Koh Rong & Koh Rong Samloem - First, slow down

It's 7am when the minibus picks us up from our hostel on Koh Chang. Our destination: Cambodia, more precisely the coastal city of Sihanoukville. After three hours of driving, we reach the Cambodian border. Crossing the border went relatively smoothly, except that we once again witnessed the locals' ability to relieve foreign travelers of their money. The fact that an employee of our bus company kindly wants to issue the visas should have made us think. He didn't mention any additional costs, even though in this region almost every favor comes at a price. In this case, he eventually wants a donation of 300 Bath (7.50€) per person, of course, after everything is filled out and there is no turning back. What can you do, especially at the borders you are in the tricky situation as a foreigner to do everything to pass them. So we reluctantly paid the man and finally set foot on Cambodian soil. However, our hope of being able to continue immediately with the next bus was quickly dashed. We sat for two hours on old worn-out plastic chairs just behind the border, waiting for absolutely no one else to get on the bus before it left. Understand a Cambodian.

Nevertheless, at some point we finally set off and the first thing you notice about this country is the pathological connection between a driver and his horn. There isn't even a system he follows. Whether he overtakes someone, is angry or greets someone. The horn was so extensively misused that any attempt to get a few minutes of sleep is immediately interrupted by a long honk or several short honks. Without sleep or rest, we finally reached the coastal city of Sihanoukville after another six hours of driving. We can quickly skip this place thematically, as there is nothing there except a few hostels, pubs, and a relatively decent beach. It should serve exclusively as a stopover, which we used to reach the picturesque islands of Koh Rong and Koh Rong Samloem from there. We headed for the last destination first, and it turned out to be the noticeably more beautiful of the two islands. A snow-white beach, a few small wooden huts, and hills covered with jungle.

Since it is currently low season, we were the only two guests in our hostel, and the beaches were all deserted. So we were able to spend a few romantic hours alone on the beach, snorkeling and taking long walks through the jungle... However, we should have worn our flip-flops, because the otherwise about 60-minute journey along the beach and through the jungle turned into an almost two-hour obstacle course due to the increasingly bad conditions of sticks, stones, and centipedes. But going back to get our flip-flops was not an option either, as otherwise you would have walked on the beach for 20 minutes and the first 15 minutes through the jungle in vain.