via Khmer NZ
Stephen Phelan
Share 0 comments 26 Jul 2010
This is not Cambodia, in any way that counts.
The island has no roads or infrastructure, no native inhabitants, no history to speak of, and no electricity, save for a few hours of inconstant power in the evenings, provided by two shuddering diesel generators to the side of Lazy Beach. If the beach had a local name before this small settlement of wooden bungalows and outhouses was built on it three years ago, then nobody here seems to remember.
“I think it was just called Beach Number Two,” says Chris Beadles, the co-owner and operator of the site. That sounds like the kind of impersonal number the Khmer Rouge might have assigned, as they did to all the streets in Phnom Penh when Pol Pot’s forces seized the Cambodian capital in 1975.
But even after his regime expelled the urban population out to the provinces, where millions were then worked or starved to death, this lonely, empty island sat outside the range of the genocide.
“During that whole trouble, it was pretty uneventful here,” says Beadles’s old friend and business partner Rich King, who first discovered this place on a weekend camping trip while working at a hostel in Sihanoukville, the nearest mainland port. We have just come from there, and it was a pleasure to get away.
Named after the monarch turned prime minister who presided awkwardly over the early phase of his country’s post-colonial apocalypse, Sihanoukville has since grown into a generic Asian tourist town, comprised of beach bars, multi-ethnic restaurants, internet cafes, and long straight lines of pink and white sunbathers. We left them behind this morning by walking straight into the sea.
When the Gulf of Thailand is choppy, as it has been today, the motorboat to Lazy Beach has to anchor way offshore, and new guests are obliged to swim for it. Our bags followed after us in floating, watertight crates. This felt adventurous, a feeling soon compounded by voyager’s nausea, as I boldly retched my way along the Koh Rong archipelago for two hours that seemed to last six weeks. Lying prone on the deck with my head hanging over the bow, I saw Koh Rong itself pass by upside down – a largely unoccupied island until just last year, when a foreign engineering firm began work on a high-end eco-resort.
We also passed Koh Tang, where a US Army helicopter was shot down by local combatants in the last confused days of the Vietnam war. (A little later, America began providing clandestine support for the Khmer Rouge in their own fight against the Viet Cong, secretly backing Pol Pot’s strain of communism over that of Ho Chi Minh.)
Finally, we reached Koh Rong Saloem, and rounded the headland into this shallow bay. The wind died down to a light breeze, the waves turned calm and clear, and my dry heaves gave way to a low, happy hooting. We had reached the beach of my dreams, and probably your dreams too: an archetype of earthly paradise, a natural enclave of hot white sand and iridescent green water, sheltered on both sides by high sea cliffs and secluded by a thick, dark interior jungle.
On a rainy workday inside an office building, you might cast your mind out to a distant shore like this one, see the brightly coloured fish and the monkeys in the trees, and find yourself diving through the window. Knowing this, and having made his own escape from that kind of job in the UK, Rich King started drawing up plans as soon as he set foot here. Despite his name, which seems a good fit for a foreign conqueror, he wasn’t thinking of fortune or glory so much as making a better life for himself, and sharing it with a few fellow travellers.
Over a tall, cold lime juice cocktail, offered free to new arrivals as they step off the dock, King tells me the story of how he leased this land from the government, brought in Beadles to design a discreet row of 12 beach bungalows, and enlisted his local girlfriend and her family to help build and run a modest resort around them.
Lina Muy, who is now King’s fiancee, is also head chef of the finished complex. Her father Ben is the master carpenter. Her brother Ken is chief mechanic and boat captain. And her mother Ang manages the booking office back in Sihanoukville. En route today, we met them all in reverse order. Lina, as it turns out, is a better cook than even King himself realised, and the menu in their open, airy, custom-made bar and restaurant is as good as anywhere in Cambodia.
This is fortunate, because there is not much to do here but eat and drink, and nowhere else to go. At first, I thought Lazy Beach was in itself a lazy name to give the place, but after a few hours it comes to seem entirely apt, as the sea rolls in and sun rolls over and nothing continues to happen. We spend the next three days swaying half-awake in hammocks, floating belly-up in the water, or curling into soft cushioned bamboo chairs and sofas with books and snacks and fresh fruit shakes, occasionally sharing with one of the owners’ two black dogs, Boysie and Spoon, both equally sleepy.
The bungalows themselves are much better appointed than the more basic equivalents on other Cambodian islands, and a lot pricier at $30 per night, although each can sleep up to four people in two comfy double beds. For the duration of our own stay, we share our bathroom with a family of large, colourful, and immovable geckos.
We give them literary names based on the authors we’re reading – Elmore Lizard, F Scott Fitzlizard, Salamander Rushdie – and welcome them as benign reminders of the jungle outside. Better geckos than pythons. King has told us that the island’s rainforest is impenetrable, except for one short path under the canopy that leads from this beach to an even quieter stretch of coastline on the opposite side.
The other beach does have a local title – Ao Yai – but is also known as Saracen Bay, because of a British ship that once sailed into it. When we get there it is utterly deserted, the sand is so blindingly white that it takes our eyes a while to make out the small naval station at the very far end.
Technically, this entire island now belongs to the Cambodian navy, but the last decade of relative peace and stability has seen the cash-strapped government sell or rent its land resources to every kind of developer. Rich King prefers to call them “speculators”, in reference to the various groups with their sights set on this archipelago, which some of them are already advertising as “the next Asian Riviera”.
He doesn’t think of himself in the same class, and has no plans to expand his own property beyond two or three more bungalows. “We could stick a skyscraper on it if we wanted,” he says, “but then why would people come here? On this island, less is definitely more.” His hope seems to be for Lazy Beach to remain as far removed from the modern age of global capital and mass tourism as it was from the previous half-century of atrocity, famine, and political chaos.
There’s no arguing that the recent past was preferable, but no real denying that we are all agents of change. Economically speaking, Cambodia is at least 10 years behind its wealthier neighbours, which makes it that much cheaper than Thailand or Vietnam, and that much more attractive to budget travellers, who in turn act as vanguards for the more affluent. In coming here to avoid the crowds we have paid a little extra, and pushed out a little further, but this only makes us part of the process.
And if Lazy Beach is heaven on earth, it is also a sealed and soporific bubble of tropical atmosphere, with only Lina’s local dishes to remind us what country we’re in. In order to relax about this, I actually find it helpful to forget what little I know about Cambodia, and think of the island instead as a safe and well-catered lost world.
The real pleasures of Koh Rong Saloem make you feel like some kind of time traveller. A sudden thunderstorm breaks over my head while I’m wading at dawn, and the rain becomes so heavy that the dock, the bungalows, and then the beach itself seem to disappear.
A few hours earlier, when the sea was still black, we watched phosphorescent blue algae rise to the surface like little galaxies being born. And every night around dinnertime, the generator fails for at least a few seconds, cutting the music and lights, filling the silence with waves and jungle noises, sending us back to primordial darkness with cocktails in our hands.
Getting there:
Cathay Pacific operates direct from London Heathrow to Phnom Penh with return flights from £549. From there, Sihanoukville is a long but highly affordable bus trip south, with most one-way fares around the $10 mark. Bungalows at Lazy Beach ($30 per night) can only be reserved through Ang at the booking office, who will also put you on the boat to Koh Rong Saloem for $10 per person each way. For details go to www.lazybeach cambodia.com.
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