The final days of our Cambodian holiday were spent at the seaside. I’d originally booked a hotel in Sihanoukville but a Twitter friend warned me just in time to rebook that this town is currently a building site taken over by Chinese building dozens of casinos. He wasn’t wrong. Our twenty minute airport transfer to the ferry port area was made three times longer by slow construction traffic through the churned roads.

There seems to be a lot of resentment from the Cambodians towards the Chinese who allegedly are allowed to buy up swathes of the area at bargain rates and are exempt from local building regulations on their projects. Indeed, just a couple of days before our arrival, a 7 storey building collapsed in Sihanoukville, which you might have seen on the news. I suspect that this won’t be the only such occurrence. Apparently only Chinese construction workers are allowed to build here, and European tourists are staying away, which is causing quite a hit to the local economy. Maybe it will be as quiet and shiny as Beijing in a few years. We shall see.

I changed my booking to Koh Rong Samloen, one of the islands off the coast, reachable only by ferry. It’s quiet there and has a Bohemian vibe that’s not really me anymore, and if the hotel had been a bit better value for money it would have been nicer. The bar in Sihanoukville where we spent a couple of hours waiting for our ferry transfer reminded me of the places we used to stay when we travelled in China all those years ago.

On the transfer and the ferry we found ourselves surrounded by the insupportable inane chatter of Gap Yaah students. Were we really so vacuous at that age?

It was nice enough on the island and quite beautiful at times. We saw some monkeys on a walk in the woods and John went night snorkelling and experienced the phenomenon of photoluminescent plankton. It’s clear, though, that this place is just on the brink of being “developed” by Chinese as even here there were earth movers and diggers. It won’t be quiet for much longer.

The ferry service isn’t very reliable, especially in rainy season, and communications with the island are evidently difficult so we decided to return one night earlier than planned to Sihanoukville to have a chance of catching our morning flight to Ho Chi Minh City and thence HK. Our ferry for this journey turned out to be a party boat complete with mind numbingly strong cocktails, foam and Chinese hiphop, which was little surreal. The novelty wore off after about half an hour for us staid Westerners.