Welcome to Kirirom Hillside Adventure

By the end of our weekend getaway at Kirirom Hillside Resort we all concluded that the place felt like the set of a dodgy horror movie. The resort was obviously once a very fancy place to visit, but is now lacking in certain health and safety, cleanliness and friendliness standards. However, we loved our trip there and these discrepancies made it all the funnier – plus we were staying in a villa that made us feel like we were on the set of the OC!

We arrived in time for lunch on Saturday, there was a lovely restaurant by the side of the pool and we were starving! All eight of us ordered off the menu and settled in with some drinks. However, at good 10 minutes later the waiter came back to tell us that they didn’t have any of the meals we ordered! No eggs, no beef, no sandwiches… the list went on. We then had to re-order, using the three and only three menus the restaurant owned. The food finally arrived but in pairs, which clearly meant they had a maximum capacity of two meals at a time. Two meals came out wrong, but an hour later we were all satisfied! An eventful start.

A few of us decided to explore and go canoeing, we went through the ‘dino park’, a weird selection of dinosaur statues hidden around the wooded area, which was complete with hundreds of little straw huts for picnics. The canoeing was on a very small lake and apart from the broken cable dangling in the water which we had to canoe over wasn’t particularly exciting. Clodagh however, had an incident with a huge spider on her paddle which the guy just brushed off while she screamed and she almost impaled herself with her paddle when we went under a bridge with lots of posts underneath!

Clodagh and Lauren at the lake where we went canoeing

After a dip in the pool we decided to go to our villa and change before dinner. It was dark at this point and the display of stars was amazing. We decided to cut through the ‘zoo’ which turned out to be a bad idea. It was a creepy setting with a random collection of animals, squawking monkeys, tons of white rabbits, a deer and then two large ostriches with only a waist height fence. This freaked me out a fair bit and then as we walked past the enclosure we saw that the gate was wide open! The ostriches were just able to wander in and out! We all got out of the zoo as fast as possible, running past the bizarrely painted Disney characters, who looked very creepy and not accurately formed or painted and a giant UFO which was casually placed at the entrance to the kids park. Not my favourite zoo. When we went through in daylight, one of the ostriches was just wandering around, none of the locals were too bothered and we were concerned they did not know what ostriches are capable of.

Casual UFO

Our day of adventure began the next day, starting off with the zip wire through the trees and over the lake. It was a really beautiful setting but the health and safety checks were not too stringent. We pre-booked and arrived at the start of the zip-wire with no-one around. A man then casually arrived and just walked up the steps to the top. He then pulled the wire until the harness emerged from the bottom and looked up for a victim. As an adventure lover I volunteered to go first, everyone else thought I was mad and suggested that we just abandon the idea. I decided to go for it and was very glad I did! It was a lot of fun and everyone followed me down afterwards. At the bottom, a guy would just grab you as you went flying into him and then he would shout ‘hello’ in a very friendly manner.

Getting attached and more and more nervous

Weeeeeeeeeeeee!

We then wanted to go to see the waterfall, which we were told was 8km there and 8km back, which we weren’t too keen to walk in the sweltering heat. However, they were not very useful in suggesting an alternative, the bikes had to stay on the resort and the motos were ridiculously expensive, so in the end we negotiated a 4x4, with four of us crammed in the boot! If we had walked it would have killed us as it was out in the open on a dusty straight track. We arrived at the entrance to the national park and were provided with an ox cart which we all crammed on – it turned out that ox carts are very slow so most of us ended up getting off and walking. We then had a lovely half an hour trek to see two waterfalls and have a splash about in the pool below, where many Cambodians were dancing around to Gangnam Style.

The two hour drive back to Phnom Penh in the air-conditioned bus (with Wi-Fi) was smooth but we saw some funny sights. Firstly, we saw an 8-year-old girl cycling a bike on a bumpy road with a 2 year old boy on her hip; she had to lean to the left to counterbalance the weight! We also saw a wedding that was being held at a petrol station; the guests were parking at the station and then going into the building behind for the festivities. I’m still getting used to this place.