I was busy sweating uncomfortably on a gritty beachside deckchair in 30-odd degree heat in the emerging Cambodian beachside resort of Sihanoukville, when all of a sudden an idea occurred to me.
The previous night had been spent wandering from one beach bar to another accompanied by interchangeable individuals who collectively constitute the general flotsam and jetsam which drifts around the country, and I was now dying of a hangover which worryingly seemed to be getting progressively worse as the day went on.
Earlier that morning I had, somewhat inadvisably, allowed myself to be talked into consuming barbequed lobster for breakfast by a Khmer woman who made her living by flogging the things on the beach. She told me, through a barely concealed giggle I only noticed on reflection, that they were a fabulous hangover cure. Failing to detect the ulterior motives at play, I took her at her word, paid $2 and munched my way through half a kilo of the unfortunate crustaceans. The woman, it turned out, was a damn fine liar.
Anyway, between bouts of promising nobody in particular that I would never drink again and wondering if my throbbing head would go numb if I soaked it in the sea for an hour or so, I recalled a conversation I’d had in a small but popular beach bar the night before.
The Kiwi owner of the establishment casually mentioned that he had picked up the place two years previously for the princely sum of $15,000. The premises featured a large kitchen, which meant it also acted as a restaurant, and had five one-room bungalows out back which he rented out to tourists. He also organised boat trips and other excursions for visitors as a means of supplementing the business’ income.
The average wage in Cambodia is around $40 per month; the guy paid three Khmers the comparatively generous wage of $70 per month each. He ate food from his own restaurant and lived in one of his bungalows, which meant all the profit from the business had to cover was his own entertainment expenses. Being a typical beach-bum type character meant these costs were minimal given that his favourite pastimes were fishing and surfing during the day and sitting at his bar drinking cost-price beer and shooting the breeze with travellers who pulled up a stool in the evening. The bloke had found himself a slice of heaven for about €12,000.
He wasn’t the only one. I didn’t meet them in person, but he told me the story of a group of Irish girls who had planned to spend a year in Australia but opted to stop off on the way for a quick look around south east Asia. They made it as far as Sihanoukville and, like many others, fell completely head-over-heels in love with the place.
In order to secure an Australian working holiday visa the authorities require that you have €2,500 in your bank account, so the girls had enough between them to buy a bar. They knocked the well-worn Oz trail on the head and went for it – and two years later they’re still bumming around living the dream.
This, I decided as I squirmed around under my parasol gripping my stomach and shouting abuse seaward, could be a good option. I could handle a few months as a bar owner in Cambodia. I had spent most of the last year writing articles about the real estate industry in south east Asia for the property magazine I worked for in Bangkok and was struck dumb by the returns overseas buyers were getting on investments in Cambodia. Even if I was to get bored after six months I could flip the property and walk away with a profit.
All I needed therefore was a large sum of money which, sadly, I had no way of getting. Ah well. It had been a nice idea and had helped sustain me through a torrid hangover, which I managed to tip over into what felt like a life-threatening bout of food poisoning.
Although lack of funds had put the kibosh on my embryonic idea of life as a Cambodian bar owner, I had at least got another three days in the country before I had to head back to Bangkok. After that I would be Thailand-bound before my travels would bring me home to Ireland.
Robert Carry is a former staff journalist at Metro Éireann where he served as chief sports reporter and headed the paper’s Northern Ireland news section. He is currently working in Thailand as the news editor of an English-language magazine
