An island idyll in Cambodia – and five other less travelled islands in Asia to avoid the crowds
- From sunsets in Koh Rong Samloem, Cambodia, to Yakushima in Japan and its magical forests, adventurous travellers can still discover serenity
- Try these remote Asian islands for some solitude and scenery
Every day at 4pm blocks of ice the size of coffins appear on a remote Cambodian beach. Three excitable teenagers drag the freezing blocks from the hull of a wooden long-tail fishing boat and float them through the waves before dumping them, like lumps of concrete, on the white sand of Sunset Beach.
It’s enough to make you peer out of your hammock to see what all the fuss is about. Now caked in sand, the ice blocks are left in the sun to melt around their edges until the reason for the ice appears nearby; slabs of beer cans. Within 10 minutes both the beer and the ice have been distributed to the four restaurants on Sunset Beach, the teenagers have splashed their way back to the fishing boat, and Koh Rong Samloem’s most remote beach returns to its usual sleepy state.
Not much else disturbs the peace on this idyllic stretch of a tiny, roadless island (also called Koh Rong Sanloem), aside from a mini rush hour when a dozen or so people grab an ice-cold beer and sit on the sand to see how the beach got its name. After that it is just seafood, stargazing and walking through the surf watching bioluminescent plankton light up between your toes.
But do not expect Sunset Beach to stay peaceful for long. Nearby Sihanoukville on Cambodia’s south coast, once known for its quiet beaches, is now infested by high-rise casinos, and the larger Koh Rong island to the north already has a few. Sunset Beach and the other quiet stretches of sand on Koh Rong Samloem, such as nearby Lazy Beach and the slightly more developed Saracen Bay, probably have only a few more years of solitude left.
