…the most striking image you’ve managed to capture is of the loo in the onsweet of your new hotel room. Then again, it is a pretty striking image. Don’t think I’ve ever had – or indeed, for that matter, even seen – a golden bog before.
That aside, it’s been a pretty humdrum day. The morning was largely taken up by going to the dentist, again. Oh yes. After upwards of a decade since I last had a filling fall out, last night I had the second one go in as many months. Timing, eh. So off to the dentist, who proved to have a busy schedule this morning. But then, as last time, it turned out that where there’s one dentist, there are others, and before we’d gone 100 metres Virle had persuaded me that they’re probably all much of a muchness and fillings are hardly rocket science and this one will probably be fine and can we just get it done because I want me breakfast.
“That is a big hole,” said the dentist. “That is a big hole.” He didn’t say it twice, that was the echo. And he wasn’t wrong. But he set to manfully, and twenty minutes later out I came with gnashers restored. 20 bucks to you. Half the price even of the good old En Haitch Ess. Bar-gin!
So back to our usual for a quick breakfast, then off we staggered to the bus office, to catch the 12.45 to Sihanoukville, where we’re spending the night before heading off to the island. And that really is all we’re doing; there appears to be absolutely nothing to do hereabouts, and from what we saw on the way in, nothing to see either. The duck and chickens we saw on the way here in a tuk tuk would have looked quite cute, if they hadn’t been rooting through a pile of rubbish by the side of the road. The whole place looks a bit rubbish, to be honest. Apart from our bathroom, which wouldn’t disgrace the home of a Man U full back.
Coming out of Phnom Penh we saw more signs of what I call the Phu Quoc factor – a phenomenon we last saw in Vietnam last year: massive chunks of Chinese capital, landing like spaceships in poorer neighbouring countries, creating weird, anachronistic edifices, lost in the middle of nowhere. Passing through the scraggier outskirts of a city not short on scraggy, you suddenly encounter these vast lumps of real estate, with no one in them, no one round them, shiny, empty shells. Like enormous ultra-modern ghost towns.
And then this evening in Sihanoukville – a city that makes Phnom Penh look like Paris, we go out for a walk from our hotel in, again, a pretty scrappy part of town, and all around us are these massive buildings – not quite on the Phnom Penh scale, let alone Phu Quoc, but big. And these ones aren’t just unoccupied, they’re unfinished. Just one after another, great hulking skeletons of buildings,
Were they stopped in their tracks by the pandemic? Or are they victims of the collapse in Chinese real estate? They look older than that, like they’ve been part-built for a decade and some. And they’re all over the shop. And there’s no signs of any further development going on. No cranes, no activity, no nothing. They just…loom. What a massive waste of resources, of money, of effort. You wonder what local people think of these vast half-finished ghost-buildings, ghost-shells, appearing in their town and then…just enduring. And, presumably, rotting, ever so slowly, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
Anyway, off on the ferry in the morning, to an island so tiny and basic that we can’t find out definitively whether a rumoured water taxi actually exists, or whether we will have no option but to get to our ‘hotel’ by trekking 40 minutes along paths through the jungle. An island, indeed, so basic that this blog may not appear for a week: electricity is apparently very thin on the ground, wifi all but non-existent, and as for network coverage…well, let’s just say we’re not holding our breaths.
So, see you on the other side. Or, possibly, this side, when we return to the land of golden toilets in about a week.
Wish us luck.