Now that Pramaoy is our basecamp of sorts, we have started to explore the local areas outside the town for affordable land to purchase.
🤠 Apparently The Wild West Is Still Too Expensive 🤷♂️
I don't know why I've never thought of myself as financially poor, and honestly the only time I ever feel "poor" is when I realize how unattainable things like a new car or a hectare of land with no home in the middle of nowhere are. Pramaoy is beautiful, and I think we are in the right part of Cambodia geographically speaking, but I think Pramaoy isn't in the cards for us.
We haven't heard a price less than $40,000 in this area, and a few days ago we even went 35 minutes off the highway down a treacherous road, the land very unfertile, possibly 24 hours away from decent medical care, and still a small cabin on a hectare of land costs $40,000+, and it's times like these that nearly break my spirit.
It's Not In The Cards 🎴
Already we've done enough exploratory adventures in the area surrounding Pramaoy to realize that the Chinese are buying massive plots of land at extremely inflated prices, and even here in the middle of nowhere there are hundreds of Chinese in this tiny little outpost town. I'm not willing to live 2 days away from medical care without internet on unfertile land just so I can call a place "mine."
I Just Can't With Humans Anymore 🤦♂️
Our rental room is in the town is $50 a month, and steady internet is possible to arrange, so we're quite comfortable with our living space, and by no means in a rush to spend our life savings in such a questionable market. I myself made peace many years ago with the fact I may never be able to own land in this lifetime, and at times I feel it may be smarter to just keep building a nest egg for the @kidsisters so that they can one day be landowners after my time has passed.
All of my crypto investments are at all-time lows or in the dumps, so cashing out to buy inflated land is about the dumbest thing I could do right now, besides we don't even have close to a combined $40,000+ right now anyway.
All of this money talk makes me feel dirty, it's hard to explain. I don't even believe in the concept of land ownership, but I was born into a system that never asked nor cared about my opinions on these matters. It seems as if I don't partake is this world that I will be doomed to a life of slumlords and leaky ceilings, and I honestly just want to forget it all and just go exploring and camping.
Soft Title 🤔 Hard Title
Not many places in the world have such these as hard titles and soft titles, but this vocab is used in Cambodia to describe the type of deed that the land is under. A hard title is without a doubt the only kind of title you want in this country, as it is "real ownership," whatever that means.
The Khmer Rouge burned nearly every piece of paper in the country during the genocide, and many refugees returned to Cambodia to reoccupy their homes, only to find out someone else was occupying their land/home, and the original owner most often did not have "sufficient proof" to show ownership of the property.
My own wife's mother lost her land in this way, unable to reclaim it after re-entering Cambodia from Thailand after 10+ years in a Thai refugee camp. Pramaoy is beautiful, even the water next to the roads looks fairly clean here, but I've been researching the local history of land disputes and conflict, and it seems to be a particularly troubled region.
On The Road Again 🛣️
So, as I write this post, we are actually loading up the Ape for a trip back to Phnom Penh for several reasons, chief among them to obtain my one-year visa, get the license plate for the Ape as well as Pov's National Police Background Check, something that is very hard to get, but required for immigration to the USA, something we have already paid for, so we might as well keep pursuing until all hope is lost.
We have no intention to live in the USA, but if granted immigration, we could live there a minimum of 6 months per year for three years and then the ladies would have US citizenship, something that would make transiting international airports much easier, and also I'd love to visit the USA with my Cambodian family once every two or three years, and citizenship would make this process a whole lot easier, cause we sure aren't eligible for tourist visas.
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Return from Exploring Pramaoy, Cambodia 🛺 Land More Expensive Than We Ever Imagined 🤦♂️ to Justin Parke's Web3 Blog
