Somebody's ancestor is buried in the island's name. Koh Ta Kiev — កោះតាគៀវ — means Ancestor Kiev's Island, and the Khmer honorific ta marks him as an elder, a grandfather figure whose claim on this patch of forest outlasted his own life. French administrators of the protectorate preferred descriptive geography and renamed it Île de la Baie, Island of the Bay. The old name won. It has outlived the protectorate, the war years and the arrival of the Cambodian navy, and it now faces the one force that has reshaped this coastline faster than any of them.
The crossing starts at Otres, the long strip of sand at the southern edge of Sihanoukville, and it is short enough that the mainland never quite disappears. Koh Ta Kiev sits four kilometres offshore, the largest of a small cluster of Cambodian islands, and from the water it reads as a low green wedge rather than a peak — 6.7 square kilometres of forest, mostly flat, humped with hills at a few points. The island runs 4.4 kilometres end to end, narrows to 1.4 kilometres at its waist, and folds 13.4 kilometres of coastline into coves and headlands. Three beaches face the visitors' side. On the eastern shore a small fishing village works the shallows, and a kilometre beyond that the mainland resumes as Ream National Park, so close that Koh Ta Kiev can look less like an island than a piece of coast that drifted off and kept going.
Sihanoukville was invented. Independence in 1953 left Cambodia with a river route to the sea that ran through Vietnamese territory, so the government picked a stretch of empty coast at Kampong Som and built a deep-water port from nothing. The city was established on 22 November 1957 and named for King Norodom Sihanouk. For decades it was Cambodia's only deep-water port; later it was a backpacker town, with Otres the last quiet beach on the strip. Then came the casinos. Chinese investment arrived in the 2010s on a scale the city had no capacity to absorb, more than a hundred casinos were planned, and by 2019 Chinese nationals owned over ninety percent of local businesses. A ban on online gambling that year hollowed much of it out again, leaving unfinished towers standing along the shore and, by 2023, a grim reputation for scam compounds staffed by trafficked workers. Koh Ta Kiev, four kilometres out, was where people went to see none of it.
The island is not unclaimed. The Royal Cambodian Navy keeps a small base and a port here, and beyond that there is no infrastructure at all — no grid, no road, no pier that a car could reach. The navy's interest makes more sense once you look northeast. A few kilometres away on the Ream headland sits one of Southeast Asia's most closely watched naval facilities, a base the British Royal Navy helped modernise in the early 1970s and Chinese engineering has rebuilt in recent years, dredged and re-piered and formally reopened on 5 April 2025 with a joint training centre. So the hammocks and the snorkelling trips share a stretch of water with something that several governments track by satellite. Nothing about the island announces this. You would simply notice, occasionally, a grey hull moving where the fishing boats do not go.
For years the island's tourism amounted to a few guesthouses and a campsite: solar lamps, mosquito nets, boats that came when they came. Large-scale resort development is now planned, and on this coast that phrase carries a track record. Koh Thmei, an island of comparable wildness inside the same national park, was carved into development zones by government sub-decree in 2018 and handed to a casino and lottery company. What makes Koh Ta Kiev worth the investment is precisely what the investment would spend: forest running down to the sand, the absence of engines, the fishing village on the eastern shore going about a day's work that has not changed much. Ancestor Kiev's name has survived a protectorate, a war and a naval base. Whether the island survives its own appeal is a separate question, and it will be answered soon.
Koh Ta Kiev lies at 10.494°N, 103.594°E in the Gulf of Thailand, four kilometres southwest of Otres Beach and one kilometre off the Ream National Park shoreline. The island is low and densely forested with no summit of note, so it reads on approach as a dark green wedge against pale shallow water, with three light-sand beaches on its western and southern sides and mangrove-fringed mainland behind it. Sihanouk International Airport (VDSV / KOS), 20 km east of Sihanoukville City with a 3,300 m runway, is the nearest field; Phu Quoc International (VVPQ / PQC) lies roughly 45 km east-southeast across the Vietnamese maritime boundary. Note the active Ream naval facility a few kilometres northeast on the mainland headland — check current airspace restrictions. A viewing altitude of 2,000–3,500 ft shows the island group, the Ream estuary and the Sihanoukville port skyline in one frame. Visibility is best November through March; the July–September monsoon brings low cloud and heavy rain squalls off the Gulf.