Discovering the ghosts of the Cambodian Riviera's golden age
Phnom Penh railway station radiates the ghosts of passengers past. It’s a gigantic white wedding cake where signs point commuters to “consignes” and “toilettes”. The destinations listed above most of the ticket counters are optimistic. After dictator Pol Pot held court on the concourse in 1975, only a few lamentable carriages continued to totter around the network until 2002. Now a bugling peep from the platform edge suggests there’s a gentler revolution in train travel.
Two train sets painted with a thick shell of blue gloss twinkle in the afternoon sun. Like the SNCF Autotrain service that carries vehicles from Paris to Nice, here cars and scooters toot on to wagons to be pulled gently towards the sea. They recently carried a Rolls-Royce.
The passenger carriages were built in Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like renovated hotel rooms, each contains fitted carpets, air conditioning units, ceiling spot lights and a Wi-Fi router. Our departure time is strictly adhered to. There are no other trains on the network, so we don’t have to wait for the late running of the 8.10 from Eastbourne.
With a clickety-click we’re off. Our destination is the Cambodian Riviera. Although the French left Indo-China in 1954, the country’s francophone elite continued to sip Sancerre on the Gulf of Thailand shore.
As this route hasn’t run for 14 years, it scythes through a cross-section of urban life like a clinking voyeur. It sees backyard barbecues, people doing dishes, make-ups, break-ups and dusty games of football. Then the wagons sway out of the city limits and pummel through jungle scrub.
Dusk brings a timeless portrait of south-east Asia. Silhouetted palms and rice paddies glow ochre in the winnowing twilight. Calves run alongside our irregular service, while their mothers chew on with indifference. Rural life travels by bicycle, not car. Goods by tuk-tuk, not truck. When the train stops, all is silent. You can even open the carriage doors for added birdsong and monkey shrieks, then stay perched there as the train picks up pace and the 21st century is airbrushed away.
A plunging sunset offers a violent ball of red. Moments later the tropical darkness heralds dinner. We putter into Takeo station for fast food. Here that means chicken legs and boiled eggs with salt from a communal shaker. Plus river fish spatchcocked over an open fire. There are tubes of crisps too, but not ready salted. Only squid and berry flavours, with 50p cans of Angkor lager to accompany. I wash my hands in the spotless lavatory (‘serviettes utilisées’) as the little train wanders into the humid night.
Old elites alighted at the colonial outpost of Kampot. Now the riverine town is a place where backpackers come to die. Silver-haired travellers who once ate apple pie in Afghanistan can take an apartment, attend evening yoga or sip sunset G&Ts while reading Albert Camus, albeit on their Kindles. The rococo riverside strip is charming. Under droning fans one can savour steak-frites, play vingt-et-un or indulge in a ￡7 massage. It’s as if a French colonial settler could bluster in at any moment and sink a pastis. My destination the next morning is even more chic. In a return to the Swinging Sixties, the reinstated train will also call at Kep-sur-Mer later this year, but until then it’s a 30-minute bus ride from Kampot. Before the Khmer Rouge, this beach town was Cambodia’s Deauville.
I hire a bicycle of the Parisian sit-up-and-beg variety for a tour. The ostentatious villas host more ghosts than Phnom Penh train station. Derelict art-deco dreams gaze seaward like abandoned ocean liners. One has a rubber tree growing through the middle. Another Normandy chateau sits strafed but unbowed, with fleur-de-lis ceramic borders guarding the overgrown perimeter. During Cambodia’s Golden Age, before King Sihanouk was exiled in 1970, a casino hosted games of chemin de fer. Cambodia’s modern elite prefer Kep-sur-Mer. They crowd the blissful beach with its imported white sand. Many hit the seafood restaurants built on stilts over the emerald sea. Others recline inside a uniquely Kep invention, open-sided platforms, built seaside to catch the breeze, and rented by the day. Half the family can picnic on mats, while the rest doze in hammocks strung even higher above, a duplex if you will.
Scooter hire, dive schools and fried banana stalls usher in a new breed of tourist. The welcome memo was evidently not read by a family of macaque monkeys. From the branches of a carob tree they lob seeds at nouveaux riches applying sun block in an attempt to stay pale in the tropical heat. I ride the ￡4 return boat to Rabbit Island. That’s a 30-minute splash through limpid sea with a family of queasy Cambodian landlubbers. They are as pleased as I am to see the nodding palms and lines of hammocks along a half-mile of golden sand. Snorkels are a dollar a day. A bungalow with a ceiling fan and mosquito net doesn’t cost much more. At 10pm the generator ceases, rendering the island as tranquil as a rural train stop.
At a glance | The bamboo trains of Cambodia
The lights never went out at Ile des Ambassadeurs, King Sihanouk’s former private island, where feted nabobs were fed local crab and imported champagne. Nor does the partying stop at the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc a few miles away. My flight home is from Phnom Penh. TUI started direct flights here from Gatwick in 2017, meaning I could trade a Robinson Crusoe lifestyle for rural Sussex in one swift move.
A rather lovely thought.
How to do it
Thai Airways (0330 400 4022; thaiairways.co.uk) flies direct from London to Bangkok, from where an hour-long flight connects to Phnom Penh. Return flights from ￡626.
Royal Railway (royal-railway.com) operates trains from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville via Takeo and Kep from Friday through to Monday. Tickets cost ￡4 one-way.
The Pavilion in Phnom Penh, a former palace residence with two tree-dappled swimming pools, offers double rooms from ￡65, including breakfast. Read a full review and check availability.
The Columns Hotel in Kampot is housed in a French colonial mansion; double rooms from ￡39, including breakfast. Read a full review and check availability.
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