Looking for the unspoilt Thai islands of the 90s? Head to Cambodia

I seem to have arrived in a dystopian video game. All around me are soaring, jagged skyscrapers, half built, or half falling down, with scores of empty windows as black as skeletal eye sockets. The doomy towers parade down the littered seashore, each vista more apocalyptic than the last. Any moment now a hybrid tungsten killer-zombie will loom around the sunburned corner and laser me dead, meaning I have to restart from Level One. I’ve been in nicer places.

All of which is a shame, as up to this point my cross-Cambodia trip to the supposedly wondrous Cambodian islands ^[1] has been going decidedly well. I started in Phnom Penh, which in recent years has emerged from decades of torpor to become one of Asia’s most exciting yet affordable capitals: full of brilliant food (the freshwater prawn pancakes!), vibey Blade-Runner-esque nightlife quarters, swish new boutique hotels, gleamingly renewed 14th century Buddhist temples, riverside boulevards with gastropubs, sky-bars, tapas restaurants and still-authentic markets selling Russian teapots, live catfish, Tiger Eye jewellery and total sensory overload.

Koh Rong island is home to exquisite beaches Credit: Alamy

From Phnom Penh I took the new Chinese motorway into the Cardamom Mountains, to the Edenic hideaway hotel of Shinta Mani Wild ^[2] – brainchild of hotel design genius Bill Bensley – where you arrive by exhilarating zipwire over the tumbling waterfalls right into reception (though there is a less exciting Jeep option) and generally depart in a state of blissed out languor, after several days of staring at the hornbills in the banyans, and lazily listening to the lulling white noise of the rainforest wildlife.

Me, I did exactly that: barely budging from my all-inclusive hardwood glamp-suite (with its stand-alone bath on the deck), only shifting myself to eat the tip-top tasting menu on the wooden restaurant terrace, do laps in the ornately tub-like swimming pool – right by the waterfall – and take a languid boat trip, where I swam in the green shady river and watched tropical kingfishers flit vividly overhead, adorned with all the colours of Elton John during his mid-Seventies heyday.

Shinta Mani Wild is an Edenic hideaway hotel in the rainforest

After that I got back on the boulevard and swiftly made it here: to dystopia. The shuddering nightmare that is modern Sihanoukville.

Why is Sihanoukville (“Snooky”) like this? That brilliant new Chinese road – handily reducing a seven-hour coast-capital drive to about 120 minutes – gives a clue. In recent years Chinese investment has poured into Cambodia, and one of its main targets is – or was – the fishing settlement of Sihanoukville, once famous for cheap amok curries, ace beaches, Western drop-outs and not much else.

In a few years, the Chinese built a bazillion towers, which were swiftly filled with some questionable characters. Suffice to say that when the Cambodian government finally ejected the online gamblers, people traffickers and general undesirables, there wasn’t much left – and Covid finished off the rest.

Now Snooky stands here, bizarre, unpeopled yet spectacular in its own way, if you like 21st century Oriental versions of a vertical Detroit on steroids.

Understandably, most people heading to Cambodia’s islands tend to skip the city entirely. After an eye-opening urban tour, I join the throng at the gleaming marina.

Koh Rong island remains unspoilt Credit: Moment RF/Getty

A few minutes later we are all surging in a large speed boat across the Gulf of Siam. Soon the grey wash of Snooky’s pollution gives way to emerald cleanliness, exuberantly silver flying fish and the occasional dolphin. After half an hour, we arrived at a private pier on the western side of Koh Rong island – and one of the most exquisite, jaw-dropping beaches I have ever seen.

The beach is called Sok San and it comprises seven long, idyllic kilometres of angelically soft white sand shaded by swaying palms and bathed by gentle surf cleverly warmed to a soul-soothing 29.3C. This is a beach so perfect that, after your third passion fruit mojito, you start desperately trying to nitpick: “Well, that palm tree could be moved six feet left, for a slightly superior photo?”. Even better, it is regularly swept entirely clean of sandflies – which can be a pain elsewhere in the region.

The obvious comparison for a beach as world class as this is the Maldives ^[3], Thailand ^[4] or Polynesia ^[5] – and there’s the rub. In all those places you’d be looking at an island rammed with development, making the most of the sand, the sea, the effortless blue skies. Here, in Cambodia, that development hasn’t happened. There were plans to devastate the place – think Sihanoukville – but they are now on indefinite hold. Hurrah!

Royal Sands is Koh Rong's only five-star resort

All that means Koh Rong consists of just one excellent five-star resort: Royal Sands, where I’m staying, complete with glass-floored spa, ocean-front private-pool villas, occasional golf carts, a brilliant all-day restaurant that does the best fish tacos this side of Tijuana, and a crackling fire pit for sublime sunset aperitifs (the beach faces due west).

Apart from Royal Sands there are a couple of shy, middling resorts – and the rest is pure hilly jungle, or whispery mangrove swamps (great for Zen-calm kayaking), or entirely untouched sandy coves, or appalling roads that end in stilted fishing villages where the locals sleep on hammocks all day after a hard night catching sea urchins. It’s fabulous.

There is one “town” in Koh Rong (and this is where you would stay if you want a budget trip, as many do) it is called Koh Toch and if there is such a thing as an “authentic” backpacker village lifted from the pages of Alex Garland’s The Beach, this is it.

Expect agreeably drunk Westerners, languidly drunk locals, jovially drunk police, Nutella pancakes, delicious red mullet barbecued in the surf and dreadlocked gap year Danish girls with ankle bracelets making out with Norwegian guitarists. There are occasional power cuts. No one minds; barely anyone notices. They light up candles and lanterns, and chuck another lobster on the barbie. Sexy, sighing, barefoot-boho Koh Toch is a rattling, $15 (£11.78) tuk-tuk trip from the immaculate opulence of Royal Sands, and long may the contrast continue.

Koh Rong is as dreamy as everyone says – like an especially lovely and unspoiled Thai island, such as Koh Samui, in about 1993 (and I went to Koh Samui in 1993), but I am told that just across the choppy turquoise waters is an even more remotely perfect island, even less developed, yet equally enticing – in a different way. Koh Rong Samloem. Also, this island apparently has good snorkelling, which is not the case on Koh Rong (thanks to fishing and coral bleaching, not development).

I catch the longtail boat from Koh Toch. My pilot turns out to be the only other passenger. He’s not sure where I’m going, and as the sun clips the jungly island hills, he drops me at the wrong pier. As Koh Rong Samloem is, like Koh Rong, cheerfully devoid of proper roads, I have to persuade another Khmer fisherman with a speedboat to abandon his whisky-soaked seaside card game and boozily steer me to the right place before night falls. He shrugs, and charges me five US dollars, very affably. Almost everyone is affable in Cambodia, especially in the islands.

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My final destination is a tiny village called M’Pai. It consists of one pier, an almost comatose seafront, half a dozen winsome beaches in the vicinity, a weirdly chic wine bar, more Khmer fishing families, about 50 expats (some backpackers, some older poet types), and about 300 inhabitants total. There’s a couple of decent hotels at the back; all the action happens on the beachfront drag, where the bars consist of school desks in the surf. I get a room at Bongs. It has a cold water shower, a brilliant sea view, and a wooden balcony. It costs $10 a night, and downstairs they do notable cheese-pesto sandwiches with cold Singaporean pilsener.

In sweet, drowsy, faraway M’pai, hours blur into afternoons which, I reckon, could easily blur into entire lifetimes. Music drifts under the palms, scuba divers occasionally hop into boats, at night people run laughing into the sea because the local plankton is beautifully bioluminescent: as you move about, the krill lights up in tornado swirls of silver and blue, like you are the source of subaquatic fireworks.

Hours blur into days in the island's peaceful villages Credit: Alamy

How long will these glorious, paradisal islands resist the roads, resorts and 7 Elevens that have obliterated virtually every island in Thailand, and beyond? Three years? Six? Ten? Who knows, but for the moment they remain in that perfect sweet spot where they are 94 per cent unsullied but you can buy good sauvignon blanc. Go now.

Essentials

Sean Thomas travelled with Experience Travel Group (020 7924 7133; experiencetravelgroup.com ^[6]). They offer 11 days/10 nights, FB & HB basis throughout: three nights Shinta Mani Wild, five nights Royal Sands and a boutique hotel in Phnom Penh, for £8,450 per person inc all private transfers and flights from the UK

References

^{^} Cambodian islands (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^{^} Shinta Mani Wild (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^{^} Maldives (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^{^} Thailand (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^{^} Polynesia (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^{^} experiencetravelgroup.com (experiencetravelgroup.com)