After the trauma of spending days researching an article about the weapons sprinkled liberally all over Cambodian society, which had itself come hot on the tails of a terrifying fight against a pro Muay Thai fighter in Bangkok and a distressing trip to Burma that ended with me being ran out of the country by soldiers of the military junta, I was pretty much knackered and needed a holiday.
Cambodia’s colonial era coastline was awash with lavish European-style resorts, although they were all pretty much levelled by the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Over the past decade however, visitor numbers have being climbing rapidly. The Cambodian people have very much embraced tourism and employ all sorts of ingenious methods of taking their share of the revenue. Tourist resorts are beginning to recover although are now very much pitched towards the budget traveller. Among them is the difficult to pronounce Sihanoukville; a laid back bamboo-and-thatch job said to be similar to Thailand’s south island resorts 30 years ago.
There were a couple of other options that appealed but Sihanoukville had one key advantage – it’s home to Cambodia’s national brewery and a beer can be had for the princely sum of $0.75. The beachside bars also sell $2.50 buckets – the ones kids use to make sand castles – into which a bottle of Mekong Whiskey, a litre of cola and two cans of red bull are emptied. There are few people alive who could walk after consuming $10 worth of alcohol in Sihanoukville although many brave young men and women go down trying each evening. Cambodia, I was becoming aware, is probably one of the cheapest non-war torn or blight-ridden countries in the world.
I bade goodbye to my guide and translator Thida, who seemed surprised that I had survived my meeting with the grubby Cambodian arms dealers, before calling driver Sonny to ask that he take me to the bus station. I waved away his ludicrous suggestion that we drive the 100 or so kilometres from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville in his three-wheel tuk tuk, paid $10 for my coach ticket and was soon whizzing down a lumpy, dirt track road banked on either side by glistening rice fields dotted with bent figures wearing conical straw hats.
Our bus was met at the station in Sihanoukville by the customary mob of touts, one of which whisked me south to a strip of seaside bungalow outfits that have set up shop along the impossible to pronounce Ocheatueal beach. The pricing, by European or even Asian standards, was astonishing. I booked into a large two-bed en suite beachside bungalow with air con, fridge and satellite TV for $10 per night. After dumping my stuff and taking a shower I went looking for somewhere to eat along the beach. The price of a western meal in practically every establishment comes in at under $4 with most in-and-around half that. Cambodian dishes like fried noodles with chicken or Samlor Machu Trey (a kind of spicy seafood soup) cost around $1.50.
Most businesses along the beach consist of a beachside bar/restaurant with a few bungalows out back and they supplement their income by operating tours and activities for tourists. Still, customers can be relatively sparse and with prices so low I was amazed they could stay afloat.
Even more precariously balanced on the edge of ruin are the hawkers who trudge up and down on the blistering sand attempting to sell their wares to the-oiled-up-and-uninterested western and Asian travellers who sweat under parasols. Some offer one-hour beach-side massages for $3 while others give on-site manicures and pedicures. Children lug coolers full of fruit or ice cream from one end of the beach to the other and in a simply phenomenal demonstration of endurance given the 30-plus degree temperatures, dozens of women make their living by carting a fully lit clay pot barbeque and a massive box of live lobsters on either end of a wooden pole slung across their shoulders. $3 dollars to eat your way through a kilo of freshly barbequed lobster yards from the sea they were plucked from a few hours beforehand. You’d barely get a batter burger out of a Dublin chipper for that price.
At the bottom of the pile though, are the horrifically maimed beggars who in the absence of anything even resembling a welfare system are forced to drag themselves around asking for change. Landmine and combat victims from the civil war years, most are missing one or both legs or are burned from head to toe. Owning a set of crutches is a pipe dream for most, never mind a wheelchair. The rock-bottom price of everything in Cambodia means living like a king is easy. The crippling poverty that abounds here however, means that doing so without feeling guilty is slightly more difficult.
