The rickety ferry chugs from Shihanoukville's fishing port into what most maps of Cambodia show as an empty expanse of blue. It is four hours late leaving on its 30 kilometre journey due west to Tmaow Sa Island, but time means little on this island most Kompong Som Khmers have heard of but never visited. To expatriate residents, it is a total mystery, despite its population of between two and three thousand people.

Approaching by boat it is as if Tmaow Sa village comes to meet you, as the houses extend over the tidal mudflats perched high on their stilts. The houses are connected by precarious wooden walkways in varying stages of disrepair. The gray mudflats beneath them contrast sharply with the bright greens, reds and blues of the fishing boast that line the channel to the shore. 

 
Fishing nets hung up to dry glisten like fine cobwebs in the last of the day's light. The smell of the catch and of human habitation hands in the salty air. It is low tide as the boat pulls in. Now the crew must wait for the tide to come in again before it can unload its heavier car go. Most of the contents are bound for the market which hugs the shoreline. This boat is the island's lifeline, providing the basics they cannot provide themselves.

 
So to locals, although the island actually lies in the Tmah Bang District of Koh Kong Province, they consider themselves linked to Sihanoukville. When they consider themselves part of mainland life at all. For most,  this tiny island is all they want or need, and although Siha noukville is their portal to Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam also have a strong influence, on their lifestyles if not their culture. The wares in the a market look like the usual collection at first, but on closer inspection, most luxury goods are from Thailand. There is Singha Beer, Crates of it, overwhelming the Sihanoukville-bre wed national Angkor Beer, There are tinned goods, too, which have come straight from overseas.

 
And the prices are in baht. Riel is accepted. Baht is requested.  Stories mainland Khmer told about the island's history are echoed in the eclectic mix of faces which come from everywhere to envelope visitors in a friendly, speechless, staring scrum. Until recently Tmaow Sa's geographic position made it an important trade and travel point.  The island gained an infamous reputation over the decades as a have n for pirates and smugglers avoiding import duties. The boat from Koh Kong, a gateway province to Thailand, used to stop there, too, until newer, faster boast were employed a few years ago. 

 
These began to stop at neigh bouring Koh Rong, and Tmaow Sa lost its daily influx of rich travelers. The difficulty its location provided for authorities trying to control border trade and crossings also made the island attractive to people looking to start a new life from overseas.

 
From early times, it became a popular crossing point for people trying to avoid immigration. And so the faces in the crowed are more than just Khmer. They are Thai and Chinese and Vietnamese, too. People have lived on the island since the post-Angkorian period, joined periodically by waves of refugees, fortune hunters, seekers of a bet ter life, depending on how life on the mainland around the unchanging island was being treated by history.

 
It did not escape the ravages of Khmer Rouge times. Tmaow Sa's proximity to the coast made it a valuable post for the regime and one it later used as a base to levy "taxes" from every vessel which wished to pass. To keep islanders under control, villages were burned, sometimes with their occupants, to prove to any dissenters who ruled this little rock in the oceans. But times are peaceful now. The twenty first century has made its mark on a few houses, with tangles of television ariels protruding form their roofs. Electricity is permanent.

 
So is the blare of KTV and dubbed Chinese videos enticing customers into the handful of restaurants in the market There are even a few satellite dishes. But no roads. Not anywhere on the island. Vehicles are limited to a few motorbikes.

 
And almost no westerners come her, perhaps because there are no fabulous ruined temples or macabre museums to enthrall tourists, only the hospitality of people unjaded by tourism. If people here have heard of beach resorts and the strange foreign habit of lying in the sun to brown, they don't ask. The presence of foreigners is a novelty and a quickly assembled crowd follows every move. An arm snakes out occasionally to pull am hair or point at a bridged western nose and there is confused, shy but always friendly laughter.

 
There are a couple of guesthouses, but the locals will not allow "special guests" to stay in them. The crowd heads towards a houses on the mudflats. "I study English," says Mom, the eldest daughter of the family living there. "Please stay with us. I'd like to practice." "I live with my father on the mainland most of the time," she explains as she settles her guests in, "but I am visiting my mother and two brothers. They live here, and my mother needs help, so I don't know when I will go back."

 
She points to a small run from a bed on the rickety pathway of planks outside their house. The stall sells only two things- rice and petrol. The family's 12-metre fishing boat, its greatest asset, sits nearby, stuck in the mud and full of fetid water, Mom's mother is confident of selling it soon, now they have the shop and don't need it. "It is only 40,000 baht ($US1000)," she urges. "Really, That's a cheap price."

She bustles around cooking for her new guests, clicking her tongue furiously when money is offered for room and lodging and refusing to hear any more of it. But the meal does not contain the famous shrimp past. The search for that continues after the meal. Food on the island is basic -  fresh seafood, pork (the island supports a fair pig population) and mainly tinned vegetables. A little rice is grown. Most is brought from the mainland. Exploring is easy. The entire area is ris-crossed with tracks, and people are friendly and more than willing to tell the story of how Tmaow Sa Became their home.

 
There is a little subsistence faming in the middle of the island. Many people grow pigs because they take up little space in return for good meat yield. Coconuts grow wild. Most of the population fish for a living, and shellfish, shrimp and squid are also harvested. Any of the catch not used by the islanders  is taken to Sihanoukville on the daily boat. Shrimp fishing brought 66-year-old Pak Porn to the island in 1982. "I heard there was work here, so I came from my home province of Kampot," he says.

"There were maybe only 200 families when I first came here with mine." He built his Khmer-style wooden home himself, and says he will never move back to Kampot permanently, although he returns each year in dry season for a few months to farm salt. Now he considers himself an islander, and the entire family make a living off the shrimp catch. The salt is only a tiny annual supplement."There are two sizes of shrimp," he explains. "the big ones I can sell for 400 baht a kilo. The smaller ones only fetch 250 baht a kilo.

Bu he did no know about the shrimp paste they all credit the island for far away in Sihanoukville.

 
"They used to make fish paste," he offers. "From freshwater fish. But they stopped last year. The freshwater fish on the island ran out..."

Further down one of the myriad tracks, Nok is out collecting firewood, shouldering two branches on his way back to his house in another of the island's four villages, Phum Thmei (New Village).

New Village is in fact about 20 years old now like its sister villages, its population consists of immigrant workers. 

"Originally  I am from Srey Ambal in Koh Kong Province," Nok Says. " I came here with my family in 1989 to look for work." 

He catches crabs and shellfish for a living. His wife runs a small shop in front of their house. 

 
"I prefer this island to where I come from because here I have a job. It is beautiful and the air is good." 

Nok's family is one of 89 which make up the village. In Phum Thmei all eke out their living from the sea and find extra money growing and selling what they can.

He doesn't know about the famous shrimp paste either, but points to an old woman across the track selling sugar cane. Black sugar cane.

"This is what the island if famous for," he insists, but looks shy when asked why. 

 
"It is special..." he stammers. "It is used as medicine. For.. women's problems." Prolonged boiling with water renders the cane a potent medicine, he  explains, although for which "Problems" he declines to elaborate. The crowd which follow white visitors" every move, still  gathered around, are more easily explained. "The only foreigners who have been here since I can remember are Indians who come to sell shirts and mosquito nets. Never barangs (white foreigners)."

 
One of the children in the crowd wears a wild boar tusk around her neck. "There are still some wild boar on the island, although most hav
e been eaten," Nok says, "Wearing its tusk protects her from sickness
." Further into the interior of the island, far from the sea, the shrimp past search continued. 

En Ain, 57, and his wife, In Sruan, 51, are some of a handful of the island's farmers growing fruit and a few vegetables and not living off the catch of the ocean.

 
The hardship of their lives is etched into their faces, but they are happy in Tmaow Sa. They risked their lives to make a new start here.

"We came here in 1981, rowing here from Kampot in a small boat with all 10 of our family," Ain explains.  

 
Now there are 20 in the family. Half are grandchildren. They live off what they grow and what little surplus they can sell at the market. 

"We left Kampot because our family was big and our land was small. It was very difficult. We will never go back. It is better for us here. We have more land and there are jobs here," he adds. 

The main crops from the 100 metre strip they work as family land now are watermelons and bananas. 

"We would grow rice, but we have no buffalo and we can't afford one," Sruan explains. 

 
As you move around the island one mystery presses far harder than the whereabouts of shrimp paste. Where did the island get its name?  there is little, if any, evidence of white rocks on any part of the island. 

At Tmaow Sa Temple at the very heart of the island, this question at least is answered, though without the usual mystery and legend such things are often endowed with in Cambodia.

"It was named after a rock about 50- metres offshore to help people arriving distinguish this island," a monk explains. "The rock was white. Now it is not. Maybe it used to be that colour from birds using its as toilet. In any case, it is still there today." 

And, back on the shoreline on the opposite side of the island, it certainly is still there, solid as ever, but undeniably, inscrutably black. 

"It is still white inside," villager Nyn Mony Insists. He doesn't know why it changed colour, just hat it did, "some time after the French arrived".

He proudly leads the way to a small spirit house, home to a relic.  

"See, Inside. This is part of the rock from when it was white," he says, and sure enough inside, behind a fan of burnt incense sticks, lies a piece of snow white rock. 

The enigma of the name is solved. The mystery of the shrimp paste remains. what would mainlanders know about island life, the locals shrug. Let them keep believing there is something here they don't understand. 

The next day, the boat chugs back to Sihanoukville, to beaches an discos and fancy  restaurants, where all these island lives are rendered into a legend of shrimp paste so delicious it defies description from a little island somewhere far to the west of this party town. 

Life will go on in Tmaow Sa, an undisturbed corner of Cambodia so close to the glamour of the nation's primary beach resort, and so far away. 

Tmaow Sa is an island of opportunity for those who have settled there. They have come to improve their lives. They defy maps, making their homes somewhere a map doesn't show. One island of perhaps thousands forgotten by most mainlanders - anything but a barren, chalky outcrop in the sea. Words Jon Bugge. Pictures Jon Bugge and nathan Dexter.