Sihanoukville - still

We have relaxed at this beach city for the past few days. Wonderful warm sunshine, clear blue water, fine sandy beaches....and then some contrasts. There are many peddlars and beggars on the beach selling manicures, pedicures, massages, sunglasses, fruit, bracelets, crayfish and so on as well as beggars that are without a limb or blind so it is kind of mixed. There is lots of development going on here and I understand that only 4 years ago that there were no cars here. Now the standard Lexus, BMW, Toyota and so on are here. It seems that the Russian mafia owns the Snake House - a restaurant with lots of glassed in snakes to view while eating. There were 3 Hummers in their yard. They are building a huge disco with an old plane in the centre that will have rooms to rent. Apparently they are building a bridge across to some islands and expect to build the most expensive resort in the world. Anyways lots of entrepeneurs here! Here from someone today who tells he that he is a retired CSIS person and he tells us that the police chief's wife has a brothel with 35 women employees. Sex trade is pretty highly developed here. Also there are so many charities working here and information for the tourist to buy only from children attending school, etc so hopefully there is a better alternative to begging. I had a massage from the Seeing Hands place today - they employ and train blind people to give a massage. They drive them to and from work and allow them to live doing trained work. These people lost their vision either from missiles or from disease and some were born that way.
A difficult society with such wealth and such poverty and such corruption - and so many people aiming to get in on the development from abroad. Hopefully it will maintain peace for time but it does not fill one with certainty. Quite a few people enjoying it here. As I say beaches and so on are great but then there is the ever present problem of the environment and garbage disposal and clean water and sanitation.