Rabbit Island

Saturday 20th March

Dinner last night was different. As this is a famed area of Cambodia for crabs, we ordered some. The plates that arrived looked like a construction kit for alien lifeforms. They contained spider crabs with long legs and smallish bodies, quartered, partially dismembered and covered in sauce. Luckily crab picks and crackers were provided, but even so it took the best part of two hours to perform the necessary combination of eating and arthropod dissection.

Tasty, but what with the need to wear glasses to examine the morphology of the animal, and the effort of extracting the meat having found where it was hidden, probably more energy was needed to eat the meal than the nutrition obtained.

Today we went to Rabbit Island. A small island about 40 minutes by wooden clinker built open boat from the mainland. We landed on a palm fringed sandy beach with bamboo platforms to rest on set under the trees, then cafe and restaurant shacks set further back, and finally a line of palm thatched bungalows before the jungle started.

The temperature must have been in the mid 30s, the sea was wonderfully warm, although a bit turbid for snorkelling. However we saw a few small fish, crabs and coral growing on boulders. The downside was cidarid echinoids, about the size of apples, which in places were spaced less than a metre apart in places and were covered in fine but very sharp spines. Quite a lot of people ended up with punctured feet. It seems there is always a problem in paradise.

We have decided to take the early bus to Phnom Penh tomorrow, in an effort to try and reach Siem Reap the same day.