Central Cambodia has a lot to see and experience but we also wanted to see other parts of the country so we headed south toward the coast and eventually landed in a strange little place called Otres Village. It’s largely a village of young European guys who are cashing in on the recent influx of tourism to the area by getting cheap leases on undeveloped land and building cute little hotels and bungalows. The place has an odd vibe. As a generalization these guys never ever wear shirts, not even when they’re cruising around on their motorbikes with cigarettes in their mouths or eating in restaurants. Here they are, building their dreams, and yet I don’t think I ever saw one of them smile. Almost all the food available was western food, lots of Italian. There were some Cambodians around and we gravitated toward them – ended up in a Cambodian run hotel and mostly ate at a little Cambodian restaurant and the people who ran these places were very friendly. There was nothing to do except relax on the beach, but what a beach! It was one of the nicest, biggest, cleanest, quietest beaches that we’ve seen so far. All of the other nearby towns have restaurants, bars, and endless rows of wooden chairs with umbrellas right up on the water. Otres Village has none of that. It’s a nice place to slow down and catch your breath.
I’d been reading about how beautiful some of the Cambodian islands are, and how quickly they’re changing. More and more tourists are flooding to these places, major development is unchecked, and basic infrastructure has not been able to keep up. Many of these places will be ruined (from my perspective) so it seemed worth it to see some of it now. We got a ferry from Sihanoukville to Koh Rong, a small island off the coast. The center of the island is completely undeveloped and filled with jungle but there are a few beaches with places to stay. One of them is Koh Touch, which is very popular with partying backpackers in their early twenties. Not much Cambodian culture – burgers, thumping bass, and a beach full of bottle caps and broken glass. We didn’t stay there. Instead we got an adorable bungalow around on the other side of the island in a place called Soksan Village which was very quiet, charming, and rustic.
So rustic, in fact, that there was only electricity during random hours of the evening and the water would cut out sometimes, like while I was taking a shower and had just finished rubbing soap all over my body. There was a long gorgeous beach, most of which was completely uninhabited. The water was shallow and great for swimming, except for one thing – The Blob.
Lurking about in the water, the Blob is a large, ever-changing entity comprised of garbage and dead organic material like seaweed, leaves, and sticks. The garbage is mostly plastic bottles, plastic bags, chunks of styrofoam, fishing hooks and nets, and abandoned flip-flops. In the few days that we stayed there and walked up and down the beach we probably saw 300 hundred flip-flops washed up on the sand and we even wore some of them when the sand got too hot. The huge quantity of garbage on the beach was hard to ignore, and most of it came from the Blob. The Blob would move around from day to day so that an area that was pristine clear swimming water one day would be transformed into a dark sludge of trash the next day. It always deposited lots of trash on the beach whenever it passed through. Sometimes the people who work at the various beach accommodations would come out and rake up the trash but it honestly was an exercise in futility. They could spend hours raking up the trash one day only to have twice as much dumped in the same spot over night.
It became a source of entertainment to observe the Blob. It could show up anywhere, anytime, much like clouds drifting through the sky. It presented multiple iterations of itself that perhaps drew on a much larger source of material farther out in the ocean. I doubt that all that trash actually came from Soksan beach since there were very few people there. The Blob seemed to have its own force of gravity that held it densely packed together and it had a distinct edge around its body. One spot on the beach could be covered by the blob while 10 or 15 feet down the beach could have perfectly clear water. It really was bizarre and it had the power to turn a beautiful tropical paradise into a pile of trash.
This was certainly not the first time that I’d noticed a lot of trash around in another country and it wouldn’t be the last. I’ve heard many stories about the garbage in India and how it can take some getting-used-to. I guess it was just the dramatic presentation that caught my attention. I’ve definitely noticed that in a lot of places the locals don’t mind the trash in their environment. They make no effort to remove it, and where would they take it anyway? Dump it in a river so it washes out to become a part of the Blob? They seem to simply see it as part of their environment which on some level makes sense. It is part of their environment. Perhaps I just need to make sure my definition of beauty is flexible enough to include garbage because I’m going to see a lot of it.
We had to go back through Koh Touch to get our ferry back to the mainland, and it is sort of cute in a way, so we decided to spend a night there and check it out but there really aren’t nice places to stay there unless your forking out the big bucks. In an effort to find us a place that wasn’t upstairs from a thumping nightclub I booked us a bungalow on the beach which happened to be much farther away than expected. We walked away from town, through the jungle, and out on to the next beach which turned out to be stunning. There were two small bungalow establishments on this beach and that’s it. Almost nobody around. Not really what I was going for but, wow. So beautiful.
It took us a while to find our place and get situated. Fortunately we brought some fruit with us for dinner because there were not a lot of food options around. We swam and relaxed and enjoyed the sunset over the water from our little porch. It was very hot and there was a fan, which would have been fine except that this was another place with limited electricity. The fan turned off in the middle of the night and we laid there awake, sweating, listening to a rat go through the trash in our bathroom. In the morning I went for a run and collected some nice shells and when I got back Fern told me about the water. A little background information: We brought a couple of Steripens with us, which are UV water sterilizers. That means that we don’t have to buy bottled water. We can just drink tap water if we sterilize it first. It’s wonderful on multiple levels. When I got back from my run Fern informed me that our tap water had turned to ocean water. The tide had risen high enough the night before to contaminate the lagoon which was the water source and all of the bungalows had salt water in the sinks, toilets, showers, everything. This meant that we would have to walk about 45 minutes back to town for food AND water. As beautiful as this place was, it was starting to become a pain in the ass. The next night we listened as the same rat rummaged around the bungalow and tried to steal Fern’s toothbrush. Morning came and we walked out to the gorgeous beach. Nope. Not any more. The Blob found us! It rolled in over night and the beach was covered with lots and lots of trash. The water was filthy. We had booked a couple more nights but decided it just wasn’t worth it so we left early.
One more stop in Cambodia before we headed to Thailand. Koh Kong is an out-of-the-way little border town. There aren’t a lot of tourist attractions but the town has a unique, quirky, genuinely Cambodian charm to it, with a touch of Thai influence. Things are inexpensive, there’s a lot of good food around, and the architecture gives the town a cute cozy feel. After our previous beach experiences, it was nice to end our time in Cambodia here. Looking out across the river toward Thailand, one of the most bizarre sunsets that I’ve seen in a while occurred here.
jim@snorkelbandits.com