Savet 1 Guesthouse

We stayed two nights at Savet. A Cambodian family owns this place. It features 7 rooms. We stayed in a very large room on the third floor. The room is spacious, simple, and has hot shower. The TV is small but has a few international channels. The third floor has a terrace overlooking the street where you can watch the local neighborhood scene go by. It also has some fitness/exercise equipment that I can't imagine anyone using. The guesthouse is located 2.5 blocks off the main street where you will likely get dropped off if you took a minivan to Stung Treng. I downloaded the Google map of the city beforehand so it was very easy to find the guesthouse from where we got dropped off. The young couple who runs Savet speak good English. Their very friendly, young staff do not, which is fine. The couple don't stay at the guesthouse but if you need anything that requires complicated English communication, their Khmer staff will call them on phone. There's a very, very good, affordable pho (noodle soup) place directly across the street for meals when you tire of the western menu Khmer food you get elsewhere. We ate a few bad street vendor and restaurant food elsewhere in the city so we ended up eating at the Saigon pho place for the rest of our stay because it was reliably good. There are cheap massage, laundry, and convenience store places within a block so all your travel needs are close by. There's even a milk tea place across the street, next to the Saigon pho spot, if you are hankering for another sweet drink. If you're like us and decided to stay in Stung Treng to visit the waterfall near the Lao border and possibly see dolphins, you can rent a motorbike from Savet for $10. It's a 1.5-2 hour motorbike ride on mostly flat, dirt roads that are surprisingly smooth. If you need comfort, you're going to need to hire a car for $60-$115 to take you to various sights. We opted for the $10 motorbike for the pure adventure and cost, but our butts and legs were quite sore after the day...more reason to get another massage! If you're reading this review a year from now, the current Savet building might be a converted massage place and a new guesthouse will likely be operating next door. The friendly Savet owners are constructing a larger building next door right now. I'm sure it will be very nice and of course new and clean in late 2018/early 2019! P.S. The building construction next door did not negatively affect our stay. We had a quiet two nights.