Regardless of these experiences, being a tourist in Cambodia didn't even come close to shaping our notion of the country as much as us actually establishing some sort of a life there. It started when we managed to sort out this Workaway gig in the last minute and found ourselves traveling to the south of Cambodia right the next morning. Even though we originally wanted to stay for a maximum of two weeks only, four weeks later we were still working at Kactus Resort on the beautiful and remote island of Koh Ta Kiev.
The place was a paradise: white beaches, crystal clear water, lavishly green jungle, and, my personal favorite, glow-in-the-dark-plancton. The feeling of swimming through a sea of a thousand shimmering lights under a black sky with a thousand stars is hard to describe. It was a breathtaking experience that even the people at Disney and Pixar couldn't have made up in all it's cheesiness.
Blending in with all that beauty the bamboo huts of the Kactus Resort were hidden in the jungle overlooking a picturesque bay. Lea and I worked there for about a month, mostly covering bar and service shifts. The job was amazing, especially when looking at the work-to-perks-ratio: we got accommodation, three superb meals a day and as many drinks of any kind as we wanted. In exchange we worked five hours a day. And the work was great, too; it reminded me of how much fun I have always had when preparing and bringing well-made food and drinks to people. Working and living on Koh Ta Kiev certainly made me question the whole office-job-hamster-wheel-situation I had left behind in Hamburg.
Still, as awesome as many aspects of this arrangement might have been, we mostly learned that even the most beautiful places will be spoiled if the people and the group dynamics don't work out. On first sight, things were peachy. Everybody was constantly smiling and kissing and hugging, smoking joints and drinking shots in the middle of the day, drawing Henna tattoos on each others arms and backs and legs and giving each other massages. But it didn't take too long to realize that there was a ton of unresolved issues bubbling under the surface. The whole thing seemed to be a trickle-down-kind-of-situation. It started with the owner, a French guy who occasionally melted down on his guests and his staff, and went all the way down through the managers to the volunteers.
The lowest point we witnessed was the boss throwing a plate of eggs with a fork and knife at the 12-year-old Khmer kid who worked in the kitchen when the local staff had forgotten to bake bread the night before. Then there were the managers who seemed to be under a lot of pressure and overwhelmed with tons of tasks and responsibilities. I was especially unlucky as one of them had this idea in her head that I was working and thinking too slowly, giving me a hard time at every possible turn. None of the other volunteers ever had to rake the entire area, fetch water from the ocean to fill the flushing buckets in the toilets or scrub the entire bar with bleach. Two weeks into us working at Kactus I had an episode of sitting in the most beautiful surrounding and feeling so pressured and undervalued that I could have bolted right there and then. I didn't, of course, and for our last week, the mixture of me being able to handle the situation better, and the manager in question easing up on me, led to us having such a good time that it eventually become hard for us to leave.
However. If nothing else, we learned that paradise is not just about the beauty of a place, but just as much about the people there not talking behind each others' backs, not sweeping things under the rug, not making assumptions or at least discussing them openly. The impact of the people on one's perception of a place can hardly be overstated. They can (temporarily) ruin the nice places and just as well increase the value of the shitty places (like we felt it had happened in Mui Ne in the south of Vietnam).
The only good thing about this complicated situation was that it didn't ruin the relationships between the volunteers. On the contrary, it actually gave us a never ending string of topics to discuss and brought us all closer together. I spent most of my time nurturing the bromance I had going on with Mike, a descendent of British colonialists in Zimbabwe, whom I bonded with over doing Yoga on the beach, talking about philosophy (Look at the cup in front of you. Now imagine everything is one and you are one with the cup.), hitting our private gym (a huge tree that had fallen over on the beach) and taking the resort's surf board out to paddle into the world's most amazing sun sets. And both Lea and I became very good friends with 19-year old Canadian Peanut Guillaume and slightly older Swiss henna queen Camilla. For the first time in nine months we had enough time to actually get to know the people we liked. And in this case our time together even got extended as right after leaving Kactus in the beginning of February we all spent a few days in Kampot together. Our time there was the most pleasant haze of hangouts by the river, outdoor water parks, concerts by local artists and regular food at this one family's restaurant shed, all curtesy of Camilla and her boyfriend Randy (they had been living in Phnom Penh for a few years and knew the place like the back of their hands). Plus we managed to meet with Katrin, a friend and former colleague from Hamburg who was traveling Southeast Asia at the time too. So things could have been perfect. If only there hadn't been this thing with our passports hanging over our heads...