Song Saa Private Island

Song Saa exists because two people fell in love with a pair of uninhabited islands and refused to develop them the way everyone told them to. Rory and Melita Hunter, an Australian couple who had moved to Phnom Penh for what was meant to be a one-year adventure, spent two weeks in 2006 circumnavigating the Koh Rong Archipelago in a rented fishing boat before anchoring on Koh Ouen and Koh Bong, two small islands close enough to touch, locally nicknamed the Sweethearts. Before they built a single villa, Melita established the Koh Ouen Marine Reserve in 2007, Cambodia’s first marine protected area. The resort came second, opening in 2012 as an extension of that conservation instinct rather than the other way around, and it remains the Hunters’ own, independent company. There is no group behind it and no comparable competitor in the country: Song Saa is Cambodia’s only ultra-luxury private island, full stop.

That singularity is the point of going. The 24 villas, built from reclaimed timber, driftwood, and stone quarried on the mainland, split between jungle hideaways cut into the rainforest canopy and overwater rooms perched on stilts above a reef that the resort itself has spent nearly two decades protecting. You can snorkel from your own deck into water the Hunters fought to have designated a reserve, and the coral you see was likely replanted by the same marine biology team that will take you diving. The Song Saa Foundation, the couple’s non-profit arm, now runs the largest island-based marine conservation program in Cambodia, working across the wider archipelago on mangrove restoration, sea turtle protection, and community fisheries, so a stay here funds work well beyond the resort’s own shoreline.

Getting there is deliberately unhurried and part of the theater. Most guests fly into Sihanoukville, transfer to the resort’s own lounge at the port, and cross by speedboat in under an hour, watching the mainland recede and the two islands resolve out of the Gulf of Thailand. Guests short on time, or simply wanting the more cinematic entrance, can arrange a helicopter from Phnom Penh or Siem Reap that lands on neighboring Koh Rong for a five-minute boat hop in. Either way, arrival is the moment the isolation becomes real: no other resort, no other guests beyond Song Saa’s own, just two small islands joined by a bridge.

The island’s rhythms are built around that isolation rather than against it. Dinner at Vista, the overwater restaurant, happens on stilts above the reef with nothing between the table and the horizon; the spa has no walls at all, just a scatter of open-air sanctuaries where Khmer-trained therapists work with herbs foraged that morning by the resort’s own botanist. It is a smaller, quieter proposition than Maldives-scale overwater resorts, and that is deliberate. Song Saa was never trying to be the biggest private island in Asia. It was trying to be the only one in Cambodia worth calling that.