Ishicilelwe: 14.02.2020
Day 5 was not particularly spectacular. We left early for the bus and spent most of the day on the bus. First, we went from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh and then took another bus to the coast to Sihanoukville. We made a few short stops, but I'll mainly stick to a few pictures I took from the bus.
The journey also took forever, especially because the traffic was terrible near Sihanoukville and we were moving very slowly.
Even though we arrived in Sihanoukville in complete darkness, you could tell that it's not a beautiful city anymore.
The entire city center and the part near the sea are being completely rebuilt. There are no normal paved roads anymore, and you can only drive on bumpy dirt roads. It feels like every old house has been demolished, and in its place, new high-rise buildings, Chinese casinos, or shopping malls are being built, although only a small part is finished. Most of the investors are Chinese. You will see a few pictures of that in the next entries.
In the hostel, we met two Germans and a Canadian, with whom we had dinner. The Canadian showed us pictures from a few years ago when the city center still looked beautiful. We also went to a Chinese mall together, and it was exactly like what we know from Shanghai, even paying with the smartphone was normal.