18th July - Geoffreys' Birthday Bash!

A birthday is a very special time and every year you always try and outdo the year before.. this week was the birthday of a best mate here in Cambodia, and that guy is Mr Geoffrey the Saffer (South African).

Geoffrey's Birthday picnic by the river!

And so the planning of ideas began until he decided that this year he was going to throw a Boat Party! followed by a night on the town ! and so the planning, began, we managed to hire a decent sized boat for 2 hours for just $50, and entire buffet prepared, 3 crates of beer plus around 10 bottles of whisky and plenty more of Rum. The scene was set for an epic birthday in Phnom Penh!

Everyone met at the riverside for around 7pm and headed together over to the dock to board a lovely wobbly plank on the boat, in all there was around 23 people gathered for a night that we hopefully would never forget, and hell we now know we wont! 

The party kicked off brilliantly, blaring music, free flow of ice chilled beers and spirits and some amazingly delicious food

Warming up on the boat! (20mins in, 3 beers consumed and 5 shots finished.. each)

Enjoying some food and beer                                                 Andrew,  Myself,  Geoff,  Raksmey

Soon the party became full swing and everyone and myself were having an amazing time, Geoff was drinking those birthday shots like there was no tomorrow and the drinking games had begun! though soon enough the time on the boat time was over and the hilarity of watching over 20 stupidly drunk friends stumble down a terrible thin and wobbly gangplank trying not to take a soak in the river is something i'll never forget, one member actually froze mid way down and refusing to move without my assistance, which nearly saw me flop into the water :'), but we safely all made it back onto the dock without incident. and now the real fun began, trying to find enough tuk tuks that'd actually take 20 odd expats into the bar district of town, the infamous 51 street!

Group shots on the boat

After a brief search we managed to persuade our way into town and headed to our favorite spot, Howies, for a few games of pool, some dancing and more importantly to carry on the drinking games and to make sure the birthday lad could barely walk out! 

picture from a previous night to Howies.

Inevitably we got separated around 3am from the group and ended up being just me, Matt and Nandi, we decided to go to Nands since there was still plenty of beers left and  hopefully everyone would make their way back there to try and regroup! after a brief search for Geoff we assumed either he'd continued the party elsewhere or gone home!

So we headed back and after maybe 30 minutes of not hearing from anyone we resolved to continue our night anyway and hoped we'd find the birthday boy later on, and just as we were leaving the house.. guess who shows up, non other than Geoff and some of the group! Though at this point i don't think Geoff was quite able to walk never mind continue on but non the less he resolved to continue and push through and celebrate his birthday to the very last! 

from here we headed to the roof top reggae bar where the party continued and inevitably ended up in Soria malls' G-pot.

what seemed like hours later we realised at which point we had all be defeated by alcohol and exhaustion, stumbling from the club were met once again by glaring sunshine and 20'c sunshine at the lovely time of 7am.. 

Piecing together or fragmented memories from the night, it turns out Geoff couldn't remember much from getting into town and most of the group still don't even know how they got home!, so in all a successful night and a cracking birthday for our buddy!