Qualla: Koh Russei

Koh Russei: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The sand here will hurt your feet. Tropical island write-ups do not usually open that way, but the standing advice for Koh Russei is to bring shoes onto the beach, because the grains are coarse enough to be uncomfortable underfoot - an odd instruction to receive about a place whose entire reputation rests on being a beach. The water makes up for it. The shallows run out so far that you can wade for a long stretch and still only be waist-deep, over pale sand that turns the whole crescent the particular luminous green of the Gulf of Thailand. Khmer speakers call it Koh Russei, Bamboo Island: 1.4 square kilometres of it, 1.7 kilometres end to end, lying about four and a half kilometres off Sihanoukville. Its recent history is a compressed version of everything that has happened to this coast.

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Koh Russei: Six Kilometres of Edge

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is not much island here, but there is a great deal of coastline for its size - six kilometres of shore wrapped around a landmass never more than 1.7 kilometres across and in places as narrow as seven hundred metres. That ratio is the whole appeal. Whichever side you land on...

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Koh Russei: The Navy's Island

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of its documented existence, Koh Russei was not a destination at all. It served as a small outpost of the Cambodian Navy and nothing else, which is less unusual on this coast than it sounds - Cambodia's offshore islands have long carried small garrisons, and the mainland...

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Koh Russei: Ten Dollars a Night

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What grew here once Sihanoukville's tourist numbers climbed was about as unpolished as coastal tourism gets. Two clusters of huts faced each other from opposite sides of the island, roughly ten to a cluster, each with its own bar and restaurant, at ten to twenty US dollars a nigh...

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Koh Russei: The City That Changed Underneath It

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sihanoukville was built in 1955 for a strictly practical reason: newly independent Cambodia wanted a deep-water port of its own rather than depending on Vietnamese control of the Mekong Delta. The city was formally founded on 22 November 1957 and named for King Norodom Sihanouk, ...

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Koh Russei: Villas, Planned

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Koh Russei was never going to sit out that boom. The investment company Citystar drew up plans for a low-density villa community and a luxury hotel on the island, to be built against EarthCheck environmental benchmarks and finished by 2016. Nearby Koh Puos - Snake Island - had al...

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