Days 72 and 73, in which we sleep in the company of ghosts

We took the taxi another 300km south this morning and checked into the towering white edifice of the Independence Hotel, in the beach town of Sihanoukville. At first glance it seems that there's not much history to Sihanoukville - the city is not yet 50 years old, carved out of the jungle by the French as Cambodia's first industrial port - but it soon transpired we were staying in the heart of the town's history.

The Independence Hotel was apparently Cambodia's first luxury hotel - attracting guests as fabulous as Catherine Deneuve and Jackie Onasis - but the current owners aren't quite honest in stating it has been a "luxury spa resort since 1963" on three counts: i) construction wasn't finished until 1964; ii) it doesn't have a spa; and iii) it was taken over by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, who used it as a local base for four years after which it became a base for bandits and criminals.

The hotel doesn't go into this aspect of its past - its 'History Hall' literally only contains a photograph of a road and an old piece of wood whose provenence is unattributed, and the large sequence of photos in reception stopped at 1969 - but it seems it only reopened in its current form in 2004 after Canadia Bank invested $35 million to turn it from a broken, bullet-hole riddled shell into the lovely place it is now. Among their original plans was to convert the existing pool into a 'floating spa', however I cannot imagine this would be a relaxing experience as apparently the clover-leaf pool was once used as a prison, roofed over with bamboo. Thankfully the pool is now out of use, hidden on the far side of reception, but there are still local rumours of ghosts haunting the hotel proper, including a woman who killed herself in one of the rooms and four smugglers who were executed in another.

We tried not to think about this history as we enjoyed a slap-up lunch in the restored ballroom - a circular glass dining room with views out onto the terrace - nor while down at the private beach, sitting on the soft sand watching the sun set spectacularly across the ocean and preparing ourselves for a slap-up dinner. Unfortunately it was hard not to think about it, especially as we seemed to be the only people staying in the hotel and so whenever we left the room to walk through echoing corridors or sit in vast empty dining rooms it felt we were in a remake of The Shining. Several times I jumped with surprise when we came across another human being.

We had quite a large dinner, but alas the Immodium was beginning to wear off and Day 73 was mostly a write-off, spent in the hotel.