Change of Pace

With two new holistic, boutique resorts, the islands off Sihanoukville are finally living up to the promise of the Cambodian Riviera.

My latest trip to southern Cambodia was exactly 10 years on from my first visit there. I’d just moved to Asia and, after a month living in Saigon, the Tet holiday rolled around. The choice was partly because I was interested in Cambodian history, and mostly because we had planned late and it was the easiest play. We hired a driver for a road trip through the sparsely populated Wild West that included a random afternoon in a far-flung fishing village in an unbelievably blue estuary where I cooed over a baby cooling off in a cooking pot, and a few days in Sihanoukville, a faded seaside city that was supposed to be well on the rise.

Born of the country’s need for a deep-water port after the breakup of French Indochina, the city was cut out of raw jungle in 1955 and spirals down a hill that a decade ago had cute bistros and less cute brothels alike. Spreading out in either direction along the coast, the backpacker town in 2009 held one real resort, Sohka Beach, where we stayed, whose arrival the year before was meant to signify that foreign investment in tourism was imminent.

The place seemed on the precipice, the Franco and Russian influences—the one cool bar was in an Antonov-24 turboprop— vying for dominance over Sihanoukville’s next incarnation. “In five years,” I wrote in a travel story back then, “a handful of new resorts and several middle-class housing developments probably will have sprung up.” But I vastly underestimated the development, because I didn’t account for the Chinese. They now dominate this no-longer sleepy city, bringing hoards of cash with their One Belt One Road initiative, and transforming the skyline with towers and casinos and resort complexes that hold negative appeal.

So, write off Sihanoukville, but thank the holiday gods for its airport, which offers easy access to the still stunningly clear and surprisingly empty waters on the eastern edge of the Gulf of Thailand, where the fishing villages have been joined by places to stay that are delivering on the area’s long-ago tourism promise. Two five-stars have debuted on isles south of the city, doubling the region’s high-end radius beyond eco-chic Song Saa, a seven-yearold pioneer, and The Royal Sands, which opened in 2017, both in the more northerly Koh Rong archipelago. To reach the new Six Senses Krabey Island and Alila Villas Koh Russey, just hop off your international flight from Kuala Lumpur or Saigon (there are rumors of Bangkok later this year) and be on the beach in under an hour including speedboat ride: it’s just a 15-minute drive between the airport and their respective private piers. Ten if you’re running late and your amenable driver just guns it down the median strip— in many ways, Cambodia is still the Wild West, which happily means plenty of potential for creative luxury playgrounds.

Flying yoga on a hilltop overlooking the horizon seems the most apropos way to wake up on a jungle-clad private isle where the pre-dawn audio reel is birdsong over the light waves lapping the shore of the private beach just beyond my private pool. At Six Senses Krabey Island, the spa is the crowning glory, and every time I tool up here, which is once or twice per day, there’s a warm welcome to this divine kingdom of wellness. The women’s lounge has a water circuit with Scandinavian, Middle Eastern and East Asian aqua therapies. A neat innovation, Alchemy Bar is a room built for crafting handmade beauty and wellness products that therapists use for treatments or you can souvenir home after taking a hands-on class. (Note: properly pestling Kampot peppercorns requires inordinate upper body strength.) And at the summit of the complex is an outdoor treatment room, and a breezy yoga pavilion where the green parachute hammocks dangling from the ceiling echo the rooftop garden planted to blend with the environment.

This island Six Senses has claimed is a layer cake of prehistoric rocks and millenniumold trees. They’ve wrapped a ridiculously picturesque boardwalk part-way around it for sea-level strolling. One of the 40 flat-roofed, open-plan pool villas that look like they belong in the Malibu hills and are smart-wired with intuitive touch-screen room controls to match, the Beach Retreat has a big outdoor tub in a gazebo over the ocean that, with chilled champagne and pink skies, would make for a super sexy sunset (provided you weren’t traveling with your photographer friend). Like every Six Senses, Krabey Island is ecoobsessed—they’ve got a water filtration and bottling plant; room keys are recycled wood— and has playful features like an adorable icecream parlor slash deli and mini playgrounds where you can hop on wooden pegs or walk narrow planks to improve balance… if the hills and natural stairs everywhere or water sports at the main beach aren’t enough of a workout. Starlit movie nights avoid noise pollution by providing guests what general manager Alistair Anderson calls “silent-disco headphones.”

On nearby Koh Ta Kiev, there’s an elephant-shaped rock for cliff-jumping into the ocean, if that’s your thing. There’s also an idyllic backpacker hostel, with tents and cabins flanking a shady grove where a dozen twenty-somethings are playing cards, lazing in a tiered kaleidoscope of hammocks and kicking a soccer ball around with the owner’s toddler daughter. It’s cozy, like summer camp, and I love that our hotel has brought us through during a nature walk, the Six Senses Experience Assistant Manager Minea exchanging warm greetings with the proprietor he’s known for ages, who capitalized on the natural offerings long before the wealthy big boys moved in.

The beach beyond is mind-bogglingly long. Our affable boat crew has pulled around and set up a picnic. While we’re chatting in the baby-blue water, Aaron, the aforementioned photographer, picks up a stick, it turns out to be a stick-shaped fish, and my usually cool and collected friend shrieks like a little girl. Even in an ocean so clear that you can see your toes on the ground through chest-high water, Mother Nature proves cleverer than we could ever be.

I could’ve stayed sunning on this squishy beach all day, but I have an appointment for a massage, acupuncture and moxibustion with Dr. Anand Peethambar. Moxibustion is a method of drawing toxins out of the body with heated herbal compounds, and you’re unlikely to find the treatment at a mainstream hotel, or indeed from someone who isn’t a Chinese medicine practitioner. “That’s why we had to have Dr. Anand,” says spa director Rachael Birchenough. “He’s an Ayurvedic yogi who does moxibustion.” Only here could I have ever transcribed that sentence. His blended mastery of various forms of traditional wellness is a human incarnation of what the best spas in world are doing now, and two sessions on his table renders my chronic shoulder pain more amorphous and my mind feeling clearer and more open to the little details in the world.

One morning we visit a fishing village of 127 inhabitants presided over by grandpa Lihung and grandma Sovpow. Originally farmers, they fled the Khmer Rouge 25 years ago, and moved from land to sea; they cannot legally live on an island, but they have been allowed to construct a community on stilts. It seems an unnecessary inconvenience considering the water is only about a meter deep, but everyone is dexterous on the perilous boardwalks connecting the houses. I notice the kids—who take a ferry to school on the mainland, and who hand-make fishing nets in their free time—are watching a YouTube cartoon that is teaching English from a base language of not Khmer but Vietnamese. Right, Lihung tells us in Khmer through our translator, he actually fled the Khmer Rouge twice: in 1975 he moved to Vietnam near Kampot, where he met his wife; they returned to this region in 1981. The whole family speaks Vietnamese, has Vietnamese altars and celebrates Tet. We shouldn’t be surprised; these cultures overlap in a variety of ways, from the pork-and-herb-stuffed turmeric crepe banh chao (banh xeo in Vietnamese) I scoff down every day at Six Senses to the non-linear water borders that places Vietnam’s largest island, Phu Quoc, closer to here than its country’s mainland.

Still, Aaron, who used to live in Hanoi, and I both get excited and dig deep for our Vietnamese vocabulary.

“No, we aren’t married,” Aaron answers a predictable villageelder question, trying to simplify things with: “She’s my boss.”

“In the past women asked men to marry them,” Lihung replies. “But now the men ask the women.”

Amused by this non sequitur, we say effusive thank-yous and goodbyes and tightrope-walk back to the boat, glad of a sweet connection that, however brief, was I’m pretty sure the intended purpose of our being here in the first place.

Because this is such a little cluster of little islands, it feels less like an archipelago than a neighborhood. You can see Koh Russey from Krabey and the boat transfer to Alila is faster than the time it would take to put on a life jacket. On a snorkel with activities manager Ali Fayaz, I discover that the calm waters lapping up to the resort’s rock-lined shore make for prime fish-spotting. The area by the pier is such a good feeding ground that when I come around a barnacled pole, I swim into a dense wall of speedy fish, which makes me jump sharply. Ali laughs at me in his snorkel.

With 50 balconied rooms and 13 villas, Alila has more of a traditional hotel design. You enter via an open-air atrium that overwhelms with its calm. The flow from the water features and ocean views here, through the glass lobby with couch swings and hanging-basket chairs, down a portico to the inside-outside main restaurant and vast beachfront resort pool beyond, is ample evidence that someone was paying attention to the feng shui. In this Modernist property where whites and neutrals dominate the palette, breakfast is healthy-ish and a la carte. Yoga is under an ancient banyan tree in a small grove that is being prepped to also hold the hotel’s organic garden and host cooking classes. And one of the activities is sailing to the mainland to make merit and receive a blessing from a monk at Ream Pagoda, which takes in orphans and solitary souls of all ages. I still have the string around my wrist— and with it a visceral sense of the whole trip’s feel-good luxe.

Hugging an amphitheater of sea, Alila leaves plenty of shoreline untouched so that a walk along the tree-lined water’s edge leads you to what could be a deserted isle. On this leeward corner of the bay are tide pools and sandbars, and you feel like a little kid splashing in the shallows. Well, maybe a little kid with a taste for unoaked Chardonnay. Between the picnic lunch and ice buckets of vino set up here under silken umbrellas by butlers discreetly waiting behind the boulders, and the sunset sail on the hotel’s custom cruiser—a refurbished old fishing boat lined with pillows and stocked with champagne—Alila has a smart selection of ways to make on-property activities feel like off-site adventures.

On our last day we want to paddleboard, but by late afternoon the glassy lake of an ocean crescent has gone choppy. I spot some whitecaps and question my resolve. But Ali isn’t going to let a change in surf deter him. He shoves a board in through the waves. We are wondering how he’s managing to kneel on it when he goes to stand up—causing Aaron to dramatically rip off his t-shirt and charge into the water with his camera just as Ali thrusts his hands aloft, the paddle over his head triumphant—Aquaman emerging from the tumultuous depths, long hair flowing in the wind.

This triumph calls for a toast. We head to the beach bar, where we alternate between Samai rum drinks and Seekers gin drinks. The former is a multi-award-winning rum made of Cambodian sugar cane with a specialty blend seasoned with Kampot peppers, the latter is distilled of Kampot mountain spring water and flavored with plants native to the Mekong River Delta, and both are small-batch artisanal products made in Phnom Penh.

Naturally, Alila has forged alliances with these companies to showcase the sustainable strides that can be made in local industry with the right mindset. Like Six Senses, Alila embraces its location under the theory that boutique brands, especially in developing areas, should support one another. You might not be able to take on the Chinese tsunami, but you can skirt it and scoot just a little ways out to sea, where you’ll find someone’s hit the slo-mo button and evolved an alternate reality in which the waves are gentler and the pace of change feels as organic as the botanicals in your locavore gin. Little wonder I was in no rush to leave for the airport.

By Jeninne Lee-St. John

Photographed by Aaron Joel Santos