A little more than fifteen years ago when I was living in Arizona, there was a man who sometimes visited the house where I lived named Caleb.  Caleb was about 40 years old, 6′-0″ tall, 190 lbs, not a bad looking guy, not ugly.  He was fairly intelligent, polite, a decent conversationalist.

Caleb did not like hard work, or working hard, because he said so.  In his late twenties he had decided that he wanted to be a drug smuggler and drug dealer, because he didn’t like working.  He didn’t like getting paid low wages, working all day, working five days a week, being told what to do, and how to do it.

Caleb retired from being a drug smuggler and drug dealer when he was in his mid-thirties with about $250,000 in savings.  At this present time, he tried to live very cheaply, and work just a little bit to earn enough money to cover his daily expenses, which were small, and preserve his money in savings.

Many men never see it, know it, or realize it, that we trap ourselves in a prison of our own making.  We seek to have a nice place to live, often to impress others, or because it is expected of us.  The same thing for expensive cars, motorcycles, boats, firearms, and clothing.  We seek a hot girlfriend or trophy wife.  Then, we spend the rest of our lives trapped and struggling to pay for all of this shit, that we didn’t absolutely need to have in the first place.

Caleb realized early on in his life, that he didn’t want to be trapped in a job, working for other people, and buying a bunch of things that he didn’t really need.  He also realized that it cost a lot of money to attract and keep a girlfriend.  All of these things were a trap.

What Caleb learned in the 1990s was that a single man could live very cheaply in Thailand, with a very good lifestyle.  So for the past four of five years, Caleb had spent about four or five months each year living in Thailand.

Caleb explained to me, that you could rent a cottage on the ocean in Thailand for about $300 per month.  You could go into a town or village, and pick out a “Bar Girl” that would come and live with you for about $10 per day.  Not only would the “Bar Girl” have sex with you as often as you wanted, she would do the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and laundry.  Food would cost about $10 per day.

So for about $1,000 to $1,200 per month, this would cover the cost of a cottage on the beach, all of your food, and a beautiful young girl that would do all of the grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning, and have sex with you as much as you wanted.  For many men, this was paradise, if you were willing to give up the customary Western lifestyle.

For many men in Canada, England, and the United States in the 1990s and 2000s, they realized that Thailand was a paradise to visit or retire in.  Younger men that had somehow accumulated or inherited over $500,000 in assets could sell everything that they owned, place the majority of the money in stocks, and move to Thailand with the expectation of never having to work again, with their cost of living not exceeding $15,000 per year.

Older men who had worked twenty-five to thirty years at a company, in the military, or for the government, and had earned even a modest pension, realized that they could live so much better and so much more happily in Thailand with the cost of living being so low for a single man there.  Would you rather live out the remainder of your life stuck in a small apartment in an expensive, unfriendly, cold, dreary city, or living on a sunny, warm beach with a beautiful young woman?

After 2010, the number of foreign men visiting and retiring to Thailand became ridiculous.  The country was overrun with expatriates.  Recently, the government in Thailand has passed legislation and policies making it more difficult for foreign men to retire to Thailand.  Foreign men are now required to go through a process where they must demonstrate that they have a certain amount of money in savings, deposit this savings in a Thai bank, and demonstrate a certain level of retirement income.

One of the problems, is that foreign men have discovered that once they deposit their savings into a Thai bank, if they want to leave the country, the Thai banks do not want to allow them to remove their money from the bank.  So, many foreign men who have retired to Thailand, or were planning on retiring to Thailand, have begun looking at moving to neighboring Vietnam or Cambodia instead.

Here is a video made by a young Russian man named Oleg, that shows him leaving Thailand, crossing the border into Cambodia, and travelling in Cambodia:

Though Oleg did a good job making this video, what I saw in this video scared the shit out of me.  The making of the travel, accommodation, and transportation arrangements into Cambodia looked very sketchy to me.  The small van, ocean ferry, bus, and motorcycle taxi transport into Cambodia looked rough.  The filling out of “travel documents” at a dirty primitive rest stop along the side of the road looked like the beginning of problems.  The crowded, run down, Cambodian immigration office looked like a nightmare.

The driving around Cambodia revealed that it mostly looks like a primitive, shanty town, slum.  There were several mentions of the taxi driver taking Oleg to places where they attempt to rip-off tourists.  The entrance fee to one of the temples in Cambodia was $37, which is four times the price of the first hotel that he stayed at in Cambodia.  The price of a beer in some places at night was $3 to $5.

What I saw in this video, it looked like Cambodia was a dirty, primitive, rough, unsafe place for foreigners.  I couldn’t believe that there were so many Chinese tourists, and even some American tourists with wives and children.  I wouldn’t go to Cambodia if someone paid for my travel, hotel, and paid me $5,000.

The whole point of foreign men visiting or retiring to some place like Thailand, Cambodia, or Vietnam was that it would be an improvement over their home country in the cost of living and lifestyle.  Cambodia did not appear to be cheap, pleasant, or safe.