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Cambodia
Sihanouk Hell

Sihanoukville's beaches and islands are known as the premiere tourist hotspot in Cambodia. Accomodation, drinks and services of all kind are very cheap, while the hospitality is just great. The local women love to give you every comfort they can to make you feel like a little king. If you want, you can also call it: Sextourism at it's best.

Shooting Location: Sihanoukville
Coordinates: 10.60115°N 103.52879°E

Cambodia is one of the poorest countries on earth with a horrifying past, despite being one of the most culturally interesting and exciting. In 2014, four million backpackers and Angkor Wat pilgrims visited the country. Tourism provides the country with a chance to stabilize and is an engine for the future, or so everyone says.

I first went to Cambodia in 2009. I entered through Cham Yeam on the coast and travelled onto Sihanoukville, a small place on the Gulf of Thailand, which was acclaimed in the travel guides as a little bit of paradise on earth. That was just what I needed to relax for a few days.

The hunt for accommodation proved difficult. Although I was travelling off-season, places to sleep were so thin on the ground that, after an hour, I returned to a small hotel in the town where I started my search. It was already late in the evening by the time I ordered a warm meal at the counter, watching a group of men, who were busy trying to put the balls with their cues on the billiard table. There was Adam from Australia, Raoul from France and a pensioner from America. All of them had been coming to Sihanouk for several years now and would stay for a few months each time.

They could afford everything here, most importantly alcohol and women, including sex with girls as young as 15, they were telling me unashamedly. They also told me about the "Chicken Farm", an Eldorado with cheap ladies and vented about a young Vietnamese girl, who was supposedly very popular at the time although you’d have to act fast, because she would be “used up” in just a few days. They would knock back one shot of whisky after the next into their decaying bodies, before heading off on their motorbikes at around midnight, drunk as a skunk, on their way to the aforementioned brothel. I was flabbergasted. Prostitution cannot be avoided in South East Asia, but I had never experienced it in this blatant and cynical form before.

The police in Sihanoukville ensured that you wore a helmet whilst driving a moped. They also cared whether you stopped at a red traffic light, why did they not control brothels?! The landlady at the counter told me that you might even be caught and locked up but there were always ways in which you could bargain your way out when standing before a court. I had to have been really quite naive back then. I had no idea about the magnitude of the bottomless hellhole, which was sex tourism. I was speechless, disgusted and wanted to leave the town the very next day.

The next day, I went to the beach anyway, to get on with my travelling plans. But to no avail. I could neither sit down at a bar, let alone lay down on one of the 300 deck chairs next to the sort of person who had made me aware of this hellhole the day before.
Instead I watched as a tourist was being massaged by a Cambodian woman.  He lay there on this back, with a cigarette in his mouth and a book in his hand. The other hand was being looked after by the masseuse. The Cambodian lady’s face spoke volumes.

A spherical man with a small monkey walked past me. At the bar, he was served a bottle of coke by the bartender without being asked. The fat man opened the screwcap and let the monkey have a sip of his soda. The monkey quite obviously took pleasure in this. Then the monkey retreated onto a tree, to which it was then chained by the man. The man smiled contently.    

An old Cambodian man crawled before the tourists through the sand and tried to beg for some spare change. The Cambodian only had one leg. The other was probably blown off him by a mine, like so many people in Cambodia. The man smiled.

A tourist wearing a tight-fitting swimming costume tried to improve his sex appeal by doing pushups in the middle of the beach with his hands positioned on a table. The bending of the arms while performing this variant of the pushup is known for being less taxing. Presumably, the man believed that, with this, he had found a reasonably efficient balance between physical exertion and retaining sex appeal. As the man rose from his pushup and stretched in every which way, he also smiled contently.

Sihanoukville did not feel real. It depressed me. No more than 24 hours had gone by since I had first set foot there before I left this “paradise” again.