Islands and Lakes in the Fast Changing Cambodia

Cambodia is a beautiful country with lots of jungle amongst the paddy fields, and apart from Phnom Penh, the population is mostly rural.  However, it is also a bit of an enigma as areas go through massive change, whilst others remain as they have been for decades.  The next few places we visited in Cambodia show this perfectly.  As mentioned in the last post, Cambodia emerged from a dark period in early 1979, and is attempting to change quickly, with many of the people who built the country before 1975 no longer around.  Usually this involves outsiders, often in cahoots with the ruling party.

This is most evident in the coastal areas of South West Cambodia.  We first stopped in a small inland town called Kampot, which had a lovely Old Quarter and over 100 restaurants and bars.  In the rainy season it was quite quiet, and very wet at times, as the large expat community go about their business of getting ready for high season.  Even here it is about to change with the Japanese building a 42 storey hotel beside this Old Quarter and the Chinese building two massive casinos in the National Park 1,000 meters above the city, all to be reached by new high speed ferries and small cruise ships.

We then moved to the coast itself.  There are two beautiful islands reached from the coastal town of Sihanoukville.  This stepping off point is one large building site for 10,000 hotel rooms and multiple casinos along what were once pristine beaches.  The locals resent this as the money doesn’t reach them, and is kept by the Chinese backers themselves or the government officials.

We didn’t stay here, but took a ferry to the beautiful tropical island of Koh Rong Samloen.  With white sandy beaches and a warm sea on shallow beaches it was idyllic, as the small resorts and backpacker hostels are largely hidden in the jungle.  It was a beautiful place to spend a few days.  But as a sign of change, the sister island is building an airport, big hotels and casinos too to attract the high-spending Chinese tourists, and presumably push out the local and Western tourists who currently visit.

Thus the coastal area is all about change and is building upwards rapidly.  However, on our trip north to Cambodia’s second city, it was completely the opposite.  We took a bus north from Phnom Penh and got off in a small town called Krakor.  We ended up getting various forms of transport to reach the floating village of Kompong Luong.  This was situated on the enormous lake of Tonle Sap which grows from 3,000 square kilometres in the dry season to 13,000 square kilometres when it rains, necessitating the towing of the village and all its floating buildings several kilometres backwards and forwards so they remain floating.

The village was so vast that there were shops, boat repair yards, telephone shops, generator repair buildings, a Buddhist temple and Catholic Church etc.  After the tour round the village, we stopped at a homestay, and lived with the family overnight.  The accommodation was basic with a bed and about three feet of space beside it.  The bucket shower was at the back with just a curtain hiding us from the rest of the family, and the toilet was just a bowl behind the shower.  But we had great fun, and life here hasn’t changed much for decades, except for the ubiquitous mobile phones and satellite television.

After a day there we travelled further north, to the subject of the next blog.