“Everything is shifting here and so many expat businesses are just a lease and a dream, all smoke and mirrors…”
Josh Page is essentially the “type specimen” for all Kiwi expats as near as I can tell. A true exemplar of that whimsical cast of characters who, taken as a group together, give the distinct impression that theirs is a nation made up entirely of misfits, so that perhaps everyone belongs there because no one belongs there.
A Kiwi, yes, indeed. For the past three years, Josh has often ambled barefoot – yes, sans shoes of any sort – while traversing the city’s less-than-sparkling thoroughfares. Kiwi oddball to the core, he was a constant fixture in Phnom Penh’s nightlife scene, known in part for his work behind the bar at Show Box, but even more so for the very visible, very audible, and often thriving business that he founded and operated: Tipsy Tuk Tuks, Phnom Penh’s very first bar crawl.
Tipsy Tuk Tuks typically traversed the town on Friday nights as a traveling tumult of tourists, a bacchanal of backpackers, accompanied oftentimes by an envoy of expats with eyebrows raised and ready for an evening’s entertainment passively observing the fun…only to find themselves participating in it fully, their worldly been-there-drunk-that jaded facade banished for a few carefree hours.
This past Friday marked Josh’s final run in the oversized Tuk Tuk that was his company’s primary material asset and hallmark, seating ten or more people in the elongated trailer. Josh has sold the business to a friend of a friend who plans on continuing on in the same tradition and even has ambitious plans for expansion within the coming year. The changeover in ownership was prompted by big changes in Josh’s personal life. He and his girlfriend who he met here in the Kingdom are engaged to be married and are (for now) relocating back to Claire’s native Britain.
Josh feels that Phnom Penh has changed a great deal in just his few short years here, perhaps becoming a less than ideal place for him to put down permanent roots. ‘”Everything is shifting here and so many expat businesses in Cambodia are just a lease and a dream, all smoke and mirrors without any real equity or stability involved. I feel like for the plans that I want to pursue next I need a little bit less excitement and a little bit more certainty.”
Still, even with Josh’s misgivings regarding the sort of chaos that goes hand in hand with the frantic growth that Phnom Penh is experiencing, it’s apparent that there’s still a market for the business Tipsy Tuk Tuks is in: showing people who are often either too transient or too new to the scene where the good times can best be had. A typical evening has Tipsy Tuk Tuks shepherding or chaperoning anywhere from a dozen to perhaps 25 or 30 revelers on average (their record so far is 56 attendees) from location to location where they enjoy happy hour style drink specials or freebies from the bars, such as shots, as a way to welcome them to town and welcome their return business.
Josh’s journey as an expat in Cambodia seems to have both started and ended well, even if there were some rocky bumps in the road along the way. Will Josh ever return to Cambodia to grace us again with his free-spirited and good-natured Kiwi debauchery? “Yeah, for sure man, I’ll be around to visit. It’s always going to be a great place to visit. I’ll always have the friends I made here and I can’t ever see that changing, or at least I hope it never does.”