9-11 November 2011

Water Festival

The government has made Koh Pich (Diamond Island) available to its developer friends, and it is amazing how much it has grown in just the past year.  A year ago there were just a few wedding reception halls and a few small shops open for business.  A year later there are housing developments and a wide expanse of commercial operations.  It seems the vision is to make Koh Pich a waterfront exhibition area in addition to providing high-end commercial and residential venues.  The government would also like to see it used for concerts and other shows, and so moving some of the activities of the Water Festival to the island follows the master plan.

	Booths and vendors' stalls that used to line the major thoroughfares by the Independence Monument have been moved out to the island.  That had to hurt their sales because previously everyone walked by the booths on their way to the waterfront and now people must make a side trip to the island, a long walk from the boat racing center in front of the royal palace.  Early in the afternoon these booths had some customers but not the throngs they have been accustomed to in previous years.
	In addition to being a little bit out of the way, these vendors are suffering from the cancellation of the boat races which annually brought maybe two million people from the provinces to Phnom Penh. Most of those people will probably just not be in Phnom Penh this year. These pictures were taken in the early afternoon, when it was very hot. More people would be around these stalls as evening falls.
	One thing that Phnom Penh—and Cambodia—desperately needs and obviously lacks is strong urban planning.  There may be some people in government who have vision and training and expertise in zoning and planning and development, but their voices don't seem to be heard, probably overridden by louder voices promising money if allowed to do what they want.  A good example is this amusement park. It is the second one in this waterfront area!  The first one hardly gets any clientele to speak of. There certainly isn't the traffic to support two of them. The land committed to this could have been better developed with some real planning.
	Some people in Phnom Penh really don't care much about the Water Festival or the boat races.  They do appreciate the holiday, though, and the opportunity to sit in the shade along the waterfront and just talk.
	The huge throngs of people that have jammed the waterfront each year for this festival are also almost all cellphone users.  This year one of the major cellphone companies set up this mobile phone relay tower along the waterfront.  Probably this year, though, it was really not needed because of the smaller numbers.