Cambodia - Sihanoukville Revisited Again

http://tinamue.blogspot.com/2013/03/cambodia-sihanoukville-revisited.html

The beaches of Sihanoukville are beautiful, superb, unspoiled, and relatively unused although the main beach can get crowded on weekends. Here in the rainy season, they are not much of an attraction because when it rains in Sihanoukville, it pours.

However, if you visit during the dry and warm seasons head east of town. There you will soon leave the crowds behind you while the beauty of the beach increases. Soon you will end at an estuary where your main risk is to have the tranquility disturbed by a herd of cows.

There are also beaches to the west of Sihanoukville – for example, Hun Sen Beach located a few kilometers before the oil depot - that are totally deserted. Almost no tourists venture west of the Port of Sihanoukville. The most likely reasons are that the first kilometers of road are in a terrible state of repairs and that this first stretch of road goes through slum-like fishing villages. Those facts will deter most tourists daring to venture outside of town on their own.

Cambodia - Sihanoukville Revisited

A couple of years ago, when visiting Sihanoukville, I got the feeling it had become like a town in the wild west – money could buy you anything and opportunities abounded for investors flashing cash. Russian tourists and Russian money (of dubious origin) poured in. Big plans were hatched and entire islands were snapped up (e.g., www.morakotisland.com) by investors with deep pockets.

Now, the situation is quite different. Some of the Russian money men stepped on the wrong toes and their projects went nowhere. The bridge to Koh Phous (Morakot Island) was opened with great fanfare January 1, 2012, but then closed almost immediately thereafter.

Russian tourists no longer flock to the beaches around Sihanoukville, so several hotel projects have been put on hold. For a guy like me, that’s great because I don’t like crowds and the beaches near Sihanoukville are superb.

One side effect the “Russian boom” (although now bust) has had is that the Internet got filled with warnings that the Cambodian islands all were about to be turned into playgrounds for the ultra-rich. Among back-packers, this created a rush to visit these islands before they disappeared. To stay on one or more Cambodian islands became an almost mandatory activity for back-packers passing through Sihanoukville.

As a consequence, the few rustic resorts that were on the islands could not cope with the demand and they expanded capacity. Moreover, entrepreneurs rushed to sign lease agreements and build new resorts in order to meet the demand. Still today, occupancy rates on the islands remain high so more and more bungalows are being built on the islands.

In other words, the big bad Russian plans are no longer a threat to the Cambodian islands, but the demand created by back-packers is gradually resulting in that the Cambodian islands soon will be Paradise Lost just like Koh Samui and Koh Phangan and many other Thai islands are.

Anyway, if you are not a beach freak, there is also a quite nice waterfall to visit while in Sihanoukville. That is, if you can find the dusty road that will take you there. They could do a lot to improve road signage in Cambodia, but I get by with sign language to get directions.

However, some times this approach may result in mistakes and detours, which simply has to be taken as an added experience. In one instance it may take you to a rural village during rice harvest or it may take you through a slum where one gets a taste of what it really entails living on less than USD 2 per day. 

Cambodia - Sihanoukville

Sihanoukville Railway Station is an icon of shitty 1960s concrete architecture.

In 1955, a construction team arrived at what was then known as Kompong Som to begin work on Cambodia's first (and only) deep water port. When the port was finished in 1960, the area was renamed Sihanoukville in honor of then King Sihanouk. 

Today, with a good road from Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville is drawing a steady and growing stream of backpackers along with expatriates and locals coming down from Phnom Penh for lazy weekends. Russian tourists have also started arriving in droves.

The first time I visited Sihanoukville (over 10 years ago), I loved it; there were kilometers of white sandy beaches devoid of humans. In particular, Otres Beach was totally undeveloped as it could only be reached by motorcycle as there was no road (only a narrow dirt track) leading to the beach.

Now, seediness kinda starts to outshine the prettiness, especially at Weather Station and Victory Beach. The impacts of sex tourists and Russians with ill-gotten wealth flooding in cannot be hidden. Nor can the forces of "development".

For example the once abandoned Independence Hotel has had a makeover while a large portion of the previously public beach nearby was "sold" to a wealthy Khmer with, you guessed it, connections in the local government.

The trend is in the wrong direction, but outside town, one can still enjoy the sights of rice farmers and salt fields or go trekking in Ream National Park.