by It’s like I’ve stepped into a dystopian video game. All around me are soaring, rugged skyscrapers, half built, or half falling down, with scores of empty windows as black as skeletal eye sockets. The doomy towers parade down the trashed shore, each scene more apocalyptic than the last. Any minute now a hybrid tungsten killer-zombie will be swinging around the sunburned corner and lasering me dead, which means I have to restart from Level One. I’ve been to nicer places.
It’s all a shame, because so far my trans-Cambodian trip to the Cambodian islands is going well, which is supposed to be amazing. I started in Phnom Penh, which in recent years has emerged from torpor to become one of the most exciting capitals in Asia: full of great food (the freshwater prawn pancakes!), vibey nightlife neighborhoods Blade-Runner-esque, swish new. boutique hotels, elegantly renovated 14th century Buddhist temples, riverside boulevards with pubs, sky bars, tapas restaurants and still very authentic markets selling Russian teapots, live catfish, Tiger Eye jewelery and complete sensory overload.
From Phnom Penh I took the new Chinese highway into the Cardamom Mountains, to the Edenic hideaway hotel of Shinta Mani Wild – the brainchild of the hotel design genius Bill Bensley – where you arrive at an exhilarating zipwire over the tumbling waterfalls straight into reception ( although his choice Jeep is less exciting) and generally disappears in a state of blissed out languor, after several days of staring at the hornbills in banyans, and lazy listening to the lulling white noise of the rainforest wildlife.
Me, I did just that: barely leaving my suite of all-inclusive hardwood glamping (with its own bath on the deck), only to transfer myself to eat the top tasting menu on the terrace of wooden restaurant, do laps in the tub-like pool – right next to the waterfall – and go on a pristine boat trip, where I swam in the shadowy green river while watching tropical kingfishers swim vividly overhead, and decorated in all the colors of Elton John during his heyday in the mid-seventies. .
After that I got back on the boulevard and quickly made it here: a dystopia. The shuddering nightmare that is modern Sihanoukville.
Why is Sihanoukville (“Snooky”) like this? That great new Chinese road – cutting a seven-hour coastal drive down to about 120 minutes – offers a clue. In recent years Chinese investment has been pouring into Cambodia, and one of its main targets is – or was – the fishing settlement of Sihanoukville, once famous for cheap amok curry, steep beaches, Western drop-offs and not much else.
In a few years, the Chinese built a bazillion towers, which were quickly filled with some dubious characters. Suffice it to say, when the Cambodian government put an end to the online gamblers, human traffickers and general undesirables, there weren’t many left – and Covid finished the rest.
Now Snooky stands here, strange, uninhabited but wonderful in her own way, if you like 21st century Oriental versions of vertical Detroit on steroids.
Obviously, most people who go to the Cambodian islands tend to skip the city altogether. After an eye-opening urban tour, I join the crowd at the gleaming marina.
A few minutes later we are all surging in a large speed boat across the Gulf of James. The cleanliness of the emerald, silver flying fish and the occasional dolphin is soon eclipsed by the gray wash of Snooky’s pollution. After half an hour, we arrived at a private jetty on the west side of Koh Rong island – and one of the most beautiful and whitest beaches I’ve ever seen.
The beach is called Sok San and comprises seven idyllic kilometers of angelically soft white sand shaded by swaying palms and bathed in gentle surf that is cleverly heated to a soul-soothing 29.3C. The beach is so perfect that, after your third passion fruit mojito, you start desperately trying to nitpick: “Well, could that palm tree be moved six feet to the left, for a slightly better photo?”. Even better, it is regularly swept completely clean of sand flies – which can be a pain in other parts of the region.
The obvious comparison for a first-class beach is the Maldives, Thailand or Polynesia – and there’s the ruble. In all those places you would be looking at an island full of development, making the most of the sand, the sea and the blue skies with ease. Here, in Cambodia, that development did not happen. There were plans to destroy the place – think Sihanoukville – but they are now on indefinite hold. Hurrah!
All of which means that Koh Rong is nothing short of a world-class five-star resort: Royal Sands, where I’m staying, has a glass-floored spa, private oceanfront pool villas, golf carts from occasionally, a great restaurant all day. makes the best fish tacos this side of Tijuana, and a cracking fire pit for sublime sunsets (beach front just west).
Apart from Royal Sands there are a few shy, average resorts – and the rest is pure hill jungle, or whiskey mangrove swamps (great for Zen-calm kayaking), or completely untouched sandy coves, or terrible roads ending in fishing villages stilted where the locals sleep on hammocks all day after a hard night catching sea urchins. It’s amazing.
There is one “town” in Koh Rong (and this is where you would stay if you wanted a budget trip, as many do) it is called Koh Toch and if there is such a thing as an “authentic” backpackers village it has been built the page of The Beach by Alex Garland, here it is.
Expect gleefully drunk Westerners, drunk locals, gleefully drunk police, Nutella pancakes, delicious barbecued red mullet in the surf and a gap year of dreadlocked Danish girls with ankle bracelets making out with Norwegian guitarists. There are occasional power cuts. Nobody cares; hardly anyone notices. They light candles and lanterns, and put another lobster on the barbie. Sexy, sigh, barefoot-boho Koh Toch tuk-tuk tour, $15 (£11.78) from the immaculate opulence of Royal Sands, and the contrast goes on.
Koh Rong is as dreamy as everyone says – like a particularly beautiful and unspoilt Thai island, like Koh Samui, circa 1993 (and I went to Koh Samui in 1993), but I’m told it’s not there just across the choppy turquoise waters. an island even more remote, less developed, but just as attractive – in a different way. Koh Rong Samloem. Also, this island seems to have good snorkeling, which is not the case on Koh Rong (thanks to fishing and coral bleaching, not development).
I catch the long tail boat from Koh Toch. My pilot is the only other passenger. He is not sure where I am going, and as the sun cuts the hills of the fast island, he drops me at the wrong pier. As Koh Rong Samloem, like Koh Rong, is woefully lacking in proper roads, I have to convince another Khmer fisherman with a speedboat to abandon his whiskey-soaked seaside card game and steer me briskly to the right before nightfall. He shrugged, and charged me five US dollars, very friendly. Almost everyone is affable in Cambodia, especially in the islands.
My final destination is a small village called M’Pai. It consists of one pier, an almost comatose shore, half a dozen winsome beaches in the neighborhood, a strangely chic wine bar, more Khmer fishing families, about 50 expats (some backpackers, some older poet types), and about 300 residents in the complete. There are a few decent hotels at the back; All the action takes place on the drag beach, where the bars consist of school desks in the surf. I get a room at Bongs. It has a cold water shower, a great sea view, and a wooden balcony. It costs $10 a night, and downstairs they make impressive cheese-pesto sandwiches with a cold Singaporean pilsener.
In M’pai sweet, sleepy, distant, vague sometimes until an evening that, I think, could easily blur for a lifetime. The music flows under the palms, scuba divers jump into boats from time to time, people run laughing into the sea at night because the local plankton is beautiful as bioluminescent: as you move around, the krill light up in queues silver and blue tornado, as you are. the source of underwater fireworks.
How long will these glorious islands resist the roads, resorts and 7’s that have destroyed almost every island in Thailand, and beyond? Three years? six people? ten? Who knows, but at the moment they are still in that perfect sweet spot where they are 94 percent unsullied but you can buy a good sauvignon blanc. Go now.
Fundamentals
Sean Thomas traveled with Experience Travel Group (020 7924 7133; experiencetravelgroup.com). They offer 11 days/10 nights, on a FB & HB basis for: three nights Shinta Mani Wild, five nights Royal Sands and a boutique hotel in Phnom Penh, for £8,450 per person including all private transfers and flights from SAY.
