Famous Last Words

Wednesday 23rd December 2009, 3pm, Serendipity Beach - Sihanoukville

I've not written anything for a few days, this is because since Sunday night I have been permanently in two states that are not conducive to holding a pen - drunk or hungover. I'm in Sihanoukville, or 'Schnooky' as everyone abbreviates it to, a beach resort on Cambodia's Southern coast. The atmosphere here is very similar to that of Phangan and the Full Moon Party - party hard between 8pm and 5am, recover on the beach from 11am til 6pm. The difference between the two places being that Schnooky is on a much smaller scale, so once you've been here for a few days everyone knows each other - every face becomes a familiar one, you have 20 new facebook associates, and when you are all reunited at Dolphin Bar on the beach in the evenings you are thrilled to see a bar full only of people you are now calling friends.

The past few days have passed in a hedonistic haze, I have done absolutely nothing of cultural interest and have been behaving like a naughty sixth former on her first 18 to 30's holiday rather than a 23 year old backpacker in search of enlightenment. What's more, I don't feel even a little bit guilty about it. Myself and the companion have decided that we're taking a holiday within our holiday and that we will not in any way beat ourselves up about all the things we should be doing or seeing just because his Lordship the Lonely Planet guide says so - it's Christmas, and we're having a very merry time.

We met a group of crazy English boys on Sunday night who sum up Schnooky living pretty well I think. They'd gone out dressed only in pink boxers, neon paint, and motorbike helmets and were buying rounds of 25 beers a time then handing them out for free to any girls at the bar - hence how we met. One of them, Matt, told us that the boys' travelling experience over the past few months has basically consisted of the 4 of them getting drunk a lot, every day, in various different locations around South East Asia. This routine had become so much the norm, the daily grind for these boys, the 9 to 5, that every now and then they take it upon themselves to have a 'Daycation' - a day's holiday within their vacation. A Daycation, so I'm told, is centred around getting monumentally trollied and mischievous, as opposed to regular drunk and mildly stupid. We only saw the boys in regular mode apparently, normal vacation time, and I cannot even begin to imagine in that case what kind of debauched little pile of mess a Daycation must look like.

So for now, for our Christmas holiday week, I am going to unapologetically drink too much, wear too little, sleep too infrequently and flirt too blatantly. As my best friend always says to me when trying to encourage me to misbehave... 'Gracie, what's the worst that could happen?!'