I spent the weekend on the Cambodian island of Koh Rong with my friend from college Christina and two of her friends. Christina has been living in Phnom Penh for the last year and a half working on a malaria study for an NGO. She's responsible for the Myanmar portion of the survey, so she's spent most of her time in Myanmar and hasn't spent much time in Cambodia, so it was everyone's first time exploring the beaches of Cambodia.

We took a car service down to Sihanoukville on Friday afternoon, which took about 4 hours. The ferry to Koh Rong didn't leave until the next morning, so we had dinner and wayyyyy too many drinks on the beach in Sihanoukville. Saturday morning was not fun, but we made it to Koh Rong before noon and got a few good hours of beach time in.

At night, we took a boat ride to a bay with bioluminescent plankton. The bioluminescence is triggered by motion, so we got in the water to swim around in the pitch black. It was amazing. I've seen some pictures of bioluminescent plankton which look like the water is glowing blue, but these were like little white dots of glitter. It looked like magic when you waved your hands around and thousands of bioluminescent lights shot out of your hands. I haven't been that impressed by something in a long time! I decided that bioluminescent plankton are my new favourite animal, but my on-call marine biology expert (Kelly Hannan) tells me they could have been plants or animals or eukaryotes (?). I was incredibly amazed by them!