In January of this year, I was living in Chenzhou, southern Hunan province, China. Towards the end of the month, we began to hear about a new virus that had been discovered in Hubei province, the next province to the north of us. People were getting nervous and most people were staying at home. Most Chinese people, anyway. Foreigners were still perfectly happy to go out into the world and enjoy the Spring Festival, which had already begun.
I'm an English teacher, or was, at an after school program (they call them training schools) in Chenzhou and the kids were already out of school for the holiday when word of the new virus came around. At first, I doubted it would even push back the start of the new semester. As time passed, however, it was announced that the start of school would be pushed back at least a couple of weeks. As more time passed, they began to monitor people coming in and out of my apartment complex and I began to weigh the value of staying in China during all of this.
At that point, it seemed like the virus would easily be contained within China. It didn't even seem like it would spread much outside of Hubei, but precautions were being taken and everyone was going into lockdown, which seemed like overkill to me. I hadn't taken a vacation that year, and therefore had a bit of money saved up. My sister was planning to visit in the summer, so I wanted to make sure I'd have enough to have a nice time on her visit. The farther the start of school was pushed back, though, the less it seemed like that was something that was actually going to happen. I thought at the time that I would be working all summer because of this virus. Exactly the opposite happened.
As the lockdown got more severe (at one point, the community sent someone to guard the entrance to the complex, ensuring that people weren't able to leave their apartments more than once every two days), I wondered if it wouldn't be prudent to ride out this virus (what are we talking here, six weeks, at most?) somewhere else. After all, I hadn't taken a vacation in the spring festival, and it didn't look like I was going to take one this summer. Why not spend a few weeks on a beach in Southeast Asia instead of Chenzhou? If I was being paranoid and this whole situation wasn't as bad as I thought, I could come back in a few weeks and the worst thing that would have happened is a few weeks on a beautiful beach. If the lockdown actually got worse, I'd still be enjoying life on a beautiful beach.
Finally, on Valentine's day of 2020, I set off for the airport, not even sure I'd be able to get that far (most transportation facilities were already at minimum), and started my mini-vacation while I waited on things to get back to normal. It's almost July and I'm still waiting.
I didn't really choose Cambodia so much as the situation chose it for me. By the time I left China, almost every country had banned any flights from China. Except for Cambodia. The president or premier or whoever is in charge there had decided that he wanted to show solidarity with China by not banning any flights to China. Cambodia's leader also refused to evacuate Cambodia students studying in Wuhan and welcomed a cruise ship full of diseased passengers into Sihanouk to show how they were not afraid of this virus. Sihanouk is the name of the beach town on the Cambodian coast that I had booked my flight to. It was practically the only option on a place to go and the cruise ship thing hadn't happened when I booked my flight. I also didn't hear about it before I left Sihanouk, so I wasn't worried about it while I was there.
I spent two weeks at a small 'resort' at one of the southern beaches in the city, enjoying the food there and not much else. The entire city of Sihanouk was under construction. I'm certain there was a city there before, but virtually every other building in town was under construction. It was truly being built anew. When I went just two years ago, Sihanouk was just a small beach town, perfect for backpackers. There were a couple of islands off the coast, and a few beaches outside of town, but there wasn't much to the place at all. And that's how people liked it. It was small and low key. Two years ago, I went there with friends and we stayed at one of those beaches outside of the town, called Otres Beach. Well, we stayed in Otres Village, a cute little area of bars and accommodations across the highway from the actual beach.
I headed back to that same place when I fled the coronavirus. But the area we'd stayed in had changed substantially. The village hardly had any tourists in it, of course, but most of the businesses had already gone under, owing to the construction. Even in this small area outside the main city, new construction had taken over. Right next to the village, there was a new mega-casino/resort under construction. And all around it were new apartments, which looked like they were intended to house construction workers for the entire city, which would have been a substantial number of construction workers considering how many new hotels were going up in the downtown area. Of course, the village was just the tip of the iceberg. The appeal of the beach area itself was that it was lined with little restaurants and bars, shops and hostels. It was a great place to spend the day, sipping on a frozen cocktail or a beer, as you like. You could enjoy the ocean breeze and people-watch until lunch, then order your lunch from the bar, never moving from your lounge chair. Then grab a joint from the head shop behind the bar after lunch and enjoy it on the beach.
That little strip of heaven was my whole reason for coming to Otres in the first place. Every bit of it had been demolished. There wasn't a single one of the shacks remaining when I returned. there wasn't anything on the beach at all, not even a park bench. The locals were still enjoying it. Plenty of families had brought their kids to the beach in the areas where there weren't large, earth-moving equipment or construction materials stacked up. But everything that backpackers had come for was gone.
Of course, the longer I was there, the more I got to explore and I began to see that this was true across the entire town. High rise casinos were going up on every corner in the city center. And virtually every street was ripped up and being replaced, not to mention new sewer systems. It was a truly miserable place to have a vacation. I stayed in my room almost every day. Only leaving on one day of the two weeks I was there to go into town for a bit of being a tourist, and on another couple of days to meet a friend. One of my high school students from my first year teaching in Chenzhou (who has since graduated) was trying to return to Australia, where he now attends college, and couldn't go directly there due to Covid-19 restrictions. Like me, he found out that he could come to Cambodia and spend a couple of weeks before he was allowed to move on to other places. So we ended up there at the same time and went out for lunch one day and dinner another.
So, what had caused this construction boom? I'd love to tell you that the banking community simply saw the wisdom in pouring money into a community that has been working hard to compete with the tourism big boys all over southeast Asia, but that simply isn't the case. The truth is, Sihanouk would probably never have been able to compete without a little help. You see, Southeast Asia is covered in gorgeous beaches and beautiful scenery. And Sihanouk, being Cambodia's only real beach resort, doesn't even come close to the others in anything that attracts tourists. It's not the most beautiful beach. Not the most beautiful scenery. Not the easiest to get to. And not the most luxurious. In other words, it was always going to play second fiddle to the many beach resorts in The Philipines, Thailand, Indonesia... even Vietnam has more and better-developed beach towns than poor little Sihanouk.
So the solution to drawing in tourist to this sleepy little beach town was obvious. The same thing every other place that has nothing else to offer turns to. What do you do when you've got servicable, but hard-to reach beaches? Rail stop in the middle of the desert? Coastal New Jersey between New York and Philadelphia? It seem like every 'almost there' tourist destination eventually comes to the same conclusion: casinos. This time they're being bankrolled by China. Chinese construction companies and workers are rebuilding Sihanouk by the ground up.
So staying in Sihanouk right now is pretty miserable and uninteresting. And, like any tourist, I was generally pretty put off by all of this. I was cursing the terrible casino corporations that had come in and bulldozed my favorite spot to watch the sun set and smoke a joint. How dare they. They'd ruined everything that people who liked Sihanouk came for and replaced it with the most boring, banal casinos. Casinos that could easily be found anywhere else. At least, I'm sure that's what they will be after they finish construction. The whole town was ruined. Even the beaches, which were only mediocre for this region to begin with, has mostly washed out to sea or been covered in construction material and trash.
Luckily, two weeks staying in the area was enough for me to cool down a bit and forgive this little town for ruining my vacation. It should really go without saying that anyone who travels to Sihanouk during all of this construction will have a miserable experience. All of the things I said are true and will remain so until the bulk of this construction boom is over. Of course, any successful, growing town will have ongoing construction, but not to this degree. At some point the major road and sewer projects will be over. Some of these mega-casinos will be finished and, at some point, the town will be back in a functioning state. It's worth noting that they probably picked the best time possible to rebuild the entire town. Since there was never going to be any travel during 2020, and possibly 2021, now was the perfect time to rebuild a tourist town, if that's what they wanted to do.
And what about their choice? To switch from a backpackers' beach town to a glitzy casino destination would certainly change who the town is marketing itself to, but that's not necessarily bad for the town. Of course it looks shitty now. It's under construction. But, I had to tell myself, take notice of what's causing the most problems during the construction: new, concrete roads all over town and a modern sewer system. Sure, these things are being installed to handle the influx of expected tourists, but it's also going to improve life in Sihanouk for the residents. Better roads and sewers are never a bad thing. And those casinos that are replacing the backpackers for the Maybach crowd? They'll be bringing jobs into the area. And probably better paying jobs than what's currently there.
Yes, there will still be problems. Many small business owners are going to go under before the construction boom is over. Many more will go out of business because their target market simply isn't there anymore. But many more will likely replace those with higher-end versions. The Maybach crowd will still need restaurants, bars and shops to spend money at. If this venture of bringing high end customers to Sihanouk is successful, they'll need supporting businesses from food suppliers to tennis instructors, and everything in between. It's not possible that there won't be more jobs after the change than before. And those construction jobs that 'go away' once the project is finished? Not possible. Despite the enormous amount of construction going on right now, I was witnessing just the skeletal frame on which the new Sihanouk will be hung. Sewers, roads, and major casinos are not the end of a tourist town like what they want to build in Sihanouk. They're just the start. If the project is successful, meaning: if they are able to market it to the wealthy elites that are always looking for the latest destination, that will in turn generate a demand amongst the slighly-less-elites, who will look for accommodations and facilities catering to their demographic. They're presence will generate demand from their lessers, and so on and so forth. It's the same reason Calvin Klein products used to be available only in high-end designer shops, but now can be found at any Macy's. So construction projects in Sihanouk are from over, and there may be more construction in the town's future than there is right now.
That's not to say that the town will return to drawing backpackers again in the future. That's unlikely. But I think there's a confusion amonst travellers about how these sorts of things work. Many of us have it in our heads that there's a hierarchy at work. That there's a great and powerful organization of high-end hotels and resorts that build their facilities wherever they want and push out the weaker, less profitable backpacking and mid-range establishments. Like a great and powerful nation bullying its less powerful neighbors. But that's the wrong analogy. In fact, we don't really even need an analogy because we all know exactly what this process is: gentrification. Yes, the term isn't entirely correct here because most of the small businesses that catered to the backpacking crowd are also owned by locals, and sometimes the larger businesses that are catering to the wealthy are renting their spaces. But the general concept of the highly profitable businesses pushing out those less able to pay rents, even as the presence of the businesses that cater to the wealthy drives up the rent and accelerates the process.
I'm going to wrap up this entry here because I have no idea where I was going this. Has any of you know 2020 has been a very disruptive year. I believe I began to write this post thinking the virus would pass and that I would want to use the time I spent in Southeast Asia to talk about other issues but it turns out the virus itself became the story of 2020 and probably 2021 so I'm going to conclude this post and try to start posting next week with more relevant information thanks for reading this car far more brief in the future.
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