One of the things I always liked best about Kampot, Cambodia was the tall stately old casuarina trees that lined the riverfront. Their beautiful lacy conifer type leaves have a special grace about them. The trees, which I guessed to be about 60 to 80 years old, are actually a century old according to a local Khmer.
Every time I’d ride my bicycle along the river I’d get a warm grateful feeling, like it was a privilege to live among them. Over the nearly five years I’ve lived here, I’d often remarked to myself how great it was that the authorities here hadn’t tortured and emasculated them the way the old trees of Phnom Penh had been mistreated. So, of course, it had to happen. Far be it for Cambodians to see a hundred year old tree, nay a nearly kilometer long row of centenarian trees, as a venerable natural work of art. What were once fifty to eighty foot - 15 to 23 meter - tall, grand and beautiful trees are now 15 to 20 foot tall trunks with a few branches hanging off of them. Total uglification.
Ironically, even while they severely cut back the casuarina trees they left the parasitical strangler trees and branches in place. The stranglers seed up high in the tree and send their roots down to the ground. Eventually when there are enough roots surrounding the trunk, they merge together and strangle it. So parasite stranglers okay; beautiful old trees, mauled and ravaged.
In five years they’ll have a clump of green leaves to start to provide shade again and in a generation they’ll start to look good again, meanwhile every time I look at those emasculated trunks or even think about what they’ve done I get sick to my stomach, not to mention angry. At one point while they were doing their dirty work, I started yelling, at no one in particular, to express my displeasure. Two Khmers I talked to said they were dangerous: you know in the next ten or twenty years a branch might fall and hurt someone, as if there aren’t scads of more dangerous aspects of daily life in Cambodia. I expect they were mimicking the official line, though I’m afraid one of the authorities’ motivations may be to sell some of the very valuable lumber.
It’s not just on the river where they’ve gone on their arboreal rampage, in other places they’ve cut down old trees so they could plant neat rows of saplings. A century old tree can not be replaced with a sapling unless you want to wait around a lifetime for it to achieve the same level of grandeur. They did the same thing in Phnom Penh when redoing the riverfront. There were four very large old trees whose roots were encroaching on the embankment near Street 178. They couldn’t be bothered to design around them, they had to go. Even worse was the giant tree that once sat close to Sisowath at Street 118. It interfered with their sidewalk design so it too had to be axed.
To me every old tree is a precious asset, especially in an urban context where they provide shade and oxygen as well as calming green energy to offset the overwhelming sense of concrete, metal and pavement of a typical city. It should take an act of God to remove one of those trees.
I spent five years back in the seventies living in the mountains of southern Oregon, noted for its ancient forests, the small percentage that remain anyway. At that time the official mantra of the US Forest Service, in line with the logging industry, was that 400 year old trees were in the process of dying so should be cut down before the lumber was lost and besides they weren’t producing wood as fast as young trees could, so they needed to be liquidated (their word). Never mind that they might have another 200 or 300 or 400 years to live, they had to go. When there’s money to be made, all other considerations are secondary.
Leaving that sour, disturbing and depressing note, my favorite little burg is looking up, though it’s kind of subdued now in the middle of September, height of rainy season. We had lots of rain recently, 10 inches came down in three days as a result of tropical storm Nock-ten. The official figures for Phnom Penh for September, the heaviest month for rainfall, is 12 inches so that was a real deluge. I don’t know what the official figure for Kampot is though I’m pretty sure it’s more than the capital. After 2.5 inches fell in the first couple of hours it just kept coming down in what I think of as a constant but light Oregon rain, alternating with tropical torrents. There was no sign of the sun for three days. The one difference to Oregon is that it’s always cold when it rains there, never above 68º F - 20º C, even in the middle of summer. You always avoid getting drenched but when it does happen here the air and water are so warm you really don’t mind it that much. Ironically enough, it hasn’t hardly rained in the week since the deluge.
Heavy rainfall is a bit problematical for access where I live. I do a lot of biking around town and the three worst roads I’ve come across are the ones I need to access my house. My place is about 50 meters from River Road about 200 meters from the new bridge. When I first moved in four years ago there was a small temporary pond at the intersection which would dry up not long after the last heavy rains. Most of the street frontage was ponds and wetlands. When property owners started filling in their watery places and the rain no longer had any place to go - there’s no drainage system - the pond began to deepen and take on seasonal characteristics. It got so deep I couldn’t drive my Camry through the center of it.
Last dry season somebody, or maybe it was the neighbors all together, got the bright idea to fill it in so they brought in several dumploads of fine river sand - probably because it’s cheap here - and it made a very nice, smooth road for the duration of the dry season. Unfortunately it turned slick as snot with the first substantial rains. The first vehicle to attempt to drive it was a small dual-wheeled truck; it slid over to the soft edge of the road and had to be towed out, nobody’s tried it since. There is a passage at the edge of the road for bikes and motos that’s doable but quite messy when wet. Meanwhile filling in the seasonal pond that once covered the road at the intersection of River Road and my connecting road, has now moved the water up to just before my house where the last pond, that is adjacent to my house, is located. Now heavy rains take all of the runoff for a large area into the last pond where it reaches higher than it ever has before and floods part of my yard in the process. As well, the road becomes a pond about 6 inches deep in front of my house. River Road itself is a foot deep in places.
There’s a lot of road construction happening all over town and River Road is kind of a priority so I assume it’s on their list for improvement and they’ll get to it next dry season. Problem is; often when they improve a street, they waste a lot of money making it far wider than it’ll ever need to be and so they don’t have enough money to make even minimal improvements to others that desperately need it. I have the same complaint about how things are done in Oregon, so that kind of waste is not peculiar to Cambodia; however, officials here do love asphalt seas. Kampot’s main traffic circle, for instance, is three or four times larger than traffic would ever warrant, unless you’re talking 50 years in the future and the city has grown to a million people.
There are several reasons why excessive pavement is a mistake. First, or course, pavement is expensive, there’s no sense in spending the money if it’s not actually needed. Secondly, it’s ugly; greenery is esthetically preferable and besides, usable by people. Thirdly, pavement is referred to as an impervious surface. The larger the pavement area, the greater the size of the drainage system necessary to drain off rainwater and thus the greater likelihood of flooding when the rain comes down too fast for the system to handle. The rain that falls on unpaved surfaces is easily absorbed into the ground. Finally, pavement, being dark in color absorbs heat making the city less comfortable and adding to global warming.
September, along with June, are the slowest months in regards to both expats and travelers and so the town is really quiet. Many of the bars are also very slow, though we still are able to get together live music jams two or three times a week. Most of the players are regulars but there are always people passing through to spice up the repertoire. I haven’t seen jams this good in years. I’ve been playing drums - congas or bongos, whatever is available - at every possible jam… I try not to miss one. When high season hits and all the snowbirds return it’ll be one of the best places to hear live music in Cambodia. I keep thinking Kampot will turn into a traveler hot spot like Pushkar or Hampi in India or Dali or Yangshou in China. I’m not sure I’ll like it when my favorite little town becomes an ‘in’ place and maybe I’ll need to abandon it and search out another great but undiscovered small town home. Meanwhile it’ll take some time before that happens and it’ll be fun to have a real scene here.
The old market which was built in the mid-sixties and then sat derelict after it was gutted by fire a few years later is finally being rehabbed. It’s really a fine old building. It’ll be really cool when it’s done and with all the new shops, restaurants and bars opening up all around it, old town will be transformed.
The riverfront promenade is within a month or two of being finished. Compared to its former seedy life when it was mostly unkempt grass with a few planters and the odd crumbling concrete bench and hardly anybody went there, it’s now very heavily used. The park strip between the old market and the bus/taxi station is also finished. All of the city’s traffic circles have also been upgraded. The main traffic circle now sports a 3 meter tall durian surrounded by other outsized fruits; it’s quite a nice sculpture.
Once they’ve finished all the park strips, they really ought to search out vacant places to establish ‘real’ parks: that is, places that are partly semi-natural replete with small forests, creeks and ponds and partly for sports with football pitches, tennis courts and basketball courts, etc. The people who govern this country have, I’m sure, all visited European and American cities where they’ve seen large parks like Central Park in New York and Hyde Park in London and yet there isn’t a single city in Cambodia that has a real park, except maybe Siem Reap where there are substantial undeveloped green areas.
Phnom Penh once had lots of lakes and wetlands suitable for park space - back in the 1960’s you could rent a rowboat to explore Boeng Kak Lake - but they’ve all been filled in and developed. The former undeveloped park at the tip of the Chroy Changvar peninsula, which was a spectacular setting for a large green space was given away for development. Even the greenspace surrounding Olympic Stadium is slowly being whittled away for development. A shameful 2% of the capital is in park space and that includes traffic islands like that surrounding Independence Monument, which is, absurdly enough, off limits to people. Have the country’s leaders never been to or seen pictures of Central Park and noticed that some of the most valuable properties in New York are those overlooking the park?
Fortunately, in regards to a small city like Kampot, you’re never far from the countryside so lack of parks is not going to impact so seriously on the people’s well-being. Not like Phnom Penh which is oppressively and distressingly being built up and expanding far from the city center with nary a thought to adding public space on the periphery. If you don’t live near the river or Olympic Stadium there’s nothing except a few noisy, polluted traffic islands for miles around.
One aspect of Kampot getting up in the world is that land prices have returned to the high levels of 2007. For three years my land was worth half what I paid for it. That rise in value is good for me since I’m now trying to sell it. I’ve discovered I really don’t want to be a gentleman farmer and go through all the hassle of building a house and maintaining a country property. I’m happy in my rental house on the edge of town.
If anybody out there is interested in buying a sweet little 5000 square meter piece of Cambodia, get in touch: my email is stancam@ekit.com. It has a view of Bokor, lots of fruit trees - some large and mature - and a well with sweet tasting water. It’s about 3 kilometers from Kampot and 250 meters from Sihanoukville Road.
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