After exploring the temples around Siem Reap, I still had over a week until my onward flight to Laos so figured I’d head down to Koh Rong. I’d heard about these islands from fellow travellers in Vietnam and how these were a great destination to see bio luminescent plankton.. oh, you want that in English? Fine – awesome glowy water creatures!!

So off I set to try a little island life! Honestly, the next week was a mixed bag, filled with a couple of really memorable experiences, but also some very dull days once I realised that islands like this really don’t have much going on past the idyllic views and white sand beaches! Okay fine it wasn’t so bad 😅

I spent the week at Reef on The Beach resort in a beachfront tent which amazingly only set me back $4 a day! You can see the view from inside in the very first photo and waking up this every day was something I could get used to. I can tell you the fan provided was a MUST though – it got to sauna-like temperatures in there!

As you can see the resort was gorgeous! Though admittedly the islands infrastructure was very, very basic! For example, this was the ONLY bridge I came across on Koh Rong, if you can really call this a bridge…

Every time I walked across I was fully expecting to end up soaked, but luckily I avoided this fate unlike one of the guys I met who fell/I pushed them for a laugh (while their best mate recorded them) 😂😂

I can add Koh Rong to the growing list of beer pong destinations, and despite losing (possibly because I took the drinking aspect too seriously before our first game), I did make some new german friends who invited me to a little island trekking later that week.

Fast forward a couple of days and I set out alongside my beer pong partner Tim and his two friends to walk around the coastline to Long Beach – somewhere he was certain was only 500m away from our tents. Spoiler Alert!! IT WAS NOT 😅

What had been sold as a short walk turned into half a days trekking along dirt tracks that nearly swallowed up all of our shoes! See below…

Hours in the baking sun and we were starting to lose our minds a little, but then we began to see glimpses of something possibly resembling a beach. Combined with a little bit of 99 Luftbaloons for my new companions (the only German song I happened to have downloaded), our spirits were quickly lifted, and when we arrived we all knew it was worth the wait. This is quite likely the prettiest beach I’ve ever seen, and it goes on for miles and miles!

We stayed at local resort until sunset and managed to get bikes back to Reef on the Beach. A really long day but one of the great unexpected adventures that I’m really glad I got caught up in!

I did start to get bored of being so isolated in the following days, but my very last day on the island totally made up for it. I booked a boat trip around the island, tried fishing, and had a BBQ on the boat in Coconut Bay. After dark I got to experience the thing I’d been waiting for all week.

We took the boat about 10 minutes away from the shore and turned all the lights off, one by one jumping into the cold water with snorkel masks ready. I started to move my hands around in the water, and I could see the awesome glowy water creatures straight away. I can’t really put this into words and I don’t have pics sadly but this was seriously one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The more you move, the more the plankton lights up, and it feels magical. Couldn’t recommend this enough!

I set off the next morning from the main island town, bound for the capital city of Phnom Penh and this was an experience I won’t be forgetting anytime soon.