We left at 6:45 a.m. as we needed to take the bus all the way to Phnom Penh and then take a connecting bus to Sihanoukville. We made it into Sihanoukville just after sunset, booked a room right away and then headed to The Dive Shop to sign up for the course. Even though the person in charge of scheduling had already left that night, we were able to talk with Housaine from The Dive Shop for a little while. He didn't remember us from last August which really didn't effect me much even though we came back specifically for him to be my dive instructor. He had an extremely serious tone to what he was saying that made me feel he took it very seriously. This is what I was looking for in a dive instructor. I know a lot of people have expectations of having a lot of fun under the water, but I was really shooting for an educational experience in which I learned what was necessary for diving and more. I felt Housaine had the qualities to accent that type of learning environment. That night we relaxed, shopped around a bit, ate at a Mediterranean place with fairly impressive pizza. One thing that I feel Cambodia is better at, or at least what I have witnessed in Siem Reap and Sihanoukville, is their ability to copy or allow foreign influence in their restaurant industry in a much more efficient manner than I have ever seen in Vietnam. If you ever get the courage to try a 'Western Dish' in Vietnam it will undoubtedly taste horrible. For instance, about 99 percent of Vietnamese restaurants that sell 'pizza' will serve you an extremely undercooked mini pizza with thick dough and tasteless, very sweet, red sauce. After dinner....it happened....the book craze that seemed to catch us throughout the entire trip, leaving us dragging along a 20 pound bag filled with books across the boarder back to Vietnam. It started with an innocent browse of the books from the Mick and Craig's bookstore next door. It ended with 9 books in our arms as we giggled heading toward our hotel because everyone else was headed to a bar to grab a drink. It didn't quite seem right for anyone else, but for us it made complete sense since we've lived in Saigon for almost two years now leaving our brains to shrivel up and die from lack of use due to a lack of English published books.
January 27th, we started off our day at Mum's Kitchen. If there is any place I would recommend as far as stopping by to eat in Sihanoukville, it would be Mum's Kitchen. The main cook is amazingly sweet and makes food that has always satisfied all of our food dreams. We then stopped by The Dive Shop again to schedule the course. We set up a package where Hannah could dive with me on my last day of the course, however, the complete course began on the 28th. I informed the person scheduling my dive course that I had recently traveled to Hanoi and on the way back had a nosebleed. She advised me to go to the local doctor for a check-up just to make sure everything is alright. I remember being extremely nervous about this as we headed to the hospital in a tuk-tuk. I started to breath really heavily just to try to practice breathing....I was so anxious I started to get lightheaded just from working myself up. When we got there, Hannah decided to go to the market to buy some fruit while I got my check-up. As always, the doctor thought he was hot shit and the assistant was the sweetest man you'll ever know that could speak English almost perfectly. The doctor shoved his camera into my ears first...looked around quickly and moved on to my nose. He spent a bit more time on my nose, but then took his stethoscope and placed the end to about 26 places on my body including peculiar places like under my armpit. I had never been checked in so many place in my life. The assistant then stepped in and took my blood pressure. He said I was at 130/80. It was the first time I've never been very close to 120/80. He approved the health check though and we were on our way with the bananas thanks to Hannah. We had an entire day on the mainland before we would leave for the island, Koh Rong Somlom. We checked in to our hotel again and then went straight to the Anna's Travel Center to organize new 3 month Vietnamese Visas. I would completely recommend this Center for anyone needing visas. For the most part, the women working there...and for some reason they are always women, are rather straight forward and provide information quickly. They are very knowledgeable, however, sometimes you really must know all the questions. They are on a don't ask, don't tell basis. It was getting pretty late in the afternoon by this time, I advised that we should rent a motorbike and head over to the island connected by a bridge. Hannah liked the idea a lot. We had a bit of trouble getting the motorbike since most rentals require a passport as collateral, and we had just given ours to the center to get new visas. We found out that as long as the motorbike rental calls the Travel Center you give your visas to and verifies the situation, you can give your receipt as collateral instead of the passports. We took the road that runs along the coast and passes Independence and Hawaii Beaches, stopping off at the monkeys to feed them for a bit....they are the kindest monkeys we have ran into yet....completely opposite from the Siem Reap monkeys that seem to be rather aggressive in getting food from you and keeping it away from the other monkeys.
We found out the bridge to the island was closed for some reason...what reason I don't think we'll know. We took the long way back to Otres Beach and stopped by a new establishment since they had seats high up so we could see the sunset. That's where we discovered the sunsets in Sihanoukville are very anti-climactic. Not only does the sun seem to drop at a super ridiculous rate, it also disappears behind some haze of clouds or opaque atmosphere about an entire sun length before it reaches the actual horizon of the land. That establishment...I wished I remembered its name...was rather detached and unorganized...though they stated that we were their first customers that sat in the new seats, so maybe it was just a bad first experience. We made it back in the dark and decided to return the motorbike and get our last minute purchases such as some boarder shorts for me.
We woke up on the 28th ready to go...Hannah worked out while I took a shower...and then all of a sudden all of the time went in fast forward and we were scurrying around to get everything packed and out before 7 a.m., which was our requested arrival time at the Dive Shop. To make things worse, no one was there at the hotel to check us out. Luckily, I had thought of it about 15 minutes before 7 which gave them enough time to get there and check us out. We rushed to the Dive Shop and made it there around 7:02 a.m....we then waited around for around 10 minutes...making me feel a bit like a fool for getting worked up and worried with fantasies of them starting off without us. We all loaded our bags on the truck, hopped on, drove to the dock and then boarded the boat to the Island. At the beginning, Housaine introduced me to the only other person I'd be learning how to dive with. Neither of us received a book, which irritated Housaine a bit. He gave us a book to share and gave us a packet each to fill out. There were 5 chapters in the book and he hoped we would finish chapter 2 at least. I quickly told her, Jessica, that she could take the book first and then once she finished Chapter 1, I'd take it and we'd continue like that. I quickly found out this would be more of a baby sitting situation than anything else. She would complain about it being to hard to find the answer...even though the page number was given... or she would ask what certain words mean (because she is Chinese and she never learned how to read in context when learning English though she works for a fairly large English school) or she would talk about how it made her sick to try to complete this while on a boat...it reminded me of my mechanical drawing class in high school when everyone around me would ask which thickness of pencil to use for which part of the draft or when we switched to the computer in the second semester which code to use to make the lines tangent to each other. In school it's not so bad to just tell the person you don't want to tell them the answer and watch them fall behind, but in this situation, when our instructor just finished expressing that we are going to be buddies for this experience and we need to work with each other, it really started to swirl around in my mind whether or not to just focus on myself and try to learn as much as I could and leave her to her helpless self, or to take what Housainne says seriously and help her along with everything. At the time, I felt like leaving her in the dust and completing what I could. I finished Chapter 2 before we got to the island.
Actually the craziest part about the boat ride there was that Hannah fell off the boat. She had gone to the bathroom and when she came out she stepped over someone and tried to make it to a two by four connected to the roof of the boat. We hit a wave at the exact same time which threw her out of reach of the two by four. She couldn't grab onto anything and ended up falling off the boat. I actually saw her though to me it almost looked as if she purposefully jumped off the boat. A couple of other people...including the captain at the time, heard the splash of her hitting the water and though the boat slowed and turned around rather immediately, Hannah was rather frantically swimming toward the boat. She told me she was afraid no one saw her or heard her fall off and that she would be left behind. At the same time, she was a bit frantic about keeping her 50 cent flip flops close to her. :) Though it was just a bit scary, it was really a great experience from my end in hind sight.
Right when we got to the island, we brought our stuff to The Dive Shop Dorms and I started my Scuba theory session. Hannah joined at first, but then realized it was all coming back to her rather easily....she was going to take a refresher course the next day..which just takes her through the basic skills of diving. It was a bit of an odd experience because at first Housaine welcomed every question, but then after so many questions started to get irritated. We got finished with chapter 4, I requested to take a small break so I could go for a swim and say Hi to Hannah, then right before sunset we finished chapter 5. We took our final test and headed over a bit after 8 p.m. to eat dinner at the Robinson Restaurant.
There were two main Bungalows on our beach. They were Huba Huba and Robinson. Robinson seemed to have more of a family feeling whereas Huba Huba was more of a 'modern hang out'. One reason for this difference is that Robinson had a 'group dinner' option every night where you could pay $5.50 to share with around ten other people, multiple dishes including typically two main dishes, two vegetable dishes and one or two salads. It created a more communal environment in which the partakers would converse with each other their travels. I didn't really get involved in the conversations until I finished the course completely. During the course, I would sit silent and dreary from the effort of the foreign activity. This is what happened the first night. The only thing that kept me alert were the two very large spiders in the bathroom as Hannah and I brushed our teeth.
I took my first breath underwater on January 29th, 2014. I'm sure it is actually massively easier than what most people anticipate in their minds. We woke up around 6:30 and took our time to wake up, brush our teeth and head over to Robinson again to snatch breakfast at 7:30 right when the kitchen opened. I had to scarf it down and head over rather quickly because he expected us between 8 and 8:15. We prepared all of our gear, put our wet suits jackets, and tanks on and walked to the shallow sea. We spent
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