So after a slightly dodgy journey the previous day I decided that the best plan was to do very little and to chill out on the beach.\u00a0 The beaches in Sihanoukville are beautiful and the sea was really warm.\u00a0 Partly due to the events of the previous day and partly due to continued warnings I didn’t take any valuables to the beach with me.\u00a0 This half explains why the only photo that I have\u00a0from Sihanoukville is of me lying in bed!\u00a0 That evening I managed to miss dinner at the guesthouse (the restaurant and bar shut at 10) and asked a motorbike rider to take me into town.\u00a0 The place I wanted to go to was shut as were the next 8 or so places that he took me to.\u00a0 The town centre was absolutely dead – well I guess it is off season.\u00a0 Finally we headed to a backpacker’s area of town which was very much alive and I got some food from a Supermarket.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The following day I felt insanely ill.\u00a0 I think I may not have mentioned the fact that I got really ill towards the end of my stay in Siem Reap.\u00a0 I won’t elaborate too much on the details but it wasn’t nice and after over a week of not being able to eat and having serious trouble consuming any liquids I was starting to get dehydrated and struggle a bit.\u00a0 One night when I was up bascially all night I managed to convince myself that I had cholera.\u00a0 Although this was not entirely my fault.\u00a0 If you’ve ever used a self-diagnosis site online you’ll know what I mean.\u00a0 Those things are the easiest way to give yourself a proper illness (like a heart attack) that exist.\u00a0 I remember using one for a really bad headache at home once and it said that I had a brain tumour and that I should go straight to Hospital.\u00a0 So, on the basis of my symptoms, general hypochondria and the wonderful tinternet I managed to convince myself that I was going to die in my sleep, alone.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Whilst I lay in my self-pity I read a local paper which\u00a0I found\u00a0outside my room.\u00a0 It was this kind of Worldwide news bulletin and, yes, it was in English – I am yet to master Cambodian!\u00a0 Anyway so I’m flicking through this paper and there were two stories which really interested me.\u00a0 The first was about two guys from the U.S. who were being investigated for grave offences.\u00a0 I mean hole in the ground here\u00a0and not serious, although I guess the first does not rule out the second.\u00a0 Basically, they were accused of stealing a skull and then using it as a bong.\u00a0 Two things struck me about this story.\u00a0 Firstly, WHAT? And secondly, although this is by no means my specialist subject, would that even work?\u00a0 The second story which caught my eye was about a bear which had attacked a boy in the Battambang Province of Cambodia.\u00a0 Apparently there was a group of children as the bear approached.\u00a0 The majority of them managed to run away and climb trees but one boy was not so lucky.\u00a0 I thought you were meant to play dead and that bears could climb trees but hey.\u00a0 The thing that struck me about this story was an interview woith a local man from the village who was quoted as saying the bear had, “lost his way”.\u00a0 The implication here was not that he had literally taken a wrong turning when, say, searching for the honey tree, but that something had gone awry in his thinking.\u00a0 It almost read like there should have been a follow up interview with Mama bear saying something like:<\/p>\n
“He was such a good cub at primary school.\u00a0 He went to Sunday school and loved cub scouts.\u00a0 Then he started secondary school, started mixing with the wrong crowd, experimented with illegal grubs and as the man said, ‘lost his way'”.<\/p>\n
Villagers heard the attack and chased the bear off with farming implements if you were wondering.\u00a0 The boy is in Hospital and his condition was said to be, “unknown”, which instantly made me think that the reporter was a lazy git.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So after a slightly dodgy journey the previous day I decided that the best plan was to do very little and to chill out on the beach.\u00a0 The beaches in Sihanoukville are beautiful and the sea was really warm.\u00a0 Partly due to the events of the previous day and partly due to continued warnings I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}