Boating in Cambodia II

In my previous post on this subject http://www.about-cambodia.blogspot.com/2011/09/boating-in-cambodia.html back in September of last year I mentioned I was having a boat custom-made here in Sihanoukville. Unfortunately, the deal I had with the two guys didn’t work out as the partners at the boat building place split up. I might have had a change of heart about getting a boat but I had ordered an outboard from the U. S. already. So I needed to get it elsewhere. There are several options; the closest one is in Koh Kong. There is an Australian guy, a dentist actually, who sells RIBs imported from China. Then there is either Thailand or Vietnam. I also checked out a number of Chinese manufacturers online and had them quote me suitable boats. The drawback with buying a boat online is that you really don’t know what you are getting unless you travel all the way to China first.Quingdao has the most factories according alibaba.com. The prices are really competitive in comparison to U. S. prices. But then U. S. boats are top of the line. Although Thailand is closer I really didn’t want to go there several times to look for the exact boat I wanted.

In the end I found a Vietnamese website of a group of companies that also manufactures all kinds of boats. The guys in Sihanoukville had planned to make the boat in the sandwich method, that is there is a plywood core covered entirely with fiberglass. This is a common method if there are no molds available for producing the hull bottom and and the inner lining. This Vietnamese company, Kien Giang Composite, located in An Bien in the Mekong Delta, makes full fiberglass boats which is a lot safer due to the fact that fiberglass just doesn’t rot. Wherever plywood is used in the manufacture of boats you run the risk of water seepage through a crack in the fiberglass and then you are really in trouble. The price they offered seemed reasonable too – no bargaining, prices are fixed. The specs seemed all right so I went ahead and ordered it. I made my 50% deposit at the end of December. The quote said they would deliver after 5 weeks on receipt of the deposit. After a week I inquired whether they had started yet but was told they are still putting out 5 boats for a Phillipine customer but I would be next after January 5th. The Chinese New Year held things up too. In order to check on the progress and the factory in general I traveled to An Bien the first week of February. I thought this would be a quick one-day trip as it is only 80 km from the border at Prek Chak/Ha Tien. But until we got there it was 3:30 in the afternoon already as we couldn’t find a taxi in Ha Tien right away and we had to cross a river by ferry at Rach Gia, the provincial center, a pretty large town. Traffic is also much heavier on Vietnamese country roads. Additionally, cars don’t exceed the speed limit which was 70 for the most part. Anyway, when we got to the factory we were surprised to learn that our delivery date was set for March 05, while we had expected it to be Feb. 15 or so. We checked out our unfinished boat and made a few requests for change. Here it is at that stage.

 

 

As you can see it is solidly built. The horizontal and longitudinal stringers are hollow and filled with air which will give the boat the flotation. Other manufacturers fill these spaces with foam. But KGC holds that foam becomes brittle with time and doesn’t guarantee the same flotation as enclosed air. The sides or gunwales are between 3 and 5 mm fiberglass. For extra stability they put in support reinforcements spaced 1 m apart. Most power boats these days, especially monohulls, have planing hulls. Trawlers usually have semi-displacement or displacement hulls. This boat has lifting strakes from bow to stern, which should make it get on plane faster and not as noticeable. The boaters among you will know that when coming out of the ‘hole’, that is, the transition on to plane the bow of the boat lifts up considerable and then slowly sets down. If the boat is trimmed correctly only about one third of the bottom is a continuously wetted surface.

In the meantime I had ordered a T-Top, which would have been available as an option but the price was too high for my taste. I ordered it from a supplier in the U. S. and had it shipped in a container as bulk freight. The outboard had arrived back in December already. In order to clear all these things through customs, which is a very difficult process, I used an excellen freight forwarder - CamFreight in Phnom Penh. I can only recommend them if anybody needs to import something hassle-free. They managed to get a decent rate of 26% for tax and duty for the outboard based on the invoice price. Separately I had ordered the controls, partially used, and wire harnesses from my outboard supplier in Florida and had it shipped by USPS. After some discussion with the customs people at the post office I got the same rate. They had wanted 60% initially. Although GPS and echo sounders are available in Cambodia, they are an unknown Chinese brand and very expensive. So I also ordered a Garmin Chartplotter/Echosounder from the U. S. All this is pretty easy for me as I maintain a bank account and a credit card there. It was also shipped by USPS. The customs people at the post office base their tax/duty calculation on the price that is listed on the U. S. customs export declaration. So if you get your supplier to reduce this you can get away with a much lower payment. My GPS/Echo sounder was $520 including shipping. The supplier put $220 on the declaration form and I paid my import duty of 25% on that. The only downside to getting stuff shipped over from the U. S. is the relatively high cost of shipping. You don’t want it shipped regular mail so it will have to be priority, which can run anywhere from $20 to $150 depending on the size and weight of the package. It is still more convenient than going to Thailand by car. Plus you can’t beat the U. S. when it comes to boats, boat accessories, and all the stuff you might need for boating. Smaller packages don’t go through customs anyway. They arrive at the no. 3 counter at the post office. These guys know me by now so well that they call me every time there is a package or letter for me.

As it happened, I had all the stuff I needed for the boat ready before the boat was even finished.Finally, when it was ready to be delivered it was postponed another 5 days by the factory, which didn’t make much of a difference as the negotiations with the customs department took a little longer. Items that are worth more than $300 need to be cleared in Phnom Penh at the head office. Under $300 the local office can do it. You can imagine that with 115.325% tax/duty on boats and boat hulls the negotiations can prove to be somewhat lengthy. Fortunately, the customs people don’t have a set list as for cars (see my post on importing cars). It all depends on the value on the invoice. If it is too low they won’t believe it. Remember, they got internet there too. So it all comes down to how to liaise with the customs officials. The lady at CamFreight knew her job and in the end I was happy with the result. I won’t publish here for obvious reasons what I paid and how we got that. Incidentally, the T-Top was cleared in Sihanoukville port as we declared its value under $300. Needless to say, it was somewhat higher than that.They didn’t even know what it was, especially since it came disassembled.

Now came the big part: getting the boat across the border. Vietnam being Vietnam they have their stringent procedures, not nearly as flexible as the Cambodian ones. The shipper needs to do an export clearance, which in itself costs about $500. I went to the border at Bavet/Moc Bai with two guys from CamFreight. We got there at 9 am and I hoped to be on my way back at 12 noon. Hey, what’s the rush? This is SE Asia, right? My freight guys told me we would start to clear the boat at 2 pm. So why were we there so soon? Well, the customs guys take their lunch break at 11 until 1 o’clock. The computers are shut down and until everybody is back at his desk it will be 2. But before we needed to get it through Vietnamese customs; and that took 2 hours too. At least we wanted to get it into the zero zone between the two border checkpoints to transfer it from the factory truck to the truck I hired. Finally at 1 o’clock we saw it. But then they wouldn’t let me into the zero zone as I didn’t have a Vietnamese visa. Never mind, that I am not going into Vietnam. After some back and forth between the freight guys, one customs official and the chief of the border police I was let in and we could finally start. Here is how it worked:

 

 

 

 

So at around 3 o’clock my freight guys started negotiating with the customs officers. Promptly they said we declared too low a price. It was definitely more than what we showed them. I called the CamFreight office in Phnom Penh asking why these guys were trying to set a different value. Of course, I understood they wanted to make some money too. Their Phnom Penh pals had gotten their cut so they wanted theirs too, right? In the end, $100 did the trick and we were cleared at the originally set value in Phnom Penh. My goodness, what a useless rigamarole. Another $40 for road check points completed this thing.

The rest was pretty straightforward. I worked with Ormax on the riverside, practically the only boat shop in Phnom Penh, to rig the boat with the motor, the controls, and hydraulic steering. His shop doesn’t instill too much confidence in his workmanship at first sight. It looks like a junkyard. But some of the car repair shops look the same. They can still do a fine job. He also uses a Navy technician who seemed to know his mettle. It turned out he really did. Two days later the boat was ready to go. Everything worked fine and the job was done nicely. Despite my initial reservations I can really recommend that shop. The factory had forgotten to install the bow grabrail. Ormax put it in for $300. Altogether that boat set me back more than $30k. If I had imported a used 2006 boat from the U. S. it would have cost me $43k. Here it is:

 

Well, let’s go fishing. I will also post a more detailed review at a later date.

Cambodia’s Schools are Back Online

My past post on high schools in Phnom Penh has attracted some interest. Below is an op-ed by Estelle Shumann on the subject of education in Cambodia. I think it is a well-researched article, although it leaves out some significant aspects. The quality of education varies widely; rural areas just get the basic minimum. Driving through the countryside you will see many school buildings sitting vacant. There are not enough qualified teachers. Also people make more money in other fields. This means that children have to travel farther to their schools.

More notably, however, it leaves out the money parents have to pay teachers. This is a consequence of the poor pay teachers receive. If parents don't pay the money, usually 50 cents a day for primary, and up to $1 for secondary schools, again depending on the location, students won't receive enough or no attention. This will leave poorer students behind and more well-off students making their grades regardless of their academic record. In other words, grades can still be bought.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting article. Estelle Shumann is a member of www.onlineschools.org.

While the rest of the world moves towards online schools and ubiquitous graduation, Cambodia is a country that is running to catch up. After a brutal dictatorship, Cambodia was left with little for an academic class. Under the Khmer Rouge, an agrarian social regime that demanded its people move from the cities to tend the fields, Cambodia had lost 21% of its population. But after decades of rebuilding, Phnom Penh is catching the world’s attention for its progress.

Earlier this month, the first ever United States-Cambodia education fair was opened to Cambodian students at the Diamond Island Exhibition Center in Phnom Penh. More than 20 American and Cambodian educational institutions were featured at the event, according to the United States embassy, which organized the event along with Ruwan Hulugalle & Company and Education USA. The two-day event also featured panel discussions on topics like student life, test preparation and scholarships.

The fact that Cambodia even has a higher education system robust enough to take part in the event is a sign of how far the country’s school system has come since the turmoil of the Khmer Rouge era. Cambodia today has 97 universities, according to statistics from the nation’s Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport. That’s up from six in 1980, and it indicates even more dramatic changes at the primary and secondary levels.

Cambodia’s modern school system grew out of the colonial model used by the French, with two cycles of primary school followed by two of secondary school. Today, Cambodia uses primary schools to cover the first six grades and divides secondary school between colleges, which teach grades seven through nine, and lycées that run through grade twelve. Last year, although Cambodia included more than 6,000 primary schools, only 1,573 schools were teaching grades seven through nine and 407 schools covered tenth through twelfth grade.

As a result, while 2.1 million Cambodian students are enrolled in primary school, only 334,734 were recorded in upper secondary education. Only 51% of students in Cambodia’s urban areas, and 33% of rural students, complete grade nine. This reflects the history of Cambodia’s education system, which emphasized primary school almost exclusively until the 1980s. In the 1981-82 school year, for example, the entire country had 3,521 primary schools, 96 colleges and five lycées.

This leaves the country with very few skilled graduates, making it difficult to find qualified teachers as well. According to education ministry statistics, the majority of Cambodia’s preschool and primary school teachers have only a lower secondary education, and most provinces include some teaching staff with no pedagogical training at all. Cambodian students also have unenviable building conditions to deal with. More than one-fifth of Cambodia’s schools, in both rural and urban areas, lack good floors, and a large percentage of schools are without good roofs or walls.

In 2010, Cambodia spent about 2.6% of its gross domestic product on education, according to figures from UNESCO. Only 21 percent of those funds go to secondary education, however. This places Cambodia well below the average spending level for western countries, which typically direct 5-6% of GDP toward education.

Despite all these challenges, Cambodia’s school system has seen rapid improvement. UNESCO reports that 77% of adults and 87% of youth are literate, and Cambodia has come very close to achieving gender parity in both literacy and school completion rates. The Cambodian government is responding to the problem of poor buildings with a wave of construction, with more than twice as many new buildings being built in 2011 compared to old buildings being repaired. The number of students in secondary education has skyrocketed, from about 5,000 in 1980 to about 900,000 in 2010.

Two bright spots emerge in Cambodia’s education system: Its well-established primary schools, where enrollment rates are well ahead of the regional average, and the rapid pace of change, the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979. This month’s U.S.-Cambodia education fair was promoted as a sign of the progress Cambodia’s schools have made, from a system where few students would complete even secondary school to one where higher education planning is a part of the national vocabulary.

How Many Cambodians in the U. S. ?

With the issue of repatriated Cambodians from the U. S. once again in one of the recent Phnom Penh Post headlines, I wondered how many Cambodian Americans are there really in the U. S. Sometimes one is led to believe that there are vast numbers. So I once again checked those numbers.

The 2010 U. S. census counted 244,000 Cambodians in the U. S., of which about 15,000 live in Long Beach and 13,000 in Lowell. One Cambodian civic leader said in a Voice of America interview that there are 300,000 Cambodians in the U. S. but only 100,000 show up in the census. This is, of course, belied by the census. The census figure matches another survey done in 2005, which counted roughly 241,000 Cambodians (http://portfoliolab.org/portal/DesktopDefault.aspx?pId=2&TabId=67&HtmlId=256&MenuId=59 ). The 300,000 probably applies to the Cambodian population outside Cambodia.

The latter survey also points out an interesting factor - the median age is 25.3. Now that’s pretty young. Unfortunately, the median age doesn’t give you the proportion of age groups. Nevertheless, it’s lower than the number for the entire U. S. population. The younger people grew up in the U. S. and identify as Americans. All the more surprising is that 44.2% speak English less than well. This figure speaks directly to the average level of education.

So altogether, I believe Cambodian-Americans, not the least that relatively paltry number in Long Beach, are vastly overrated in their significance on homeland Cambodian life. I now also seem to notice a more critical view in native Cambodians of life in the U. S. as a more realistic view sets in.

Importing a Vehicle

I got a response on one of my posts dealing with cars in Cambodia. This poster mentioned he is planning to import cars from the U. S. to Cambodia. I can only say, ‘Good luck.’

The way I see it the field is not exactly undercrowded. There is practically a used-car dealership on every corner. Now if somebody wanted to import a car on his own because they just don’t want to drive another Toyota or Lexus, here is a look at what awaits them.

First you need to get an import company to do all the customs clearances, import license, etc. If you do it on your own a ‘penalty’ fee of 20% on the import duty becomes due. Seeing that most import companies charge only 2% of the cargo value or a minimum of $150, I found this very reasonable. Plus who can negotiate with the customs officers? Certainly, not an in these matters ignorant foreigner. One may drive a good bargain at the market but with these people you are lost.

First you need to find out the assessed value of the car you are planning to import. The customs code does not do this by make, mileage and market value but uses an ‘arbitrary’ value as the basis for their computation of any duty and tax due on the vehicle. This may sound pretty simplistic but in essence is the only practical way of dealing with the high potential of rigged invoices. The customs code uses the engine displacement and the year. Here is the schedule:

The ad valorum duty and tax can be found in this schedule. The 35% is the import duty, the 45% is the excise tax (I call it the luxury tax), and the 10% is the added value tax. These rates are compounded so that the total will be 115.325%.

But, of course, this is not all. You will have to pay for shipping the car wherever it comes from. If it is only one car this is extremely expensive. There are no roll-on/roll-off services available to Cambodia. So most cars are shipped in containers. This can run anywhere from $4500 to $5,500 for a single car from the West Coast of the U. S. It’s not a whole lot cheaper from Europe but there are plenty of RO/RO services to Singapore. Let’s just use $1500 as an average. Your importer may hook up with another shipment so that 4 cars can be shipped in one 40’-container.

So here is the tally for a 2006 Audi A6 2.4ltr., which is officially listed at $12,800 (though you will be lucky to get one for this kind of money. They are around $15,000 to $20,000 depending on mileage).

Shipping $ 1,500
Misc. shipping fees (bunker adjustment, THC, etc. $ 500
Import duty/tax $14.760
Customs clearance $ 350
Customs permit $ 250
Camcontrol $ 15
Use of import license of the import company $ 256

For a total of $ 17,631
If you just use the customs value of the car $ 12,800

You end up paying $ 30,431

Now you understand where those high used-car prices come from. 115.325 % is steep; but governments of poor countries that have to import most of their goods always levy high import duties as their primary revenue. Originally Cambodia used a flat rate of $2500 per car; but when they came in in bigger numbers they quickly raised it based on market values – Sam Rainsy was the initiator of that back when. The customs people at that time sat there poring over French and U. S. classified ads in car magazines and newspapers.

Finally they arrived at more varied tax rates, very high ones that goes without saying, but the World Bank mandated a set schedule not to exceed 35%, which will eventually come down to 10% in 4 or 5 steps until 2020, if I am informed correctly. But the government being no slouch quickly instituted the ‘luxury’ tax of 45%, which will most likely stay forever.

On the whole the car values are pretty decent in my view. Last year I bought a 2006 Prius for $17,500. I was amazed it was so cheap. In the U. S. that car still went for around $14,000 but in the duty schedule it is listed at a mere $7,720 because the gasoline engine only has 1.5 ltr., never mind that the combined HP output is something like 150.

Now after all, perhaps you don’t really need that Audi, BMW, or Mercedes you fancy and can do with a nice Toyota Camry, although a 2007 model will still set you back something like $27,000. But seeing the benefit of cheap service and repairs, it certainly makes economic sense.

Cambodia's Sweet Spot

For those who don't read the New York Times, here is an article they published about Kep this weekend.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/travel/cambodia-in-and-around-kep-open-but-undeveloped.html

The author visited Kep last year so the information about Bokor is a bit outdated. You can read more of an update in my recent post.

http://about-cambodia.blogspot.com/2012/02/good-food-and-big-hassle.html

Although she mentioned the tranquility and the nice boutique hotels and at the same time warning that the crowds will eventually follow, she chose hotels in a price range that are exactly the precursor to mass tourism. $300 a night is definitely for wealthier people. The average individual tourist would be turned off by such hotel rates. Thankfully, there are sites like Trip Advisor that give a wider variety to choose from. But the tourism market tends to follow  backpackers and, ironically, rich people. All inclusive package tour operators get cut-rate hotel rates for the promise of high occupancies.

One thing is clear though. If Kep would be turned into a mass tourism destination like Koh Samui (which it can't for lack of beaches) or Chiangmai in Thailand, this would most certainly spoil and ultimately destroy the rather unique character of this serene beach town. Let's hope it will stay the way it is now for a long time to come.