, who was always having a good time, and was a few notches above most people in terms of crazy. He would tell stories with more energy than seemed necessary, but it made it that much more fun. He seemed to have a sketchy past involving travels, jails and plenty of drugs. For a guy like him to turn up in a place like this in Cambodia was in no way surprising. Cambodia has a tendency to attract some wild souls who don’t find themselves fitting in back home, but aren’t quite the “spiritual enlightenment” types that you find in India. He had been working at Utopia for a few weeks. He said he was waiting for someone back in Australia to transfer a few thousand bucks into his bank account so he could continue traveling. His plan was to go north into China, and then through Tibet and Nepal into India. Jimmy had been working at Utopia for several years off and on. He was a little more relaxed than Danny, but still a fun guy nonetheless. Some nights I would bring a $1 bottle of Mekong whiskey (which was actually more like rum) and they would provide the ice cubes and maybe some cokes. They would close up around ten, by which time we had usually amassed a small crew, and would head out (which half the time meant to the bar or dance floor at our own hostel).

There were quite a few interesting characters that came around regularly. There was Karen, a middle-aged expat and mother of two. She would speak to one of her children in French and the other one in a mix of English and Khmer. I think there was also some Italian mixed in as well. She seemed that she had run on some rough times with a local ex-husband. She was making ends meet by baking cakes and having the boys at the café sell them by the slice. There was a Scottish DJ who had moved here a few months earlier and had found plenty of work DJing at some of the clubs. He played a dubstep night at the dance club area of our hostel that was really impressive. There were a couple of Brits, Jay and Fay (and they had just met), who arrived right after I did who ended up working there for a while. One was a nurse, while the other had just finished a few years of teaching English. They were pretty fun and had some cool stories. You had to watch out for Fay, though, she could get feisty. I watched for half an hour while she tore apart the Kiwi owner and a couple of his mates for being such chauvinists. She made them look completely foolish, but being chauvinists, they didn’t care what a woman said about them. Earlier in the evening, she told me off after I tried to ask her about her recent internship with the World Health Organization in Cambodia. She thought that I was trying to pick up on her, and didn’t realize that I actually have an interest in issues of health and development. This told me a lot about the kinds of guys that hang out at the hostel. She later apologized, admitting she was out of line, but I was already too scared of her to try and learn about what she had done in her internship. And then there was Carl, the Swede. I’ll be damned if he wasn’t the most Jack Sparrow lookin’ homey I’ve ever met.