She came to Kep for a few nights out of Phnom Penh. She expected a hotel room. What she found was green floors, blue walls, old jars on the shelves and a bathtub the colour of a lime. She put her phone down and did not pick it up again.
Sam Tharoth fights for a living. Bokator, Kun Khmer, mixed martial arts, with film work alongside it. She lives and trains in Phnom Penh, and she talks about the city the way people do when they have been in it too long.
She came down to Kep for a few nights. This is what she said about the room.
Colour, when every hotel is grey
"When I go to a hotel, I feel like I am in a hotel," she says. "This room, I feel like home. I don't know why."
Her first answer is the colour. Polished green floors, blue-grey walls, a bathroom washed in green.
"Nowadays they only decorate with grey and white. Everything is white, and this and that. This one is very colourful. Blue, green. That is what I like."
The rooms at Knai Bang Chatt were built in the 1960s, in the Khmer modernist style, and they have not been flattened into the beige that hotels now default to. Nothing in the room looks ordered from a catalogue. That reads immediately, even to someone who is not there to study architecture.
A room from another time
She reaches for a way to describe the effect and half finds it. Something about being in another decade, a gap of years, a different spot altogether.
"Once I enter the room, I feel I am entering another room, but also a different kind of spot. For me, I could not find this in Phnom Penh."
Asked how she actually felt crossing the door, she does not hedge.
"I feel surprised. I feel attached to this place, to be honest. I said to myself in the bathroom: this is my dream place."
The phone stayed down
"It makes me feel peaceful, relaxed. I forgot about the work, the stress. I don't even hold my phone."
What she did instead was look at things. She lists them without being asked: the decoration, the window, the leaves moving outside, the breeze coming through.
"When you are in the city, even in your quiet room, you still feel chaos," she says. "Here you just sit down and relax. You can look at the ceiling and smile alone."
The window, and what is behind it
The room opens onto a balcony, and past the palms, the sea.
"You lie on the bed and look through the window, and the ocean is right in front of you. Stand up, and it is still there. I got the best view. I am so grateful for this."
She kept the windows open the whole stay. "I love the nature, the sky, the sun. That is why I open the windows everywhere."