Happy New Year from Sihanoukville
Happy 2022, or is it 2020 II: Electric Boogaloo?
SIHANOUKVILLE - Happy New Year! While the pandemic rolls into its third year, Cambodia is defying the Covid trend of the rest of the world. We shall see what it looks like after another month of being reopened.
I was last in Sihanoukville four years ago, and to say it has changed would be an understatement. I’m posting some photos on Twitter if you want to follow along in real-time.
Considering how much I have to cover in Cambodia, my publishing schedule for the next month will be dedicated to Future Southeast Asia. I just posted a Phnom Penh construction update, and a Sihanoukville update will be next week. I will eventually do a Sihanoukville travel-related blog post for Nomadic Notes.
[Ou Chheuteal Beach, Sihanoukville, Cambodia.]
Where I’ve been
Bangkok
The month began with a 1-day quarantine in Bangkok, which was my first time doing a quarantine on arrival. I’d rather not travel at all than go through this, but a 1-day quarantine was a reasonable tax to pay for being able to return to Thailand.
I appeared to have timed my trip well, as there were barely any passengers at Suvarnabhumi Airport when I arrived. Over the month I started seeing images of crowded arrival halls, suggesting that tourism was making a comeback.
No sooner had visitors started to trickle back into the country, Thailand then put the brakes on reopening by putting the 1-day Test and Go visa on hold. The government decided to err on the side of caution with the omicron variety, so we shall see how long until the 1-day quarantine is brought back. I was planning to return to Thailand again, so this complicates matters.
With Thailand having been closed for international travel for so long, the economic damage has been extensive in tourist areas. My travel sites are still not getting much traffic, but at least I don’t have to pay rent and wages etc. I feel bad for the businesses that rely on international travel.
With my travel sites limping along, I haven’t been putting much work into travel writing (including blogging at Nomadic Notes). I spent most of my writing energy on articles for Future Southeast Asia, which there was a lot to write about in Bangkok. I did a construction report and metro report, both of which gave me good excuses for walking around the city.
I will write about what Bangkok is like in my full Bangkok trip report.
Koh Samet
I figured I should see a beach at least once on this trip, so I snuck in a visit to Koh Samet during my month in Bangkok. The last time I was in Koh Samet was in 2011, and I had forgotten how good it was. It’s the closest island to Bangkok that fits the bill of tropical paradise, and because of that, it has become a tourism hotspot. I was lucky to revisit it in the current state with so few tourists.
I spent two nights here, but it was enough to shake off the dust of my wanders around Bangkok construction sites. Expect a post featuring Koh Samet sometime in 2022.
Phnom Penh
Cambodia has become the unlikely first country in Southeast Asia to open up to travel again. They have the second-highest vaccination rate in the region (behind Brunei and recently overtaking Singapore), and Phnom Penh became the ‘world’s most vaccinated capital city’.
Cambodia reopened on November 1, and Bangkok Air and AirAsia announced the resumption of flights to Phnom Penh. I booked a flight with AirAsia, which was my first flight with them since March 2020. I had forgotten I had some credits with them from a bunch of cancelled flights from last year.
To fly here you need to be fully vaccinated, get tested pre-flight, and get tested upon arrival at the airport. Fortunately our flight arrived 5 minutes before a Singapore Airlines flight, so it only took about an hour to get out of the airport after all the paperwork and testing was done. It will get complicated when more flights start returning.
So I am back in Cambodia, mainly because of the combination of most of the people being vaccinated here and that it is easier to enter. I have a lot of Future Southeast Asia work to do in Cambodia, and I will make the most of being here with fewer tourists than usual.
Blog posts and other site news
Only one blog post this month: Notes on Coastal Montenegro – Bar, Budva, Tivat, and Kotor.
Next in the queue: Tirana and Istanbul.
Assorted travel reads
• The Hippie Trail: An interactive history of the road trip that inspired Lonely Planet
I have been following Torbjorn “Thor” Pedersen and his quest to visit every country in the world without flying for some time, who had nearly finished until the pandemic struck.
• Gandikota: The stunning Indian gorge that resembles the Grand Canyon
• Travel memories in emails: Why I can never give up my dodgy old Hotmail account
I still remember the day in the last nineties when a friend who was travelling to India showed me this thing called Hotmail so I could keep in contact with them.
• Listicle season is upon us:
- 22 sustainable holiday ideas for 2022: where we’re dreaming of [The Guardian]
- Where to travel 2022: The best destinations to visit [CNN Travel]
- Where to go in 2022 [Bloomberg]
• Postcard from Bali: ‘The pandemic has battered the island — and fake news has gone into overdrive’
“Our writer reports from the Indonesian holiday hotspot, which welcomed 6.2 million international arrivals in 2019 but just a few dozen in 2021.”
An article by Our Man In Bali, @travelfish. It is in The Times though, so paywall may apply.
• In a new series, ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ gets more worldly
“The latest take on the classic Jules Verne novel, for PBS’s Masterpiece, expands on earlier adaptations with new characters and a more diverse cast.”
• Winter is acceptable to me when it looks like this…
@nomadicnotes at Instagram
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The Nomadic Notes Travel Newsletter is a weekly newsletter of the best travel reads and interesting travel news from around the web, and random ramblings by the editor.
- James Clark
I'm interested in the details of how you got here, including visas, required tests, airline and transport experiences. Anything that you'd like to share, really, that normally we took for granted pre-covid/pre-omicron/pre concern about efficacy of different vaccines...