Koh Rong Sanloem

We actually wanted to travel to the still very pristine island of Koh S'dach, which is hardly visited by tourists. Unfortunately, apart from an overpriced taxi ride, we found no way to get from Kep to the town of Kiri Sakor, from where you can take the ferry to Koh S'dach.

The islands of Koh Rong and Koh Rong Sanloem were therefore our alternatives. Since Koh Rong seems to attract mainly tourists in a party mood, we decided on the island of Koh Rong Sanloem. On Koh Rong Sanloem there is currently only one "big" place called M'Pai Bay, which even has paved roads, and there are also individual resorts in some bays. These resorts can only be reached by ferry or on foot via one of the hiking trails. The rest of the island is jungle.

According to the locals, during the rainy season on Koh Rong Sanloem there are always 7 days of sunshine and 7 days of rain. We happened to arrive on the last days of the sunny week, and had pure sunshine on the day we arrived and on day 1, on day 2 it was sunny during the day and there was a small shower in the evening, on day 3 the sun also shone during the day, but in the evening it started to rain and didn't stop until we left the next morning.

While Markus went diving and snorkeling a few times during the three days on Koh Rong Sanloem and chilled in the beach house and took part in film evenings, I got my open water diving certificate. My daily routine was: get up, have breakfast, dive, lunch, dive, learn theory, sleep. But I was very lucky with the sea creatures: I saw a large puffer fish, one of the extremely rare turtles there and a stingray. Instead of swimming away straight away, the stingray even swam several laps around my instructor and me - that was cool!

We spent the night with several animal roommates in the diving school's bungalow: due to the risk of flooding, the bungalows are built on stilts and through the cracks in the wooden floorboards we could see (and hear and smell) the diving school owner's chickens. We also had a lot of mosquitoes, a spider that was the size of my palm and a 30cm gecko. Welcome to the jungle!