Reef Pirate Divers was an appropriate name for Kep’s only scuba-diving outfit. Tourism in Cambodia was limited to the temples of Angkor. Beyond the magnificent ruins, the country was still waiting for wealthy foreigners. You could tell in this shop.
The office of the dive business was located in a small traditional family home that rested on high stilts on Kep’s main beach. A few hundred metres to the east, a long stone pier stretched into the shallow water of the Gulf of Thailand. A large sculpture of a nude woman, recently painted in glistening white, rested regally at the end of the pier.
The compressors were located in a concrete shed. The bottles, wet suits, BCDs, regulators, masks, fins, snorkels and weights hung in a long wooden pavilion, underneath a grass roof that didn’t look l
