Gavin's Gap Year: Cambodia! (with pictures)

I’ve just about reached the halfway point of my time in Cambodia. Ergo, it’s time for an update. First, water buffalo:

This is where I live.

I’m writing this from a little guesthouse in Sihanoukville in Southwest Cambodia. It’s two hours by boat away from the tropical island of Koh Rong Samleom, my current home. There’s no internet on the island, so I make the trip to the mainland every so often.

My volunteer work here is in honor of Brendan Kutler and the Two Hats Award. I work for Marine Conservation Cambodia and conduct extensive surveys of the marine life around the island with almost 30 other volunteers from all over the world.

The island itself is fantastic. I wake up to convivial cloudscapes, cerulean surf, and the sanguine smiles of the villagers with whom we share the little slice of heaven. And share it we do – I lived right in the midst of the village. During Khmer New Year, I fell asleep to second-hand serenades belted out into karaoke microphones from midnight to dawn by jovial Khmer men. I even shared a bucket-shower room with an elderly family (there’s no running water on the island). The living is very bare-bones; the only furniture in the shack I share with three other volunteers is a row of nails on which to hang stuff.

The village has quite the history. Two years ago, it didn’t officially exist. It was a caravan of corrugated metal full of famished squatters. Alcoholism ran rampant, and the villagers were barely surviving. Then, some developers bought the island and zoned it for development. They tried to convince regulatory agencies that the bay was fished to hell, so what harm would building it up do?

Actually, a lot. It would spell doom for the island, its denizens, and its bewildering biodiversity.

This is where Marine Conservation Cambodia comes in. We do surveys of the island’s marine life to earn it the island marine protection it deserves.

I underwent two kinds of training: scuba training and survey training. I am now a certified Advanced Open Water Diver and have been down to seventy feet. The water here is so warm that we can dive down in nothing but swim trunks and a t-shirt!

It’s a different world underwater. Diving feels kind of like flying around as a fighter jet in space. My survey partners and I glide horizontally along the seafloor and communicate through hand signals. You control your underwater altitude with your lungs, though, so it has a tangibly Zen component.

Marine life comes in so many different colors – lime greens, pastel yellows, Prussian blues, neon greens. Reefs make a distinctive cackling noise, so it kind of sounds like the entire ocean is eating Rice Crispies and giggling to itself every time I get close to one.

The training for these surveys involves learning to identify forty-plus fish - in addition to all the different invertebrate, coral, and substrate varieties that populate the waters around the island. This was a lot of fun. The fish are beautifully manifold, but I began to appreciate marine life on a totally different level when I learned to marvel at the way a chocolate grouper’s pectoral fins flit in the water as it scavenges about a diadema urchin-riddled tower of healthy brain coral.

I spend about four hours a day (any more and nitrogen in the blood becomes an issue) diving in a flat expanse of over-fished almost-wasteland called the Corral. Visibility is notoriously low (I often can barely see my survey partners), and the current is nothing short of legendary. All that’s down there are some patches of sea grass, a handful of oscillating, neon-blue Anemones (complete with Nemo-like damselfish!), the occasional magic-carpet-like black-and-orange polka-dot sea slug, and a smattering of pencil urchins.

Oh, and a lot of jellyfish. Way too many. A few days ago, I counted 28 during one dive. These jellyfish move with an entrancing undulating squeeze and vary in color from pink to deep fuchsia. Fun fact: water eats up red light. That makes these breathtaking creatures really difficult to see, and the Corral’s buffeting current flings them through the water super quickly. I’ve been stung twice. They hurt.

So why go to the Corral? Because in one out of every, say, ten-odd pencil urchins, there will be a seahorse. Up close, they look almost like alien royalty. Their faces are somewhere between horse and human, and the skeletal ridges that line their entire bodies could pass for imperial war regalia as easily as an exoskeleton. They are an eerie abandoned-building verdigris-tinged brown, and they’re rarely bigger than the distance from my wrist to the middle of my pinky.

Finding a seahorse makes a chest-pounding hour of barely dodging jellyfish tentacles in three meters of visibility worth it ten times over. Even better, every seahorse we see on a survey is published in the massive logs of data that we send to a number of worldwide conservation organizations, including the UN. Every survey we do makes a measurable difference towards protecting these animals. Find a seahorse, save a seahorse.

The whole thing makes me feel a bit like a secret agent – especially the dodging jellyfish part.

Now, a bit about the country.

Cambodia is the most under-developed place I’ve ever been by a massive margin. Clear, immediate example: I’m writing this in between power outages. Cambodia suffers from severe “energy poverty” – people don’t have access to reliable electricity. They supplement the meager output of the grid with household generators. It’s no surprise this country has been locked in the third world; its people need to devote so much time to jerry-rigging an infrastructure for carting around all of that diesel. The poverty is rampant, and a tinge of desperation often fills the air. I learned this early on when I left my shoes on the beach while going for a swim; they were gone when I returned. Many people are desperately poor.

Even with crippling issues like these with which to deal, the Cambodian people – especially the villagers – are usually warm, welcoming, and friendly. This – literally – rang true this past week. There was a wedding on the island, and all the volunteers were drawn into the proceedings like old friends. I shuffled in a conga circle of sorts right next to affable Cambodian teenagers, and they demonstrated for me the Bollywood-like, languorous, lolling hand rolls of Khmer dance. Despite the lack of electricity on the island, a platoon of speakers blared poppy ballads across the bay (hence the ringing: sound carries over open water really, really well).

Long story short, waking up every morning with long chains of mosquito bites coating my legs and gecko poop on my floor is an adventure, but I’m loving my time here! I know Brendan would approve.

Anyway, I’ve gotta get this posted before the power cuts out again.

Here are some pictures: