Phuket: A bit of a gamble in Cambodia

Alasdair Forbes takes a trip to a casino with some shopping on the side.

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Alasdair Forbes Tuesday 15 January 2013,

The quiet and well-ordered O Smach market, which is dying as buyers instead explore the delights of the boisterous Khmer market across the border in Chong Chom,

Anyone who has been in Thailand for a while knows that gambling is a) generally illegal and b) a big industry.

But for those who love to throw their money away and not get fined or locked up for it, the country is now ringed by casinos just over the border in Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, most owned by Thai investors.

One such casino is 500 metres or so from the Thai-Cambodia border crossing at Chong Chom in Surin province.

Contained in the O Smach Resort on the Cambodian side, the casino is jammed at the weekends and does a solid trade on weekdays, with 10-minute queues to get through immigration.

On the Cambodian side, motorbike taxis and pickups wait to take gamblers to the casino.
Guards at the door of the O Smach casino take away cameras and there’s a metal detector to spot those carrying arms, and then it’s through rows of slot machines all pinging and jingling away and into the main hall full of tables. Baccarat, Roulette, Big Six (for real simpletons who want to lose money).

The tables are like those you’ll see in any James Bond movie, and the croupiers and dealers have all the Monte Carlo mannerisms, but the players are rather less glamorous. It’s all a bit of a let-down really.

For those with no interest in losing money, a better place to head for is the market, another 500 metres from the casino.

It’s well organised, solidly built, and has one truly unique feature: movie cafés.

In these cafés all the seats face in one direction. Up front are big-screen TVs showing mostly Hollywood movies, dubbed into Khmer. There are tables between the rows, on which staff serve atom-bomb-strength Cambodian coffee. Good stuff.

These places should probably carry government health warnings (maybe they do, in Khmer) something along the lines of “Caution: Watching a movie in this establishment may severely disrupt sleep patterns for several weeks.”

The market is quiet during the week, and even at weekends it’s not as busy as it used to be, says a young man in a shop specialising in wedding gowns covered in sequins and other shiny stuff. 

The problem is that whereas Thais used to go shopping on the Cambodian side, there is now a sprawling Khmer market on the Thai side, so shoppers no longer bother to cross over.

Here you can buy everything from vegetables and flowers to toys, knives, dried deer meat and aromatic fire-starters. There’s something for everyone.

Except for a casino.