The Hard Life and the Changing Landscape in Cambodia
Sihanoukville, Cambodia, September 30th, 2014.
Salaroche


Living in the vicinity of the seaside town of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, for the past two months has felt like an extension of an experience I had in the beaches of San Diego, El Salvador, Central America, a few decades ago. I’m not retired, nor do I think I will ever be in the full sense of the word, but throughout my stay in this land I’ve been once again exposed to the real meaning of having nothing to do: No immediate responsibilities or obligations, no short or mid-term financial needs, and no real problems or worries worth mentioning.

Yes, the rain has sometimes kept me from going downtown to run some personal errands and occasionally I’ve had to return a rented motorbike for whatever minor mechanical problems it might have had, but those are not troubling inconveniences, they only represent short delays in my random endeavors. Really nothing to write home about.

Humans are creatures of habit and by now I’ve settled on some sort of steady daily routine. I usually wake up around 7:00 am, look outside my window and, depending on the weather, decide whether to snooze a bit further or jump out of bed. Once up on my feet again, checking and answering my email is usually the next activity.

Reading the news might take an undetermined amount of time, depending on the articles I’m compelled to read. Lately, however, while my reading takes place, my guitar just sits there like telling me there’s another daily activity I shouldn’t neglect. Old habits may come and go and playing guitar is no exception, meaning that once the instrument calls the musician it is rather hard for the latter not to heed the call.

If I remember well, the longest I’ve stopped playing guitar was for about a year and a half, which covered most of 2013 and a good slice of this year, but sooner or later I usually get back to it, just like I started to do a few weeks ago. The funny thing is that once I get back in the groove I usually realize I’m doing some things I couldn’t do before, although I can also feel how my hands need to practice to get back in full shape.

This time I began practicing again because of some recent live presentations I’ve done in a couple of local places. This happened a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t performed since for the simple reason that I avoid as much as possible imposing unnecessary obligations on myself, although this doesn’t imply I don’t intend to perform again in my whereabouts.

As a soft rule, I hardly ever go out for a walk or a swim in the morning before doing my exercises. I call this a “soft rule” because I occasionally break it, although hardly ever more than once a month. Fifty pushups a day may not sound like much for any athletic kind of person, but for me it is mostly a matter of discipline. There are, however, some visible side effects to that practice, as it helps keep my body in good shape and my health running rather OK from head to toes.

I’m not a breakfast kind of guy, so I very rarely sit at the table before 12:00 m. Down here I’ve taken to enjoying a nice midday brunch in a couple of different places. My days in Malta made me a fan of typical English breakfasts, which became the perfect brunch for me over there, but, since in this corner of the world it is a bit difficult to find the right kind of sausage, I don’t order it very often. Instead, my brunch often consists of some Chicken Amok (a local Khmer dish), Sunny-side up eggs with ham, or any other light meal of that sort.

And thus go my regular mornings in Sihanoukville.

Afternoons I spend mostly by the beach, except when it’s raining, and I usually play evenings by ear, depending on how I feel. Dinner is often between 6 and 7, followed by a walk down the beach or down the only street in the community. There are some good BBQ dishes in my vicinity and I often have one of those for my last daily meal. Fortunately, I’m never short on movies, so I almost always end the day in bed watching one of the latest films or one of the all-time favorites or classics.

And while all of the above takes place, a few other things keep happening around me. For one, as I write, the local architectural landscape keeps changing and is bound to change even more in the coming months, not to mention the coming years.

A good number of land “owners” around the beaches of Sihanoukville are foreigners: French, South African, English, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Norwegian, etc. I write “owners” in quotations because most of them have only 10-year or 99-year leases on the land where they have built their hotels, bars, and restaurants.

But now the local building laws have changed and all of the present structures standing on the beachside of the road in Otres One will have to come down. On top of that, anyone willing to rebuild on the same premises will have to follow some strict new building codes that will allow only for bars and restaurants. No more beachside hotels or guesthouses. And the bars and restaurants will have to be designed according to some new government directives too.

In the meantime, foreign and local investors on the non-beach side of the street keep developing at a fast pace. Sebastian, a French guy, just finished giving the final touch to his 13 brand-new bungalows while Don, an Irish guy, is quickly adding some 10 units to his already existing 10. Another French guy whose name evades me is also building some new bungalows in his hotel, thereby showing the high rate of return foreign investors expect to get once the “squatter” mostly-backpacker beachside bungalows are gone.

And that’s only what’s about to happen in the next three months. In the long run, say, in a 10-year term, all these beaches are going to be unrecognizable. The Russians and the Chinese have been buying Cambodian citizenships (US$65k/each) so that they won’t need to form partnerships with any local people, thereby affording to be the sole-owners of the land they buy. And those guys, the Chinese in particular, don’t like playing softball. They’re going to go for big Miami-style structures to stack as many of their compatriots (and others) as possible under their roofs.

No doubt all these developments are going to pump general prices up. Sebastian, for example, has bungalows starting at US$60 a night during the low (rainy) season and is planning to hike the price to US$80 or US$90 once the dry season starts, particularly for the Xmas and New-Year celebrations. If ever he is successful in his plans, everyone else will follow in his footsteps. In other words: Bye-bye Backpackers.

All those events can be food for reflection. For example, I’m not a prophet of doom, nor am I Christian, but lately I’ve been thinking that the mythical apple that allegedly ruined Genesis’ earthly paradise probably was not sex, as Christian lore would have you believe it was, but development. Eve probably said to Adam: “Hey honey, why don’t we build a hotel here and a restaurant there so that we can lodge and feed our progeny while making some retirement money in the process?” Adam went along with the idea and the rest is one of the best known myths in the world.

In any case, humanity will always follow its own developmental path regardless of what any observers or critics might say about it, so I guess that in the long run all that really matters is to live your life according to your own brand of philosophy and guided by your own principles of conduct.

For my part, living the “Hard Life" I’ve been recently living in Cambodia seems good enough for the moment.

And the ship sails on.

Salaroche

(To see a related photo album please click here)