Sihanoukville — The road liss traveled

I wrote this up last year and it was sitting on my computer so I figured I’d post it now. A year later it still sums up the place pretty well, a lot of development, but also a lot of unfinished buildings. A lot of casinos doing well in the prime locations, but also a lot of casinos that hardly anyone seems to go to. Poker continues to get worse. All the pictures are from this year.

The not-so-nice part of town. Lovely skyline

It’s certainly changed A LOT since before Covid hit. The city itself is much more complete. Most of the big projects that managed to get funded through the pandemic, like the high rise condos, have finished. At the same time there are many many that got scrapped, leaving huge concrete skeletons dotted around the city, giving it a kind of creepy vibe. So much money wasted on starting some of these building projects! That’s Chinese development for ya. But really it’s hard to grasp how quickly things change here being from the US or western countries. The photo below would have been red dirt just a few years ago.

So yeah, you’ve got your very new and very nice casinos and high rise apartments, and plenty of nice modern, indoor shops. And despite all the unfinished buildings just sitting there, there’s also a bunch of completely new projects going on. The city is always building something. Driving along the major arteries, most of the shops on those roads are now behind glass doors with air conditioning. It used to be that almost all the restaurants and shops were open air set ups with fans blowing everywhere. Not anymore! Nowadays there are also familiar chains like Starbucks, KFC, and Dairy Queen, among other Chinese chains. There’s even two indoor shopping malls now. So this is development! Although many of these places are not particularly busy, they’re designed for the Chinese, not so much the Cambodians. The philosophy seems to be, Build it and they will come!

The new U Mall. The apartment complex I stayed in is on the right.

All of the main roads are now nicely paved with sidewalks, which is definitely a massive improvement from a few years ago. One of the big things they did was carving out a new road to connect all of the coastline. There used to be a wooded hilly section with a few western guesthouses, with only walking trails and a trail down to the waterfront. All of that got demolished to build a road with a large promenade, and the area behind the road will become a giant housing development. Although the promenade area is just completely open with no trees, no shade, it’s hot as hell during the day, nothing to do or see, and nowhere to sit except for the sidewall. Add something to make it look nice! It doesn’t come alive until the sun sets, the food vendors set up shop, the tents gets set up for night market, and there’s an outdoor concert area as well. But it seems like an opportunity missed, because it’s just a really plain and kinda ugly space. Nice public spaces are just not Cambodia’s strong suit. For example I think there might be one small city park with grass in the entire town, and they just redid that one too.

You’re not supposed to drive scooters on the promenade! :0

the massive development going on the background

Here’s what it looks like after the night market all weekend and the street cleaners apparently had the day off

The road getting to the out of town beaches was also totally redone. It used to be that you had to go inland to get to the out of town beaches, on rough dirt roads with potholes everywhere. Now it’s just one nice big wide paved road running along the coast, plied by trucks and SUVs with lots places to park. The annoying thing is they knocked down all the little guesthouses and restaurants that used to be right on Otres beach. This was where lots of foreign tourists would hang out, and they had some pretty cool creative restaurants, cocktail bars, occasional live music - It was a nice scene, but now all of that is completely gone.

This is what the coastline looks like for a few miles. The boardwalk is nice for a jog though!

If you want to be at the beach you have to bring all your own supplies, towels, blankets, food, drinks, umbrella etc. Big hotels across the street from the beach are fine, but guesthouses, restaurants, or anything remotely interesting at all right on the beach, absolutely not. I suppose this is better for Cambodians, because that’s how they do the beach, family style with big groups and setting up camp basically. But currently I don’t have much reason to get out to the far beaches anymore.

Here’s getting wayyy out of town at Ream National Park

Also worth noting the scale of development, that way outside of town near the airport they’re just starting to build an entire lifestyle community (or whatever) for the rich people called Bay of Lights, and it’s going to have a Greg Norman golf course! Damn. And the whole coastline really far outside of town where Ream National Park is, also all bought out by Chinese developers. Pretty sad. But I really don’t know where they’re gonna get all these rich people to move in from to buy this upscale community housing in Cambodia!

New building near Otres beach. No idea what it is. Feels like some giant corporate headquarters of a company owned by a supervillain. I don’t like it.

I’m currently staying in one of the high rise apartments. It’s one of three towers, all are 35 stories high, it’s got a gym but no pool, and the residents are 98% percent Chinese if I had to guess. Once again, the Chinese don’t care about pools and sunshine and swimming. It’s been a really wild transition in Sihanoukville from not having hardly any building over a few stories high to having tons of buildings 35-40 stories high! That’s how China rolls. So the housing situation has definitely eased up. For $25/night I’ve got a basic studio with a balcony, decent view, washing machine, small kitchen with a fridge, microwave, and two burners, blasting AC, and a tiny (but nice) bathroom. The thing that makes me laugh is the bathroom door opens into the bathroom, and doing so blocks off the counter with the sink, and there is so little room that the only way to close the door once you’re inside the bathroom is to step into the shower or be seated on the toilet. If they just made it so the door opened outwards they wouldn’t have this problem!

Anyway, it’s in a nice busy location, two of the best casinos for poker are walking distance, the brand new mall is right across the street, street food carts are everywhere, as well as a few Chinese restaurants and Indonesian restaurants (apparently the Indonesians are the new big online real time gambling market), there’s massage places, there’s also a beach also within walking distance, but it’s a private beach owned by a resort (it used to be public a few years ago, which is annoying). Of course being a white guy I can basically just walk right in, no questions asked, and go to the beach. It’s funny because the mostly Chinese guests want absolutely nothing to do with the beach during the day. They generally don’t like swimming and they hate being out in midday sun, so there’s hardly anyone around. Although I’d rather go a mile down the road to the Novotel beach club, which has beachfront but also a really nice big pool with lounge chairs and umbrellas. I get my $4 smoothie mango passion fruit smoothie and swim and read for a bit. And since it’s almost all Asians, generally there’s no one else swimming. Not a bad setup!

Reading my book at Amazon Coffee on the beach

So a normal (or more than normal) day looks something like: wake up, do some stretching, grab my laptop and either go to the beach or the pool club, read, swim, get a bit of sun, go to a coffeeshop to screw around on the laptop, do some photo editing, hit the gym, try and catch the sunset somewhere - either relaxing at the beach or driving around on the scooter looking for interesting photos. Come back to the apartment, shower, get something to eat - usually casual Chinese or Indonesian food (I love the Indonesian buffets) and then hit the poker tables from 8pm onwards. If the games are good I’ll play until 3-4am, if not I’ll leave early. I leave early quite a bit these days. Here’s some of my usual sunset spots:

View from the bridge you could see in the above photos

Looks like a pretty good view, just don’t zoom in too much to see how many concrete shells there are!

Occheutal Beach, the main beach just outside of town

Every place is photogenic when you’ve got the sunset colors coming out

As for poker, unfortunately the mid-stakes games are nowhere near as good as they used to be, which seems to be the trend just about everywhere. The big $2/5 game I was playing in last year has been changed to 2/3, and plays nowhere near as crazy. The Chinese who run the games are also less willing to let foreigners sit in the good games as they used to be. A lot of times if there is a good game there’s no seats of course, and none will open up for hours until the fish gets busted. And there’s just way more pros around town, it used to be all the Asians were Chinese, but now you’ve got a bunch of Japaenese and Korean pros in town too. Sihanoukville has been ‘discovered’.

There was a famous French poker player Vlogger guy who recently did a bankroll challenge in Snooky where he supposedly ran up his $1,000 to $100,000 or something, it most likely didn’t happen like that and was just made for clicks, but now there’s these friggen groups of young French guys flocking here to run it up, all inspired by that damn vlogger guy. The game most barangs (white people) play, as it’s run by a French guy and and English guy, is a $1/1 game with a max buy in of a lowly $300. I know a few players who I used to play with in bigger games from a few years ago and now they’re grinding out this game. Ugh. I think there are still some juicy high stakes games, but they’re very swingy, high rake variance fests.

DV Casino, which has most of the poker action

It’s so incredibly common to walk around and see players holding 10k brick of cash at the baccarat tables

So anyway, the poker is very mediocre now, still beatable of course, but nothing like the before-times. Anyway, I guess if poker isn’t going all that great, I’d much rather be in Cambodia where my standard of living is can still be really high for making a very mediocre amount of money. I can drown my tears at the Novotel beach club, full body massages, and tropical sunsets.

Now the photos that I put in this post are mostly to show some of the positive developments in Sihanoukville. And the nicer parts also happen to be places that I personally spend most of my time at, so it’s a bit biased naturally. My next post is going to be doing the exact opposite, going specifically for shots that make Sihanoukville look like some sort of dystopian hell hole. And boy oh boy does it have a lot spots that really fit that vibe!