Chiva's Shack

While staying in Sihanoukville we stayed a day at Chiva's Shack. A nice place with kind people, although honesty seems to have its limitations here. Below is a part of my travel journey.

Chiva's Shack turned out to be a cool place. It had beach chairs, a large terrace, a pool table, Internet (half the price of the hotel) and the 'Boom Boom Room'. The latter was a service not only providing a DJ but also the possibility of copying or burning MP3 or audio tracks to CD-Roms or your MP3-player or I-Pod. They had a huge selection from which Peter and I decided to choose some albums to add to our collection. 75 cents for an MP3 album, 1,25 dollars for an audio CD.

We hadn't quite seated ourselves in the beach chairs yet when we were approached by numerous different sales people selling all kinds of things and services. So we spend the full day at Chiva's shooting pool, drinking Angkor, having a fine lunch, getting massages, the ladies and Jaap (who later joined us) having their legs de-haired (using a strange method involving strings) and having their nails done, buying fresh fruit and bracelets, swimming in the Gulf of Thailand and generally relaxing and having a good time. What an enormous contrast with the tiring travelling, dust, temples and other physical and emotional exhausting experiences of the previous week.

After a shower and some rest we went back to Chiva's Shack at eight for dinner and more Angkor. The owner was very hospitable and asked us to make a selection of music from the PC in his living room. So we took our shoes of and went into his house, where he lived with his family.
We had some more Angkors and then we called it a day at midnight. And that's where a nasty aspect of Cambodian hospitality became apparent. We had given the people at Chiva's a generous tip earlier that day and I had even given one of the guys one of my earrings. Still, when Peter asked for the bill he noticed that they spontaneously added 5 dollars to the bill ! As you can imagine we didn't agree on paying that. So far for Buddhist's Right Intentions and 'friendship'. :-(