A walk on the Island of Koh Rong from the Bay of Long Set Beach to the Bay of Koh Touch offers a sobering view of just how rough a backpacker's holiday can be...
I remember backpacking during my college years – cheap flights (back then: Japan to Thailand via Manila with EgyptAir ... including winter flight delays from Bangkok to snowy Tokyo because of sandstorms in the Sahara, but that's a different story), ... walk everywhere and -tuk only when necessary, exchanging with other backpackers where you can get a full meal for 1 dollar, and cheap rooms in the Chinatown of whichever city you were visiting in Southeast Asia ... but ... times have changed. Now they require 24/7 free WiFi (much more important than food), health-endangering quantities of cheap alcohol ...where they do save, apparently, are the living conditions ... but we'll get to that further down.
The short, 1 to 1½ hour walk from Long Set Beach and the Long Set Resort (absolute paradise: read here) to Koh Touch will take you through 3-4 different worlds of travel, as you pass yoga-on-the-beach offers, a diving centre, beach bars advertising mushroom and other plant-based products not usually sold in public due to their illegality, "resorts" which are little more than tents with a beach hut in the middle as reception, hostels with military barrack style bunks – with outdoor latrines that I thought the WHO deemed inhumane decades ago, then hamlets of huts built atop trash and open sewage (you walk faster there automatically, and can easily get through in 2-3 minutes) ... only to arrive at what reminded me of Koh Samui 1987: before the airport, before the hotels, before paved roads ... when power was something that came and went every few hours!
Leaving, Long Resort and walking towards Koh Touch, you first pass the Koh Rong Dive Club and its adjoining Yoga location ... then the Lagoon Bridge, then the Sandbank Bar, then the Funky Beach Bar.
Then comes the small channel that connects the ocean and the lagoon and that, depending upon the tide, can be either ankle-deep or knee-deep water, bit always possible to cross.
On the other side of the channel, you are confronted first with the White Pearl Beach, a hostel-like backpacker complex where you rent tents (instead of bungalows) directly on the beach. As we just experienced a 3-hour tropical downpour the night before, I watched as the tourists here slowly sorted the wet from the drenched and tried to restore order in their tents - had a bit of a refugee camp look to it....
This is the beginning of Hippie Country: talk about roughing it!
You can rough as rough as you want gear: there is no bottom to how rough you can rough it here. It’s quite a shock after leaving the Long Set Resort, but on the other hand, it’s also quite an adventure to walk through!
After the White Pearl, paths begin to diverge into the jungle: you are now at the (amongst backpackers world famous) Nest: bunk bed barracks (the word dorms would be too luxurious) deep the the jungle, and separate toilet & shower facilities down the mud path approximately 5000 mosquitoes away … This is a place where you would not even catch me dead, but apparently a lot of people love it!
Then you cross through a mid-jungle hamlet of huts, where a few locals live, if you can call that living: heaps of trash in front of their huts with streams of brown water running out of them and down the hill ... the path to Koh Touch goes right through the middle, and this is part of the tour, like it or not.
If you survive that, things, lighten up!
Around the bend is treehouse bungalows: a rather nice and little spot with bungalows, literally built into the trees, and a bit of a large Chinese touch to it. I think the only disadvantage is, it’s next to impossible to reach with one boat per day in the morning and one in the evening Connecting you to civilization.
It was beautiful ... until I saw the poor monkey chained to a back wall ... broke my heart to see such cruelty ... but many of the signs were in Chinese and not Khmer, so I'm going to guess Chinese-owned and managed, and we have to accept that their culture places much less value on the life of animals ... sad, but another fact that can't be changed overnight.
Around the bend ... Civilization.
Suddenly you're in Koh Touch .. reminded me of Nathon on Koh Samui in 1987 ... a few buildings - hostels, guest houses, cheap restaurants, laundry service, massage service, tattoo shops and currency exchange posts (careful! cash-out 8%! Get your cash on the mainland before coming to Koh Rong or pay for forgetting to).
This place was a little end-of-the-.world ... the Star Wars trading post at the edge of the galaxy, but in no way unsafe and actually looked kinda fun.
If I were a younger again and a backpacker again, I'd hang out here for 2-3 days ... but I'm not, and was very happy to instead return to the paradise of the Long Set Beach Resort!
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