The first thing you notice when you arrive in a place that has been optimised for remote workers is the signage. Co-working spaces with names like The Hive or Hubba or Factory, their logos rendered in that particular shade of teal that communicates both creativity and productivity. Coffee bars where the power outlets outnumber the seats. Facebook groups called Digital Nomads Chiang Mai or Bali Remote Workers with forty thousand members and daily posts about which café has the fastest wifi.
Kampot has none of this. There is no co-working space with a teal logo. The wifi in most cafés is fine for a video call and unreliable for a screen share. There is no Digital Nomads Kampot Facebook group with forty thousand members. There is a Facebook group, but it is mostly people asking about visa agents and where to buy good cheese.
Whether you read this as a problem or a recommendation depends entirely on what you need from a place.
What Chiang Mai has that Kampot doesn’t
Let’s be specific, because the comparison is only useful if it’s honest.
Chiang Mai has a decade of infrastructure built around the particular needs of people who work on laptops for clients who are in different time zones. It has multiple co-working spaces in every neighbourhood, with day passes, monthly memberships, standing desks, phone booths for calls, and the kind of fibre internet connection that handles video uploads without thinking about it. It has a community of thousands of people in similar situations who have built social structures — weekly meetups, Slack groups, accountability partnerships, the informal economy of introductions and referrals that sustains the freelance life. It has specialist services for digital nomads: accountants who understand your tax situation, health clinics with English-speaking staff, visa agents who have processed a thousand EB extensions and can predict which immigration officer will be difficult on any given Thursday.
Chiang Mai’s food is extraordinary. Its café scene is among the best in Southeast Asia. Its transport links are excellent. It is, by the metrics that the remote-work lifestyle has developed for evaluating cities, a very high-scoring place.
Kampot scores lower on almost every one of those metrics. The co-working infrastructure doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. The expat community is a few hundred people at most, not thousands, and it has not built the same density of professional network. The visa situation is manageable but requires more navigation than it once did. The transport links are limited — there is no direct flight to anywhere, and getting to Phnom Penh takes three and a half hours by road.
If you have come to Southeast Asia to build a freelance client base through networking, to find an accountability partner for your productivity, or to attend a masterclass on scaling your online business, Chiang Mai is the sensible choice. Kampot will frustrate you.
What Kampot has that Chiang Mai has lost
This is harder to articulate, which is part of why people who feel it tend to stay longer than they planned.
Chiang Mai in 2026 is a city that knows it is a nomad hub. It performs that identity. The cafés are designed to be photographed. The co-working spaces have brand partnerships. The events are sponsored. There is nothing wrong with any of this — it is the natural result of a place becoming what enough people needed it to be. But something gets lost in that process, and what gets lost is the quality of not being arranged around you.
Kampot has not been arranged around anyone in particular. It has its own logic, its own pace, its own preoccupations, and they are not yours. The morning market does not care about your productivity schedule. The tuk-tuk driver does not have a rating system. The landlord who rents you a room on the river road has been doing this for fifteen years and has seen enough people come and go that your presence registers as normal rather than as the latest wave of an identifiable demographic.
What this produces, for the people it works for, is a particular kind of attention. When a place is not performing for you, you have to do more of the work of being in it. You learn more Khmer. You figure out which pharmacy stocks what you need. You find the mechanic who can fix your scooter’s carburetor and you become, over time, a person who is slightly more embedded in an actual place rather than in a floating infrastructure designed to keep you comfortable and productive without requiring that embeddedness. The community you build in Kampot, if you build one, tends to be smaller and more durable than the LinkedIn-adjacent professional networks of the larger nomad hubs.
None of this is inherently better. It is different. And it suits a different kind of person.
The people who should not come to Kampot
It is a service to say this clearly, because the town gets a certain kind of visitor who is disappointed in ways that are entirely predictable.
If you need reliable, fast internet for work that requires it — video production, large file transfers, any kind of development that involves frequent pushes to a remote repository — Kampot is not yet the right place. The infrastructure is fine for most things. It is not fine for everything.
If you are newly freelance and still building your first clients, you will find Kampot isolating in the wrong way. The community here is made up largely of people who already have their work situation sorted. There is no ecosystem of warm introductions to potential clients, no weekly networking events with name tags. If you are in the phase of your remote career where community and professional proximity matter for building the business, go somewhere that has built that ecosystem. You can come to Kampot later, when you have less to prove.
If you are someone who needs the stimulation of a dense, changing social scene to stay energised, Kampot will run dry. The pool of people is small and it does not refresh at the rate that Chiang Mai or Bali or Lisbon does. The same conversations happen again. The same people are at the same bars on the same nights. For some people this is reassuring; for others it becomes slowly suffocating after month three or four.
If you have children who need secondary education, Kampot’s options are limited in ways that require either online schooling or a commute to Phnom Penh. This is a practical constraint with a practical solution, but it is a constraint.
The sequence most people follow
Almost everyone who ends up living in Kampot for any length of time came through somewhere else first. Chiang Mai, usually. Bali sometimes. Phnom Penh, for the Cambodia-specific cohort, almost always.
This is not an accident. The sequence makes sense. You arrive in Southeast Asia for the first time and you need the infrastructure: the co-working space where you can meet people in similar situations, the established expat community that can tell you how to get a SIM card and which visa agent to use and where the international clinic is. You need the density and the legibility that a well-developed nomad hub provides. You use it. It does what it is supposed to do. You get your bearings, you find your rhythm, you figure out what kind of remote worker and what kind of expat you actually are, rather than what you imagined you would be.
And then, at some point, some of those people discover that the density has become noise. That the productivity infrastructure is also a productivity pressure. That the co-working space is full of people performing work rather than doing it. That the community, large and welcoming as it is, does not know them in the particular way that a smaller community eventually does. And they start looking for something slower.
That is usually when Kampot appears. Not as a starting point but as a destination — somewhere to go after you know what you are looking for, rather than before.
The trajectory question
There is a version of this essay that is simply a recommendation. Come to Kampot, it’s great, here is why. But any honest account of what makes a place appealing has to reckon with what happens when enough people find it appealing.
The arc that Chiang Mai followed is documented and legible: a small creative community discovers a cheap, pleasant city with good food; they write about it; more people come; the infrastructure develops to serve them; prices rise; the original character that attracted the first wave becomes harder to find; the cycle accelerates. Bali has done this. Lisbon has done this. Tbilisi is doing it now. Every “new Chiang Mai” eventually becomes what Chiang Mai was before it became Chiang Mai.
Kampot is earlier in that arc than most places currently being written about. The question of whether the thing that makes it appealing is self-defeating — whether the act of writing this essay contributes to the erosion of what it describes — is not one I can answer cleanly. What I can say is that the pace of change in Kampot is slower than in most comparable places, partly because the infrastructure that would accelerate it (direct flights, high-profile press, a teal-logo co-working space with a brand partnership) has not arrived yet. The town is still, in the main, legible on its own terms rather than on the terms of the people who have moved there.
Whether that lasts is a question the next five years will answer. For now, the answer to “is Kampot the new Chiang Mai?” is: no, not yet, and that no is still, for the right person, the point.
The right person, for what it’s worth, is not a type. It is a phase. Most people who love Chiang Mai would also love Kampot at a different moment in their working life, just as most people who love Kampot now would have needed Chiang Mai first.
The mistake is treating the comparison as a competition rather than a sequence. Chiang Mai is not worse than Kampot. Kampot is not better than Chiang Mai. They are answers to different questions, asked at different times, by people who have been moving around long enough to know which question they’re actually asking.
The question Kampot answers is quieter and harder to articulate than the one Chiang Mai answers. Something about wanting a place that doesn’t know you’re there yet. Something about preferring a smaller community you have to find rather than a large one that has already been built for you. Something about the river at six in the morning, before anyone else is up, before you have opened your laptop, when the town is just a town and you are just a person living in it.
That is not for everyone. It doesn’t have to be.