Bed #49 Koh Seh, Marine Conservation Cambodia

One of my favourite weeks was staying at Marine Conservation Cambodia on the island of Koh Seh, I loved it because I had lots of cool kids to play with AND I learnt to Scuba Dive !!!!!

I LOVE being underwater and being able to breathe and watch the fish, we saw lots of fish, crabs, seahorses and coral.

I made some cool friends: Jazmin 9, Fern 7, Holly 5 & Bee 3, they live on Koh Seh because their Dad runs MCC.

Jazmin was my diving buddy. All of the Koh Seh kids are like mermaids (or merboys for Bee) they can hold their breath underwater for ages, with their eyes open and they can even catch fish with their bare hands !!! They’re not exactly stealthy but they still catch loads. We spent all week swimming, fishing, crabbing, jumping off the pier, snorkelling, diving, playing volleyball and having fun 🙂

Marine Conservation Cambodia is a team of marine biologists & divers who are trying to protect the coast of Cambodia from illegal trawlers and electric fishing because they are doing so much damage to the seabed and killing marine life, then they just throw all the dead coral, seagrass & fish back into the water. They’re also trying to protect the seahorses from the fishermen who catch millions of them to grind up into Chinese medicines.

We stayed in a very rustic wooden hut on the beach, Mama slept on the top bunk and I slept on the bottom bunk. It was super hot but during the night there was a little breeze that came in through all the gaps in the bamboo walls. We could hear the waves and also the illegal trawling boat engines.

The bathroom had a toilet but no running water so you had to pour a bucket of salt water down it to flush it. There were 2 huge buckets, 1 with salt water for the toilet and 1 with fresh water to pour a bucket over your head instead of a shower.

During the rainy season they collect rain water into big tanks for cooking, drinking & showering but it hasn’t rained for months now and the water has run out, every 2 days the boat has to go to the mainland (3 hour round trip) to fill up big bottles of water for the kitchen and for all of to drink & shower. You can only use 1 or 2 buckets each day so its pretty difficult to wash all the shampoo & soap off !

We left a packet of kleenex in the hut and the rats ate a hole in it and dragged the tissues out. They also had a nibble on my tennis balls. After that we had to hang all our stuff on rope from the ceiling.

We climbed up the hill in the middle of the island to see the Khmer Rouge bunker, there is a tree on the top that MCC have decorated with all the flip flops that wash up on the beach. They call it the flipflop tree.

We went out on patrol on the boat to stop the illegal trawlers, we caught 2 boats redhanded with their huge nets dragging along the seabed, we got our machetes out to cut their lines but they hauled the nets in really quickly, it was really sad because they pulled up loads of seagrass, coral, dead fish & seahorses who were flapping around dying, they kept the seahorses and chucked all the dead fish & broken coral back into the sea leaving a dead floating mess.