The Slow Life on Koh Rong Island, Cambodia

It’s sunrise at Sok San Resort on Koh Rong (island) off the southern coast of Cambodia. It’s time to lay back after the chaos of Phnom Penh. We just missed a typhoon by days but it did little visible damage at the resort.  The debris in the ocean tells a different story, however.

Every morning is beautiful at Sok San Beach Resort. We're up at 6 am to reserve our beach chairs, breakfast at 7, then a long walk on the white sand beach. The talcum powder sand squeaks when you walk on it. Loving the slow island life!

Down the beach from our resort is a tiny village, really just a cluster of wood shacks. Access is along a narrow, dark laneway suitable only for slow walking or motorbikes. It's  more pleasant to take a shorter stroll along the beach. But either way, at night you’d better have a flashlight.

The food at our Sok San resort on Koh Rong island is over priced and mediocre so we've walked down the beach every night to the tiny village where there are several well priced restos with far better food.

Rickety wood and bamboo shacks line either side of the laneway in a surprising medley of housing, shops, backpacker cabins, and some very basic but inexpensive open-air restaurants. The one we like is the Moon which is right on the white sand beach. It has a laid back vibe, yellow canopies over the tables and chill music.

The Moon on Sok San Beach

It also has great food, inexpensive drinks and a young German waiter who speaks English with a French accent. He’s travelling around the world working bars and just spent the last four months with a group of young people from France, hence the strange accent. Next week he heads off to the Philippines.

Tonight I have chicken fried rice in a half pineapple. Yummy! Drinks are very reasonable, which makes Carolann happy.

Enjoying the chill vibe at the Moon

We arrived on Koh Rong just a few days after a typhoon—very unusual weather for this time of year. And although there appeared to be no visible damage, we slowly learned that it was worse than we were told by the resort staff when we called to make sure it was safe to take the one-hour boat ride out to the island. 

On our first visit to the village, I thought it was odd to see the young German dragging sleds of sand from the laneway back onto the Moon's beach front. Over beer, he explained why.

The storm had wiped out all of the cool yellow canopies at the restaurant and pushed water and sand all the way to the bottom steps of the house across the laneway—a good 150 feet. They have just set up the tables and canopies again when we sit down for dinner.

The high wind and waves had peeled off the wooden planks on one of the piers and tossed them one by one into the air like a deck of cards. Boats were tossed around like toys, damaged and sunk.

Luckily we missed all the fun by a couple of days and our resort looked none the worse for wear. The only clue we had of any storm was the constant flow of plastic debris washing up on the beach and the young blond German in bathing trunks moving sand around.

Several shops in Sok San village have displays of fruit and drinks and, as is common in Cambodia, gasoline sold in litre pop bottles.

Kids play in the laneway and are very often eating with their family at the table near us in the open-air restaurants. The laneway and shops are alive with cats, dogs and chickens as well as all the children who never seem to be in school.

I count at least 10 different restaurants, most of them offering Khmer food, but there is one Italian guy serving “Authentic Italian Pizza” at Eat, Pray, Love, one Israeli falafel joint and a Russian bar.

The mainstay of the village, besides tourism, seems to be squid fishing. At night, the horizon is dotted with 20 or more large boats all with floodlights on to attract the squid.

One dark moonless night, as we walk back along the beach to our resort, we are startled to see a bobbing light speeding silently towards us like a drunk staggering unsteadily home from the pub. It washes ashore mere feet from us and  like a  dark shadow out jumps a spry old Cambodian who quickly drags a tiny styrofoam boat up the beach. It has only one oar, hence the weaving and bobbing, and a bucket of freshly caught, squirming squid. We’ve probably eaten some of his catch on the island.

Lounging on the beach is not really our style, so collecting plastic debris on the beach and walking to the village for lunch and dinner is really the only diversion we’ve had here on the island. The food in the village is better than at our resort, the drinks are cheaper and the people are friendlier. All I have to do is say “Soksaby” and the smiles appear.